Why I hate you because of your resume | Hacker News Reader

Why I hate you because of your resume

medium.com

4 pointsimrane14 comments

My thoughts on the difficulty in hiring for our startup.

This person is the problem with tech hiring. "You've been working in some crappy language for years, but not my crappy language?" "You've never even heard of one of the tools we use to organize our code?" "I want someone who can hit the ground running, because I am delusional about my prospects of finding talent in this market".

I interpret "I want someone that can hit the ground running and if its not you, it will be someone else" to mean "I consider training you to be a waste of my time - start making me money day one, hour one or you're out."

Which seems short-sighted to say the least.

"Give me code samples or I don't believe you can do anything". Remarkable stuff indeed.

Agreed. After reading this piece I can safely say the writer is somebody I would never want to work for. I can only hope this level of antagonism never flies in tech.

I don't like countering "if you do X I will not hire you" with "well, if you do Y I will never work for you." It seems we are all desperate for some way of controlling the sucky job market and so we resort to threats like this.

That said, this guy is exactly why I've worked to excise all references to PHP development from my resume. The employers in PHP development world seem top-heavy with clowns. I once got rejected because a potential employer wanted someone "really strong" in PHP and I wasn't "really strong" because at my then-current job only 50% of my development work was in PHP, the rest being in C and Ruby. Boy did I dodge a bullet with that one.

Really depends on the position to be filled. Recently we let go a senior member of our 6 member team. We really could not afford any more down time and needed someone with a pretty exacting skill set. After a blistering 35 interviews in 2 weeks I found 2. I'd say more often than not there is the person you are looking for with the right experience.

If your schedule is that tight, you've already failed.

I don't thinks that's true but this episode has burned through about 2 man months and we needed someone that could get up to speed as quickly as possible. He starts tomorrow so too soon to know how that goes. This is not our usual M.O. but this is a replacement and the rest of the team is booked.

Look, shit happens, and handling it is part of being a professional. It's silly to ding you at this point for having to recruit under time pressure and artificial constraints. You play the hand you're dealt.

On the other hand, let's nobody pretend that time pressure and artificial constraints are good things, or a natural part of the recruiting process.

You might not want to work the "Why I hate..resume" guy but I wouldn't discount the signal in all that noise. He seems clueless but he probably isn't the only one that wants his position requirements to be matched up to your skill set in the most obvious way i.e. clearly communicated. You could put this right at the top of your resume' or in your cover letter:

Requirement -- Matching Skill

PHP -- 3 years of PHP. See [1] for links to my PHP work

GIT -- I've been using source control professionally for the last N years (SVN and CVS) but I've played with GIT.

As far as the LinkedIn endorsements, I like to nominate my friends for "Warp Drive Design".

I bet he uses "GIT" on his MAC. I know that's probably low on the list of cluelessness in his essay, but it's a peeve of mine and I'm not inclined to cut this guy the teeniest tiniest amount of slack for anything.

Look, I'm not a huge fan of resumes, either, but if your suggested alternative is "beef up your LinkedIn profile", then I submit you've not got a single clue what you're talking about. This is bolstered by the fact that you apparently still think "hitting the ground running" is a thing that exists in the world. I will enjoy hiring the good developers that you've missed, just because you think PHP is some magical language to which solid experience in other programming languages does not translate.

I mean, seriously, fucking LinkedIn endorsements!?

LinkedIn is a great professional platform for sales and marketing people. Not so much for developers.

Yeah, it's a great tool for marketers... to market themselves... to other marketers.

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