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Ask HN: Resume busters like Assembler?

4 points by bryanlarsen ↗ HN
Back in the 90's there existed the phenomenon of C programmers who didn't really understand pointers. You'd try and tease that out in an interview, but the best way to find someone who really understood C was to find somebody with experience in Assembly Language.

When we're hiring for Javascript positions, we don't really care if they have experience in the framework-du-jour. Heck, we don't really care if they have Javascript experience, we just want to make sure they can learn it and write it in an idiomatic fashion. Can they think in a functional, asynchronous fashion?

Today the equivalent for Javascript is probably a Lisp. Lisp experience is probably a better predictor of a good Javascript programmer than Javascript experience is.

Question 1: Is this recognized by other employers? If I tell a kid that learning Clojure will make their resume stand out much better and be useful for much longer than learning the framework-du-jour will, am I steering them wrong?

Question 2: Are there any other actionable similar recommendations? Winning a programming contest is also a good predictor, but it's only available to the few.

9 comments

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davelnewton
When I hire I look for specific types of knowledge, not specific languages (even Lisp and Smalltalk, which are still on my resume). IMO it's really difficult to tell how much, or what, people know, by looking at standard resumes.

Just putting Clojure on a resume is meaningless--I can put anything I want on a resume. It's meaningless until you talk to the person and find out if they have the basic concepts of multiple paradigms down.

That said: having "interesting" tech on a resume means at least they know the words and they might be more likely to have a strong developer mind.

bryanlarsen
Agreed, from the perspective of an interviewer. But from the perspective of a student, putting down 'Lisp' is probably better than putting down 'functional programming'. The former implies the latter, but either way the interviewer is going to have to verify. And from the perspective of telling a student what to learn, saying "learn functional programming" isn't as actionable as "learn Lisp".
thepredestrian
I did a variation of Lisp (called Racket) in for my first CS course in college.

Since you recommend getting good at it (or at least being competent enough to demonstrate that in interviews), any tips on how once with a very basic foundation of functional programming can proceed?

brudgers
1. I think learning a Lisp has a reasonable chance of making the 'kid' a better programmer. That may or may not appeal to a 'kid' as much as "hacking the resume process" type advice. Personally, I'd be skeptical of Clojure as the first lisp for anyone without a strong background in both computer science and professional experience with Java because, "knowing Clojure" is a much stronger claim within the community of Clojurists than "knowing Javascript, HTML, and CSS" is within the community of web developers. A claim to Clojure is more like a claim to know Haskell and knowing how the JVM (or Javascript in the case of ClojureScript) is required when debugging.

2. These days I suspect that the real resume buster is showing your work on the internet. As programming becomes more of a profession, a professional portfolio will become more important.

bjourne
I agree with you 100%. For web programming, I'd say it is understanding the http protocol. Many people can code in asp.net or even write servlets but don't know how session work, cookies or basic things like the differences between GET and POST.

Also keep in mind that there is a industry full of recruiters who don't agree! If the job ad says you need previous experience with Boongolatr.js version 3.147 then Boongolatr.js version 3.147 it is. Then good fundamentals and knowing Scheme, Haskell and shit won't help you.

ryanmccullagh
Some people seem to think the difference between POST and GET is that POST "doesn't show the parameters". That's wrong. POST has a body, and GET does not. The "parameters" go into the body of the message (after the header and \r\n\r\n)
w4tson
In JVM land I look for another language on the JVM. If Scalia, groovy, kotlin haven't piqued the interest of a potential hire then it says a lot about them.

A few years ago it would have a been a nice to have. Now it's actually suspicious if they haven't dabbled!

vorg
> Scalia, groovy, kotlin

Mentioning Scala or Kotlin on a CV says something different than mentioning Apache Groovy does. Scala and Kotlin are statically-typed languages designed for creating applications, whereas Groovy is for scripting, e.g. tests and builds.