Ask HN: Would you hire me as an intern? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you hire me as an intern?

raed.tn

15 pointsRaed66714 comments

I can't comment too much about hiring interns--we've only done it once and I wasn't involved. But I think you'd get phone interviews from companies like mine* next year for junior positions, and offers if those went well.

As for this page, I don't know if you have a traditional resume, but I do have concerns about it as someone who's interviewed/read resumes for Junior devs.

1) I don't know what your progress bars are supposed to mean, and I'm forced to make inferences/guesses about what they mean. Don't make me guess, because I might not guess the way you want me to.

2) I don't like the read more link under your experience section. In fact, before I started writing a response here, I didn't read it.

I'd rather have the text that I want to see inline ("authored PHP plug-in for the HostBill CMS to automate the task of domain registration, validation and domain name changes. This reduced the response time from several days to a couple of minutes, enhancing the user experience dramatically.") (P.S. What did this PHP plugin use? Frameworks, persistence, etc?)

If you want a "read more" link that does a cute popup that a reader probably won't click on, that's ok.

* We're an unsexy enterprise Saas company. We're certainly not Google, but we aim to hire good developers.

0) Thanks for the response, much appreciated.

1) This is the second comment I get on the progress bars, I will be investigating another form of data visualization.

2) The popups have been on my TODO list for a while, I agree that a shorter re-write would be more efficient than a fancy animation.

I will get on this ASAP, Thanks

I have a bit of feedback:

- My idea of a pastime is, no doubt, literature, music and organizing social events."

First, remove 'no doubt', it makes the sentence clunky and to be honest, it made me think that you used Google Translate to build this. That isn't bad per se, but it made me question whether you truly have professional-level fluency in English.

In fact, I would likely rewrite that whole sentence.

- The percentages in your progress bars make me ask (myself) too many questions.

When you prepare a resume, assume that the reader will see 1000 resumes and seek out ways to cull the herd. In this case, I find myself asking things like "how does 70% in .js compare to 75% in HTML5??" Or, "I see that you can set up Joomla. Does that count as 80% knowledge of PHP??" You don't want a reviewer to have to make guesses about what your resume means - we rarely guess in your favour...

You likely want keywords in your resume, but I wonder whether it would be a better use of space if you expanded on your projects a little more.

- The descriptions in your skills section make me wonder if you're telling the truth.

For example, consider, "Logo design, Typography, Graphic creation... (Photoshop/Illustrator/Inkscape/..)" When you say that but only show skills in Photoshop and Illustrator, I wonder if you have ever actually done any typography or logo design, or if you have ever used Inkscape. That makes me question the rest of your resume!

Those little issues aside, you did a good job and should be proud of yourself. Good luck in your search, your project and the rest of your Masters!!

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

-Most comments mentioned the "progress bar issue", honestly this is the first time I thought that this would be a problem. According to you, what's the best way to display skills?

-I wanted to balance between keywords/length/readable-content (not sure if that worked) but if I didn't mention a number of tools or "skills" it is mainly not to make this section too long.

As I'm currently looking for a project mainly related to embedded systems, do you think that I should just comment out all the "unrelated" fields?

Thank you again =)

I can't say that I completely understand the use of progress bars for your skills, but overall you've got a nice set there.

Thanks. As a student I'm aware that perfectly mastering a skill is difficult. I put the progress bars because I thought it would be pretentious to just mention a language or a framework and pretend that I master it fully.

To be fair I'm very skeptical when I look at those graphs. "80%" progress would suggest me that you're extremely fluent not only in language (as in syntax), but you also have deeper understanding of how it works under the hood (so at least familiarity with the specification + being able to use that knowledge in practice), and probably familiarity with some most popular frameworks/libraries. And I just find it hard to believe (not saying I'm right) you have that much skill in 2 languages (which would take quite some time of actually working as a dev, I think), and not much less in another 4 (~70%). That's a lot. I'd much rather see language + brief overview of skills (frameworks, is it mostly knowing of syntax or you have actually built some larger scale projects with it)

Yes this is a subjective guess at best. But I try to remain close to the grades I got in engineering school.

As I've said in the other comments, I never thought that this would be an issue. I think your proposed solution might be the closest to the answer.

Thanks for your time and feedback

Also, how does one average their level of knowledge against things they don't know? If you asked me how good I was at C# 3 years ago, I probably would have said 75%. Three years later, I would say 65%.

I'm significantly better at C# now than I was 3 years ago, but I'm also more aware of the things I don't understand. I also recently saw a Jon Skeet talk and it ruined my level of self-worth.

This thread has made me think about it again. I think the best way is to somehow give context either inline or throughout the resume, because there isn't a standard. That said, I looked around and came up with a scale for languages this morning.

Expert: Participates in the development and direction of the language or major frameworks, or extremely deep knowledge of some uncommon area of the language's semantics/runtime. Substantial experience developing sophisticated tools/products in that language. Why are you even writing a resume?

Strong: Knowledge that goes beyond what one would expect of a "standard" X programmer.

Proficient: Experience doing professional work on a project in a language without needing to come back up to speed.

Moderate: Able to do real work in a language, but limited depth, or a bit rusty.

Introductory: Still learning. Can write code in the language, but nothing significant.

Self evaluation:

I'm either strong or proficient in Java (I know things about the runtime, compiler optimizations, bytecodes, that aren't everyday knowledge for a typical enterprise Java programmer, but there's so many things I don't know).

I'm proficient at Javascript--did two years of professional work at it in my current company, but nothing special.

I'm either moderate or proficient in Python. I reach for it as a scripting language, but my web development experiments were a few years ago, and I'd be starting from scratch.

I'm moderate at shell scripting.

I'm introductory in Haskell, C, Elisp and AWK.

I wouldn't list my experiments with J, Scheme, Ruby, Rust or PHP at this point.

I confess that I don't know how a resume reader would react to that. It's just the terms that I think in.

I would suggest buying a Kindle book titled "The End of Jobs" by Taylor Pearson http://taylorpearson.me and look at the chapter on apprenticeships. Taylor gives excruciating detail on what a would-be apprentice (and the entrepreneur contemplating the responsibility of taking on an apprentice) should do, and what to expect from the relationship.

You may find it useful in landing the position you desire.

What are the requirements of your graduation project? Topic/timespan?

Thank you for your interest. My project can be about any subject relative to embedded systems/wearable/IoT..

The project would start early 2016 (February/March) and should be around 4/5 months long.

OP here: Wow! that's a lot of traffic thank you!

Even if you're not currently hiring, I would love to get some feedback on the resume and if there is anything that should change.

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