> These articles claim that at large companies that receive an influx of resumes, recruiters set rules to surface resumes that contain certain keywords... That is a bad strategy for applying at startups like ours. We’re not looking for keywords. We look for demonstrated expertise. Here are a couple of ways to demonstrate your expertise.
I'm always a bit surprised when startups, whose leadership doesn't even seem to understand the dominant hiring patterns for large, mainstream corporations, expect candidates to cater specifically to them.
If you're trying to get me to work for an "AI/ML platform" startup in this market right now, you'd better spend more time convincing me that you'll still exist in 2 years than telling me how I can tweak my resume for this specific company.
Honestly, a startup looking to hire founding positions should probably be searching their own networks rather than screening hundreds of resumes a month.
I think the well is really poisoned here. Resumes either hardly matter, or are just for SEO.
- If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked at by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be considering more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and GitHub). So here it's best to make them "machine readable, human-tolerable".
- If you're handing out resumes at an event, you are going to want to make it terse and punchy. Sell your impact and skills. I think this is the least degenerate form of resume. Also, I've never done this outside of my career fair in college, where your resume is basically just your GPA and expected graduation year.
- If you're being referred, your resume is mostly for talking points when you're chatting with someone. So making it like a powerpoint is best for this.
Plus, for the first one, most of the time you just get ghosted. So forget overly tailoring your resume to the company, unless it's one you really really want into. In which case you're probably better off poking around and trying to either find a recruiter or find a referral even if it's just a "I talked to this person once and they didn't punch me in the face at all, you should interview them" referral.
I'm honestly kind of passionate about resumes, in theory? "Here is a 1-pager of my professional career" is an interesting problem. Unfortunately, that's typically not the problem you actually need to solve when you're sitting down at your doc titled "Resume".
Not sure about the first one. I work for a big company and when we hire we definitely human-read lots of resumes, which isn't to say that machine readable is not a plus. I agree that tailoring may not be worth it.
I'm surprised nobody mentions hobbies etc. Maybe I'm just an old fart but I like to get an idea of the person as well.
The main problem of hobbies is that I typically don't think they matter enough to deserve space on the single page of your resume. I'm not even a decade into my career and I'm already considering cutting my college stuff down to "COLLEGE NAME YEARS ATTENDED DEGREE GPA HONORS" in a single crammed line. I think I'd put down my in-major GPA and emphasis courses before I'd put down that I like video games and my cats (.....which let's be real, you can probably just assume is in the hobbies for software engineers).
It'd depend on the field (and region), I imagine, but after the first job or two I feel like all that matters with respect to schooling is that you went. Five or ten years into a career I'd be surprised if coursework that hadn't been used on the job was relevant, and GPA wouldn't even be considered.
Hobbies are probably not that useful either, but I could see them catching a hiring manager's eye. Coursework probably won't have the same effect, although I suppose it could help you get through ATS.
Not that I think anyone's really looked at my resume for over 20 years (jobs through network), but I think the idea of a hobbies line is that it can be a conversation ice-breaker. That said, I don't think I have one on mine. If theey Google me they'll turn up more than enough to talk about.
It varies significantly, as these things do. My first job out of college ~didn't accept people with below a 3.8, so they'd explicitly ask if you left it off (or worse, would assume it was <3.8 if you didn't bother to add it).
> - If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked at by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be considering more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and GitHub). So here it's best to make them "machine readable, human-tolerable".
I wish companies would just keep it real and admit this, and instead of asking for a resume, specifically ask for a simple text or XML file with a machine-readable list of keywords. Because, let's be honest: That's all the machinery at the top of their funnel does. Once you get past the keyword filter, they can ask you to craft a real resume for them. It would cut down on everyone's work: the candidate's and the hiring company's.
I'm firing off resumes to hundreds, maybe a thousand companies anyway. It would be nice to have a standard, structured format for communicating with their AI screening machinery, that I could use for all of them.
At least when I was a hiring manager at an AI start-up, I looked at just about every resume submitted, and I thought the advice was pretty spot-on for what I was looking for. That said, I've never worked at a very large tech company, so I could believe that humans aren't reviewing them at those institutions.
I'm not sure that it's representative of the industry, as a whole, but it's excellent.
For myself, I read every résumé that I got; sometimes, not completely. If I saw that it wasn't a fit, early on, I'd abort the process.
But, for the most part, I enjoyed long, complete résumés, and would have killed for things like GH repos (they weren't really a thing, when I was a hiring manager). I tended to look for "orthogonal thinking," and "diamonds in the rough." Very few folks would come in the door, with the skills we needed, so I expected to invest a lot of training.
There’s a lot of bad advice here. Like you can dismiss this article right when the author says they read every resume and don’t use a scanner. Unless this is a tiny shop with no recruiter anywhere in the process, this simply isnt true. The recruiter is going to screen some of them, even before the hiring manager gets to them.
Now don’t get me wrong. Some of the stuff in the article is good, if tailored for new grads and junior people, but some is just bad and wrong.
I’d say pretty much anything everything billeted in this article is trash. The insights in the prose.
TL;DNR
Don’t skip the keywords folks.
No one gives a fuck about your social media (eg StackOverflow, GitHub, Kaggle, etc). I don’t have time to read some rando’s code, and all it does it show me that you don’t have a hobby outside of promoting yourself on social media.
Do you not find that 95% of the time it's just a blank GitHub though? The only people I've seen without that are either in academia or work on OSS in their day job in some way.
I look at those but they don’t tell me much as people are often working on a template and have had help, so I can’t disentangle what is someone’s work as easily
Same thing with GitHub activity grid. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to tell. Even if I’m writing code everyday, that doesn’t mean I’m checking it in, and even if I was, I’m not doing it on a public repo or even on a GitHub hosted repo.
My area is tightly coupled to a few OSS projects, so we tend to attract people that are active contributors. I've never been let down in the in-person interview by someone with a strong github resume.
Let's be honest here. What are you getting out of GitHub? My experience has found exactly two cases:
1) It's a toy. There are like two files and and ~100 lines in total. In which case, the repo is meaningless.
2) There's a fuckton of code. In which case, you are absolutely not reading it. You can't. You have no context, nor do you have the time. Reading code is Hard. You absolutely are not going to spend several hours inspecting some rando's code. So what's the point?
You can get the same amount of information from reading the resume and a 30 minute phone screen.
You do the same thing as when checking out any tool/library/whatever: Skim the README, then if still interested jump into a file or two and look at what the code is like. It’s pretty likely - if this person works in the same domain, usually the case - you (as an experienced dev) will be able to guess what files are worth looking at and quickly get at least some minimal understanding of what is being done.
And remember, this is just to decide whether to invite someone for an interview. Looking at the repo is just to get some extra signal.
So at best zero signal compared to a coding screen, but even less if it’s in a language youre unfamiliar with. So you can’t judge quality at all. Just, “Yup! There’s code!”
Also, there’s no point to look at the code in a library you’re using, because you’re not maintaining it. When was the last time you popped open some random file in Kafka? I bet never.
> 1) It's a toy. There are like two files and and ~100 lines in total. In which case, the repo is meaningless.
I don't see it that way at all. Short programs can be very meaningful. For example, I wrote a python program that generates Verilog code for a rational rate resampler that is under 100 lines. That would be very useful to discuss in an interview.
> 2) There's a fuckton of code. In which case, you are absolutely not reading it. You can't. You have no context, nor do you have the time. Reading code is Hard. You absolutely are not going to spend several hours inspecting some rando's code. So what's the point?
I absolutely read the code. I'm not digesting every line, but I take a look at the general structure and try to get a feel for it. If I can clone it and get it to run easily, even better. I can do this because I'm an expert in my field, and we only interview people with relevant experience and skills.
> You can get the same amount of information from reading the resume and a 30 minute phone screen.
Not for me. I've had people BS their resume and the phone screen and then fail miserably in the in-person interview. I've yet to have someone who had a strong github resume not ace the in-person interview too.
I don’t know how I feel about this post. On one hand, if I were running a company, I would want a hiring process similar to this.
On the other hand, the company I work for has draconian publishing policies. I can’t have a technical blog, can’t have GitHub repos of hobby projects I work on my own time, can’t write about any of the work I do on my resume. If I want to contribute to other repos, I need an approval for legal which takes forever and if you’re lucky enough to get it, you have to write “not a contribution” in the submission. When asked about what to write in the resume, they say to copy the job posting (or parts of it) I was initially hired for.
Aside from these crazy policies, I love working at my current workplace but sometimes I wonder if I’m hurting my future by staying on and letting my resume for these years spin into a black hole.
Maybe I missed it in the article but it looks to me like they're hiring more junior candidates. For more experienced candidates (which it sounds like you are) I think years of experience doing similar things in a similar field/organization would be the most likely thing to lead to a phone call.
One very small tip - don't overdo it in selling your accomplishments. I see surprisingly many resumes with the words "vast experience", and they're usually obvious bullshit.
OTOH I've got a close-ish relative who's had a very successful career in HR in multiple large orgs and now does some résumé consulting on the side, and she always re-writes things way beyond what I'm comfortable actually claiming and insists that's for-sure the right thing to do when applying to most bigcos—just part of playing the game, and if you don't play, you can't win.
You'll tell her you did X and she'll be like "well it sounds to me like that was Y, so write that down" and you're like "well... kind of? But not really" and she's like "yes, it's Y, you're cutting yourself off at the kneecaps if you don't put Y". Where Y is usually something to do with leading or managing or "architecting" something, and it's maybe technically true but I'd never have characterized it that way and would be struggle to talk about it as if it were that.
That may be fine for getting past recruiters, but if you get to competent tech interviewers who decide to ask you about technical things you are "expert" in, and you flounder, then your credibility is shot.
If you are applying to work at this company, this is probably good advice. If you're applying to work at most companies, ignore this advice. Everything he writes here makes sense, which is why you know that in our nonsensical industry, it is a waste of your time to put it into practice.
Any advice you would give for brushing up a resume? I'm not a dev but work in IT and do a lot of admin work, networking and a lot of security work. I am having a super hard time fitting all of the skills and tools I use on a one page resume. I had considered using like a GitHub Pages resume but haven't had a solid reason to do so.
It's remarkable that, for an industry that prides itself on having individualist approaches and everyone doing things their own way, everyone somehow also keeps trying to give universally true advice.
That said, the title is, explicitly, "What WE Look for in a Resume". The intro makes it clear this is about them and them only and is more of a transparency report, an encouragement for others to be more open too. So I wouldn't blame this particular post of trying to be too general.
Honestly, having spent half of my career at small companies and occasionally screening resumes... I'd say this is great advice for joining a small company.
More importantly, if you're directly applying to a role, or you're applying through a recruiter, it's useful advice.
I generally follow these practices, too, and I'm quite happy where I've landed.
I worked at 7 small companies total.
All CVs are read. There may be some screening if recruitment agencies are used. Which is sad.
Aside: if using an agency you might need a CV for them and then when you talk about the job switch to the role-facing CV. I got burned by this in the past presenting a microsoft heavy story to a non microsoft using company they didn’t want to talk.
I don't agree with a lot of the things¹, but by and large, it's good advice to apply for us as well. Not sure what exactly the "nonsensical" things are that you say we need to waste time on to put into practice instead.
¹ like those "good metrics" examples such as having picked a store location using <magic> and the location worked out doesn't mean as much as the "bad metric" example of how many code reviews you've done (tells me you've seen a lot of code and collaborated, even if "you could have done it in just one year" as the post argues)
This is just for this specific company or this person alone. Usually, they or HR only spend around 15-20 secs on each resume to decide. Github or others don't matter
> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. not only doesn’t work on us, but also hurts your chances.
It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.
YES! I thought, well say "yes" to my list of technologies I'm familiar with. If you want to hear more about how I acquired those skills, you could ask...like with a process of engaging with applicants. Let's call it an interview.
> include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume
Especially this one, because I do that for the human reader, not just for the machines.
The point of the resume is to show that you meet the requirements for the job—asking a candidate to rephrase the job requirements in their own words actually obfuscates the parallels between their work history and your requirements, creating more work for everyone involved.
> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success.
If a resume just lists word soup, you’ve really given the reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming, but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful to humans.
>It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.
At first, I disagreed with you because I assumed if Chip took the time to write this post, she must be linking it or at least making it clear from the job postings. I just checked the job postings[0, 1], and they never tell the candidate that a co-founder reads every application personally nor give any indication that they're handling applications with more care than the average company (and the average company treats candidates like garbage).
So, I agree. If you don't tell candidates that you're unique in the way that you process applications, you can't expect candidates to approach you differently than they approach most employers, who reward keyword stuffing.
I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every application personally.[2]
No, it means they want to work but definitionally when you are sending out ad many applications as you can you stop caring about the individual qualities of a company - that comes later, when it becomes relevant.
As far as I can tell, the company in question (Claypot) has <10 employees. How many people do you think have even heard of them, let alone want to specifically work for them? Approximately all of their applicants are going to fall into the other bucket.
I tried this in the past, it never worked. Resume spam is waaay better. That said it still is bad. In my whole life I got to technical interview stage only 8 times, and 2 of these were referrals...
> I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every application personally.
I mean, the real question is if the job candidate will actually believe it.
From personal experience, I put my website's URL into my CVs. When you bother to visit the website, I have a little shibboleth there that says to mention a certain thing in the job interview and I'll give you $50. I've only ever had one person ever mention that in ~20 years of the shibboleth being there, and I gave them the $50. I used to put the shibboleth in the CV, but it felt a bit crass after a while.
Also, great note there at the end of the application. I would believe you in this case.
I'm pretty sure I would get into a significant amount of trouble with my company's people team if I accepted $50 from a candidate. I honestly would consider the presence of this offer on your website as a red flag.
Yeah, if I really wanted to know if someone had clicked through to my website, maybe I'd put something like "Ask me about the time $THING" But, really, an interview doesn't seem like the time to play cutesy games.
You don't have to accept it, you just have to mention it.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure most companies have rules against hiring candidates who offer money to the interviewer (even if the interviewer declines, the candidate is rejected anyway).
Strange, they may have changed their text since you read it, because this is what I see:
> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. doesn’t work on us. They can even hurt when you apply to companies like us, because the resume space used for these tricks is the space you aren’t using for things that are relevant to us.
Emphasis mine. They're not penalizing folks for the alphabet soup, but pointing out it's a lost opportunity when you have finite space.
Yes, it looks like they've edited the article within the last three hours. Not sure what else if anything changed, but the original is still up on archive.org
There is no fairness in hiring (nor anywhere else). I once saw a hiring manager pull a resume out of the stack and throw it away because it was printed on cream-colored paper. I glanced at it--it was impressive in general. Certainly a plausible hire at a place like Google.
That's okay. You're not writing a resume to get hired. You're writing a resume to interest the places you'd like to work and repel the places you'd be miserable at.
This is a good point. Unless you are desperate for a job, you can be strategic. You could even list things that are a turn off for you. Companies that bin your CV because of honesty and trying to get a good fit are probably not a good fit.
Unless you are going against an entire culture, for example you want Fridays off but applying to high frequency trading companies.
My view of this: you're playing the wrong game. "Know your audience."
If you're applying to megacorps, fine, optimize for searching in a resume database. An early/mid-stage startup doesn't want to select for people who have megacorp offers; that's a waste of time.
Once upon a time I knew of a college job board that required resumes to be uploaded in HTML. I heard of multiple startups that would simply View Source and check if the resume's HTML appeared handwritten or if it contained the tell-tale meta tags set by Microsoft Word when it exports HTML. (Said job board was replaced by a new system that uses PDFs, sadly.)
Was it explicitly said that the HTML needs to be handwritten?
Because otherwise, I don’t really see the point of that approach. People using whatever tools allow them to produce an adequate result in an efficient manner, that’s a good thing. For some people, that tool might be Microsoft Word.
If the specification said “use HTML format” and the application was indeed in HTML, I don’t see a problem.
I was first introduced to HTML in high school when I didn’t have a Microsoft Office license. That meant that I actually did the opposite for writing assignments and hand-wrote my HTML document to print from a browser.
Not to take away from your point in any way. This discussion just reminded me of that and I realized the irony.
The lack of specification is likely intentional there - apparently they're not trying to distinguish between people who can or can't follow a spec; but rather they observe that for some people the obvious or default or simply easiest way to get a bunch of text in HTML would be to write it in Word and press 'export', and for other people the obvious or default or simply easiest way for them to do the same would be to write HTML directly. It seems plausible that those are two quite distinct groups of people, and apparently they prefer one over the other.
Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance.
Almost every time I'm given advice (by people who should know, by being SHRMs having X years experience as a hiring manager) that isn't taylored to a specific reader, I learn yet another hardline contradiction of somebody else's advice. For example, another commenter here asserted that you should use sentences (to put keywords in perspective/context), which I've heard multiple times, but I have far more often been told to use phrases and keywords because sentences take too long to read. Proponents of each seem to view it as a MUST, and auto-reject anything that looks like the other. This same pattern holds for almost every bit of résumé advice I've ever gotten.
Some people even say to submit multiple different copies with different style variations "so that one might get through, while others say that if they receive more than one for the same role, they discard the candidate.
["Include $this!" | "NO! Never include $that!]
There is no Win.
Only "do a thing, until somebody tells you to do a different thing".
> Which means that unless you can get info on what a particular hiring manger's preferences and annoyances are, your chances of surviving a résumé screening are indistinguishable from chance.
Often you can figure that out from the job description.
Rarely. There's almost never a "Don't format/say like X; do it like Y instead." analogue.
Instead, completely arbitrary rules are in play with hard disqualifiers unshared. Things like:
"Every job should have at least four bullets."; "But only one page, or I chuck it"; "But-but, if it's only one page, _I_ wonder what they've been doing with their life (except new grads), and chuck it."; "Don't include more than title, company, and duration for irrelevant jobs."; "But any job without details looks like they're hiding something or didn't accomplish anything there."; "Start with a mission statement!"; "Never waste my time with a mission statement."; "ALWAYS include a cover letter, or I chuck it."; "NEVER waste my time with cover letter, or I chuck it; if it's worth saying, it should be on your résumé."; …
Everything is just signal, strong or weak. In my experience, those who are applying to both computer-screened jobs and human-screened jobs are not suitable to work with me.
It's just like if you write that you are an expert at JAVA, GIT, and Python. Java is not an acronym. Neither is git. Is it unfair that I judge someone negatively for this? Perhaps you would consider that so. For me, it's just signal. If I'm wrong repeatedly, I will have a higher hiring cost and someone will beat me in the market. I am making those choices for the business on a hundred different axes constantly. I have no problem trusting my intuition here.
Don't worry, it sounds like you're an absolute nightmare to work with, so I doubt any of the candidates that didn't pass your filter are missing out on anything. Win win!
Well, I see it as us not being a match. It is good that those who don't want to work with me have all the information required to do so. I try to be as transparent as possible.
I, on the other hand, would pass this filter and highly appreciate working with someone who maintains it.
Not spelling it JAVA or GIT is a minor, but important detail in an industry full of acronyms. People who miss out on small details like this are also make massive mistakes elsewhere in their work and tank the productivity and morale of their teams as a result.
To be fair, misspelling "Java" as "java" or "JAVA" is both a signal about Java knowledge and a signal about understanding what's canonical English usage in the U.S. So it's somewhat biased against non native English speakers.
But at the end of the day, software startups want hackers. And hackers know how to spell Java.
I didn't list "java" as a misspelling. It could theoretically refer to the command line program of the same name that the applicant knows about.
Spelling it JAVA means you are ignoring that it could stand for an acronym. I don't see how that's biased against non-native English speakers; languages other than English have acronyms. I suppose it could perhaps against speakers of languages that don't have the concept of uppercase/lowercase; but then wouldn't you expect speakers of these languages to reproduce the (unfamiliar) name "Java" exactly?
The funny thing is that while talking about attention to detail you say things like '...miss out on small details like this are also make massive mistakes...'
Given that this is a forum and low stakes, I just find it rather amusing.
This seems like a strange asymmetric take. Aren't people who fill their resumes with word soup penalising people who don't play the games and instead fill their resume to actually be read, and convey actual meaningful information and projects to the reader?
The discrimination is already built into the system, so if you have to discriminate, if i was hiring, i'd want to do so against the game players. At least in high skill data science-esque jobs, the ability to hire for people who aren't playing games and actually doing the task seems like a plus. and additionally, if you structure your resume in such a way, you filter for companies in such a way as to avoid the dystopian megacorps and managers who expect you to play games.
that being said, I've yet to figure out a way other than networking or optimisation to reliably get past any institution big enough to have a significant HR presence professionally incapable of judging the things they're notionally hiring for. I've had the experience where I've found HR has culled resumes and chosen which ones go through to the decision maker, which is incredibly frustrating when they're by definition unqualified to be making such decisions.
ps: I will read every resume I see. I despise word-soup/algorithmic/ business catchwords/someone told me to use active language resumes.
What game? If I send someone a document, I expect them to read it. If I send them a list of repeated keywords just to rank higher in a dumb algorithm that I'm hoping they use, and it turns out it's a human now staring at a page of repeated words... I don't find it surprising that the human is not impressed.
> It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is
The best course of action is to make good resumes. If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage. If you optimize for a computer, computer says yes, then a human opens it to see what your experience is and what to talk about in the (phone) interview, human would still see you're trying to cheat their system (which could be a good thing if you apply for a hacking company, perhaps).
> If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage
This is giving the companies a huge amount of credit. The problem isn't that the only spit out garbage, just that they are 'unfairly' rejecting strong resumes.
> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success
If you bring up the topic of attending _college_ on here, there will be at least five people who say "I make a point of never hiring college graduates, because I knew one once who was incompetent". Penalizing people who play the game is something of a sport in nerd circles.
> It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not.
You are making that choice, though. Any time you make a resume, you are making choices about the profile of the one reading it.
> I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.
Not interviewing a candidate is very different from "blaming".
> I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that are presented with two components:
> How they can be tied to business objectives.
> Your contribution in achieving that metric.
I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API, it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of adding business value.
Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?! Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the side in product management / project management, you're not really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats, submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that? Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
I think business process perf profiling is a thing but micro managing seems to be their debugging. It's going to be nice if they can profile any part of process without messing with us (hey how's going?)
> I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
Honestly, this would make me depressed rather quickly. I can't imagine not knowing/experiencing my impact via the work I do. Maybe it is one of the personality differences between people choosing to work for startups/scaleups vs. big tech (no judgement either direction, just my conjecture).
It’s a trade-off. I don’t get to implement the cool ideas I feel might greatly help my current employer, but their expectations of me are generally low and I get paid enough that I can retire a little over 40. Works for me, its not like I’d actually get paid more if I did something cool anyways. That energy is better spent on my own projects.
I’ve generally noticed attaboys and prestige aren’t really personally fulfilling anyways, no one cares and my work will probably be irrelevant in a year or two regardless. A bit nihilists, but it helps one detach after a long day and deal with the occasional failure.
What im seeking in a company, i can datamine in a day from linked in. Your tech department churns through people? Dying from tech debt.
People vannish from the job market after quitting you?
Toxic culture and burnout stake.
Why cant a company be expected to put in similar effort to background crawling? Why cant there recruiters be not expected to properly vet the jobs they contact me with? Why is the effort expected so low, from those who have the biggest ressource pool?
All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met.
>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,
well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos
> open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers
Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years)
> show measurable impact
Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.
How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job position that has me change colors of a button every few days?
Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like “look for a reason to say yes”. This is generally good advice outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes wrong, lessons.
> well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos
Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.
If I am considering a candidate enough to look at their GitHub, I will actually look at the content.
If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
Not if it's in a private repo... you won't be looking at anything. Are you going to outright reject a candidate because you can't see contributions to their current employers private org/repo? I believe this is the point the poster is trying to drive home. You can't see their contributions because they're private.
If you commit only to private repos then you shouldn’t be linking to your GitHub, as this article also says.
Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing, that’s okay. This can be articulated.
The article says verbatim "Don’t include a link to your GitHub link if it’s empty." yet you're giving 1000x (your words) credence to an empty profile versus someone working privately. Private contributions show up on the graph, you just can't see the content of the commit. So it's not empty and to your point it can be articulated. Sounds like you just want to see some examples of work, just ask for that, but that's not a resume.
“A commit graph and nothing else” is approximately equivalent to empty as far as I am concerned. If I clicked such a link on a resume, I’d say “wtf am I supposed to be looking at here?” If your repos are private, just tell me they’re private.
It is well known that many engineers can’t share their work. It isn’t a requirement. But if you do share your GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and doesn’t detract from it.
My Github has projects I have worked on in the past. Most of them are stable and don't need anything more than a few npm dependency updates a year. Linking to it to see these projects is useful to the kind of company that wants to see some small things I've built. If fake contributions to a private repo will tick a box somewhere, so be it.
The scenario is the author of this blogpost, who apparently wants to see that I'm dedicated enough to write code every day. I am, but it's for my employer, not the public. I'm not going to go home and waste even more hours of my life in front of a keyboard to prove that I'm doing something I already am.
I am sure the author is aware that not all software is public. I think the authors point is that you should find the best way to demonstrate your dedication, not that you have to do it in any one particular way.
If employers use stupid metrics, they get stupid data. Making a Github account look active is exactly as honest (in some ways more) as saying with a straight face that I'm passionate about <boring sector served by company's product>, and that's been required for decades.
Yeah, that attitude is plenty enough to get you a job at a megacorp looking for a good-enough coder to fill a position.
But early stage startups, as mentioned in this article, don’t really work that way. You’ll be working closely with people who are enthusiastic enough about the company to make major sacrifices to be there, and they will want to work with people who feel the same way whenever possible. You’ll be interviewing with these people, they will be senior, and they’ll recognize feigned enthusiasm.
You can set it so it shows contribution stats from private repos. Also companies with healthy attitudes to devs can allow their enterprise GitHub instance to transfer contribution stats to dev’s personal GitHub accounts.
And that's fine. I think there's confusion that every SWE can work at every company.
Every place has bias in their hiring. It's literally the point of screening candidates. This place chooses to bias against folks who just want to code at work and want to use a traditional resume. Makes sense when every hire can make or break your company and you don't have the resources to put someone through a multi-month boot camp before letting them touch the code base.
When every hire can make or break your company, then you are looking at this from a very wrong perspective. In that case you should be hiring in network, candidates you know, or are vetted by people you trust. Or hire people on contract and convert them to full time. Or work with trusted vendors in the field who can source great candidates.
Not every SWE can work at every company, that is pretty much true. But creating arbitrary “signals” to figure out who will be a great fit will doom your company with a very specific type of people, which is not what you want when every candidate can make or break your company.
Making something optional on an application is a waste of everyone's time.
If it is optional, and it doesn't have bearing on the application process, then don't ask me to include it.
If it is optional, but it does have bearing on the application process, then I assume that I'm not a good fit for you.
If it is optional, and it officially doesn't have bearing, your screeners and interviewers may still have an internal bias that favors applications which "go the extra step" to do the optional work. Even if they don't, I'm going to assume that they do and that we're all wasting everyone's time in asking me to apply.
This. Companies just like to make candidates go that extra mile to finally not even look at their resume. Job listings where they already are interviewing candidates or have hired one are still up. Imagine how much time is wasted with frivolous optional questions.
Disagree. There can be multiple optional things, where nobody is expected to have all of them, but everybody should have some of them.
It’s a way to expand the pool. Startups especially need a lot of diversity of skills, so rather than specifying the one ideal set of skills/experiences, it’s better to be open to a wider range and then use what you’ve gained from this hire to inform what you need in the next.
Rigid checkbox criteria makes sense in dinosaur companies, but not small ones.
They're literally flagging one "sanctioned" way to provide signal as an example in a resume advice post--how is that a waste of time? This lets people infer what other types of "optional" content might provide signal: publications, blog posts, etc. Transparency in the application process is fantastic and it's wild to me that people are upset about a company posting some ways that applicants can make themselves stand out. This is order of magnitudes better than VC, finance, etc.
How interesting. The first two assertions would imply that you model candidate fit as a pure product of the dimensions you have. i.e. if any of the dimensions are absent then the candidate isn't a fit.
Well, the difference is that my candidate fit model is not a pure product. It has some sums in it. Your teammates at my org will be people like that.
Slightly disagree, they're just providing one potential way to signal experience. I'm sure there are other ways not listed (firth author publications from tier 1 conferences or journals) that are more valuable. I think you're right that this could be used as a tie-breaker, all other things being equal.
> Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years)
Then communicate that. The point in the article is just to demonstrate that you deliver consistently. If you have meaningful contributions to an internal system, tell me about it.
> whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.
Working at a large company is definitely different than working at a small company. The breadth and depth of the job responsibilities will be different.
That’s okay. Not every job is for everyone.
> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it
What do you mean by “check”?
Resumes are a place for the candidate to tell me about themselves, they’re not some sort of background investigation. I presume they are honest unless the candidate gives me a reason otherwise. And if the candidate gives me a reason to believe they’re not honest, I’m not wasting any time sleuthing about their background — they’re disqualified.
> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it
Which would bring us to another favorite Hacker News topic, i.e. venting about how tech interviews are terrible, and why don't interviewers just look at the candidate's resume and projects instead :-)
It's also worth noting that many companies have policies against open-source contributions, the use of public forums (like stackoverflow), and so forth. This is obviously more common in big tech as opposed to startups. I know employees in those corps that love coding and do that stuff in their spare time - but because of the policies they do it under a screen name and certainly don't mention it in their resumes, etc.
In some of those corps there actually is a "dont ask dont tell" kind of policy around personal projects/blog posts/oss contributions/etc. as the company forbids them unless you have special approval. However on the flip side managers know that the people with those projects and experiences often have a stronger drive than those simply treating coding as a 9-5 job.
I also know of cases where the interviewers were very impressed by the candidate's Github repo/oss contributions but stated that the candidate would have to stop working on that stuff after being hired. I know people who upon graduation seperated their projects for this purpose, continuing some under a screen name and having other less important ones for resume purpose knowing that they may not be able to continue working on them under that name in the future.
I actually did not know that was a thing, and I’ve been working in startups for over a decade now. I’ve never worked in big tech though, so maybe it’s common there. If a company told me I couldn’t work on side projects without approval, I’d tell them to fuck off.
I just tell them "this is something I do" and if that's a problem "I'm not giving that up". Leave it to them to end the interview, no need to get an attitude.
I understand the anger from the ancestor post... that this is "standard practice" in the purported "land of the free" is just fucked.
but you do give a classier way to handle it which does leave the off chance that they'd make an 'exception' for some "special" candidate, still I wouldn't like to work in a place like that.
lol I’m not being literal. I couldn’t imagine ever telling an employer literally to fuck off. But I’d decline any job offer that came with that string attached. No amount of money is worth the freedom to do what I want with my own time.
Sweeping assignment of all copyright—including for things done off-hours—to your employer are common features of employment contracts in the US, which means no open source work without requesting an exception. This is true even in many startups. Absence of that kind of provision is seen as risky by investors or acquiring companies, who fear current or past employees will try to claim parts of the company's IP as their own.
Most are chill about adding exceptions (they don't actually want to claim copyright to that children's book you're writing in your free time) though. Still, sucks and probably ought to be illegal.
As the article says, they’re looking for reasons to say “yes”, not reasons to say “no”.
If you say you don’t have any open source contributions due to company policy, that’s not a bad thing, it’s a demonstration that you respect the policy.
I don’t think they were suggesting you have to do all of those things, but rather that those things are examples of resume content that demonstrates what they’re looking for.
Also, for professionals who have a life besides coding and work, they might prefer spending their time with family, kids etc.
I spend my entire day at work in front of a screen coding, writing documents, meetings etc … the last thing I wanna do in my non existent spare time is to spend more time indoor in front of screen working on side/open-source projects and stack overflow.
You might use that as metric for junior/fresh out of college, but definitely not for experienced professionals.
It would not work for me and I have built tons of staff.
I would love to work on a company that allows time to contribute to opensource or answering questions on SO. 15 hours a day sounds like modern slavery.
I can see valuing some clearly passion driven extracurricular activity. Like if someone is a top SO contributor, that's cool. Or if they're part of a big open source project. Or also if they volunteer at a soup kitchen or charity. Stuff like that may be worth including on your cv to show what your interests are. I wouldn't weight it much differently than anything on the hobbies section, but it's still cool.
Personally I'd be wary of hiring someone who had done just the right amount of all this stuff, and who appeared to be soulessly gaming metrics instead of actually being interested in stuff. Otoh, there are jobs and work environments that fit well for that kind of person, and screenings that optimize to make sure that's what they get. It's just as important for people that aren't that way to not get accidentally stuck in such an environment. Like a "17 pieces of flare is only the minimum" kind of vibe
Startups tend to be shockingly ignorant of the culture at larger companies (or non-startups in general), and personally I find it a bit of a red flag when it seems like nobody at a startup has worked for a real business before. It's great to have fresh takes, but there should be a few people on the team who also know how normal companies operate.
I remember interviewing for a startup that sounded pretty promising. The interview was going well and then I was asked for a presentation. I told them that I was more than happy to present on personal projects (of which I had plenty) but was not comfortable sharing details of work related projects while not explicitly representing that company.
They basically said "too bad" and where shocked that I cancelled the rest of the interview. I've worked at plenty of a companies in the past where being willing to share other companies' internal work would be the red flag, and turning down such a request would be seen as a good sign.
> I would actually not apply to this company.
Sadly that was the same impression I've had, and this is from someone who has been following the author's writing for awhile. Especially in the current economic environment.
A lot of companies are very uptight about external presentations without explicit approval. This is mostly about conferences and the the like but a private presentation to a competitor might well be looked at even less favorably.
I think the advice she has is mostly pretty spot-on for recent graduates looking for ML Engineer jobs, and I think her advice is consistent with what I was mostly looking for when I was a hiring manager for non-senior roles.
That said, I agree that the advice is much less helpful for anyone who has significant industry experience as an ML engineer.
>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,
But what you quoted is not what she wrote. What she wrote was
Some signals of persistence that I’ve seen:
* Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year.
* Being good at anything that requires consistent effort,
e.g. a Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc.
* Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around.
I get that the idea here is to look for positive signal but for someone
talking about daily github contributions her own https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories
falls a bit short. Not a good look.
No one really knows how to hire so they chuck in random filters that sound good.
That said I get the impression overall that the OP preponders each CV and tries to evaluate it on its merits. Small
companies can’t afford to turn good people away because of silly reasons like you haven’t produced code on an open license and uploaded it to Azure.
Impact is about understanding the impact. Which talks to then getting jobs where you can write a good story about them after. Which you might do. I don’t. I optimise for joy and teamwork so I take the hit in bragging rights. However there is usually a story to tell of how you helped the company be better.
All this said I am curious if the “no cv” approach of fly.io will catch on. They have an interesting sounding application process.
I don't think it should all be taken that literally. It's not about literally using GitHub or stackoverflow but about having anything demonstrable, even if it's just words on paper about what you did in your role and not a link to something public.
If you can't show anything, you're a tough sell no matter where you apply, and that's not meant meanly but it's the problem literally everyone has when looking to get their first serious job without having done side projects or other demonstrable things in the past. You might be offered an entry level position if they don't simply take your word for it or have tests available to assess claimed skills. (On the other hand, a friend once took a test for a job, like hacking some application for a security consultant position, did very well at it, better apparently than someone who joined a month earlier and gets a principal consultant title and salary, but my friend was given a junior position... YMMV how much they care about tests if you can talk the talk and are of the age to get grey or bald.)
Oh they literally want code on github. And that’s a hard no for me and should be for most.
I don’t play these games. I don’t take tests, I don’t have public repos, and I’m not going to change that.
Why? Because these tests are arbitrary, faulty, and highly based in subjectivity. They are costly to me both in time and mental health.
Back when I was fresh and did them, I found that I always ended up starting a new job with a bad attitude. Well duh, it’s abusive to make a person stand in front of others and have them evaluate their worth live. It’s abusive to ask someone to work for you for free so that they can see if they like you.
It’s a terrible cycle and it shouldn’t be justified or normalized.
There are plenty of people out there who want to hire you without coming up with idiotic games for you to have to play. Seek them out.
The one thing I don't see mentioned here is spelling and grammar. Probably the single most important thing you will ever write that absolutely must not have any spelling or grammar errors is your resume. When I am reading resumes, as soon as I see a spelling or grammar error I toss the resume. To me it indicates that you don't have an attention to detail and you really don't care enough about getting a job to make sure your resume is flawless.
Some good suggestions and tips in the post and if I may, I'd like to add a tip of my own: scan the CV/resume for spelling, grammar, formatting mistakes.
I know it's not a very "scientific" and objective criterion, but it has never failed me :-)
Do... you invite people who've made those mistakes in to interview, at least? Else I'm not sure how you could have even a fairly unscientific sense of whether applying this criterion has failed you or not.
Definitely, and to be honest I’ve seen a few exceptions that confirm my unscientific rule. I try not to judge by the look, but in a CV for an engineering role I like a nice format without errors. Same goes for code reviews. I prefer clean & commented code over dirty/sloppy hacks.
Ah, cool. I definitely would expect some significant correlation there, but wouldn't be so sure without checking—looks like you're Doing It Right (well, as right as one can with hiring practices, short of running an actual study), sorry for implying you might not have been.
This is an ad for a startup that is hiring a "founding engineer" with a "competitive compensation package". Are you so excited about the mission that you'll work toward it for free, anon?
Regarding resume length, I'm a huge fan of the "collapsible" approach: if when reviewing your resume I somehow print out only page 1, is it still great? Is everything I need to be interested in you there? If so then you can have all the pages you want.
The origin of this test is that I do not actually want to read your resume. I'm not going to look at the other pages if page 1 is boring! So tell me who you are first and if I'm interested, I will follow along.
>If you’ve been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and coursework. I care more about your work experience.
I do believe in this too, yet I've been told a few times that in some countries or corpos people tend to care about this and I do wonder whether I should have "targeted CVs"
> if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage
I get this, yet, at the same time, I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with "git flow with Gitlab and Jira" since I did not name any of those in my Resume.
I wonder if I've ever been filtered at first instance for small annoyances like this, it's hard to build a good resume when everyone is looking for something different so I would appreciate if things like adding keywords would not count as a deterrent.
Now I thinking how I can put that I've been the unofficial git guru in several jobs in the resume without sounding like I'm just playing the keyword game.
Maybe under "Skills" I'll add something like "git is my bitch and I eat merges and shit rebases". Or is it too formal? XD
> I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with “...Jira"
Great question - I might start asking this, and shitcanning anyone who claims to be both experienced and comfortable with the idea of working with Jira.
You can optimize for this one guy who has something of an axe to grind, or you can optimize for the 99.99% of employers who look at education, relevant skills and employment history. It's almost definitely worth ignoring everything in this post.
Absolute bs. It's all about connections, the whole resume thing is bs. People in high positions are there because someone got them in. You need to be top 5% smart to make it there, and with SO MUCH effort and sacrifice to to achieve the same. Capitalism rewards entrepreneurship.
Basically go to an Ivy League school and you are set for life?
Please don't tell me society works like that -- its extremely cynical and it doesn't motivate people to work hard for opportunity-- life becomes based on nepotism or whate college/frat you went to as defining your life.
Obviously not everyone has the capacity to do some jobs -- you can't turn an Amazon warehouse worker into a ML engineer in a year.
Let's not forget that HN is a bubble of elite coders/educated thinkers in the top 10 percent of income, education, and intelligence distribution in society anyways. I feel you are inflating element of artificial scarcity without considering other perspectives.
Sorry, I prefer a concise one page resume that tells me just enough that makes interested to want to learn more. Anyone can claim outcomes and metrics on a resume that can never be validated.
You don’t need to “validate” the outcomes and metrics on a resume. The usefulness of this content (or anything on a resume) is not in its utility as a test of character.
I like when people list outcomes and metrics. It gives me a starting point for something to ask questions about. Projects make for a lot better interview discussion topic than “skills: HTML, JavaScript, CSS […]”
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadI'm always a bit surprised when startups, whose leadership doesn't even seem to understand the dominant hiring patterns for large, mainstream corporations, expect candidates to cater specifically to them.
If you're trying to get me to work for an "AI/ML platform" startup in this market right now, you'd better spend more time convincing me that you'll still exist in 2 years than telling me how I can tweak my resume for this specific company.
Honestly, a startup looking to hire founding positions should probably be searching their own networks rather than screening hundreds of resumes a month.
- If you're shooting resumes off into the void of companies "apply now!" pages, it's HIGHLY unusual for them to be looked at by a human. And when they are, they'll probably be considering more data points (looking at your LinkedIn and GitHub). So here it's best to make them "machine readable, human-tolerable".
- If you're handing out resumes at an event, you are going to want to make it terse and punchy. Sell your impact and skills. I think this is the least degenerate form of resume. Also, I've never done this outside of my career fair in college, where your resume is basically just your GPA and expected graduation year.
- If you're being referred, your resume is mostly for talking points when you're chatting with someone. So making it like a powerpoint is best for this.
Plus, for the first one, most of the time you just get ghosted. So forget overly tailoring your resume to the company, unless it's one you really really want into. In which case you're probably better off poking around and trying to either find a recruiter or find a referral even if it's just a "I talked to this person once and they didn't punch me in the face at all, you should interview them" referral.
I'm honestly kind of passionate about resumes, in theory? "Here is a 1-pager of my professional career" is an interesting problem. Unfortunately, that's typically not the problem you actually need to solve when you're sitting down at your doc titled "Resume".
I'm surprised nobody mentions hobbies etc. Maybe I'm just an old fart but I like to get an idea of the person as well.
Hobbies are probably not that useful either, but I could see them catching a hiring manager's eye. Coursework probably won't have the same effect, although I suppose it could help you get through ATS.
I wish companies would just keep it real and admit this, and instead of asking for a resume, specifically ask for a simple text or XML file with a machine-readable list of keywords. Because, let's be honest: That's all the machinery at the top of their funnel does. Once you get past the keyword filter, they can ask you to craft a real resume for them. It would cut down on everyone's work: the candidate's and the hiring company's.
I'm firing off resumes to hundreds, maybe a thousand companies anyway. It would be nice to have a standard, structured format for communicating with their AI screening machinery, that I could use for all of them.
I'm not sure that it's representative of the industry, as a whole, but it's excellent.
For myself, I read every résumé that I got; sometimes, not completely. If I saw that it wasn't a fit, early on, I'd abort the process.
But, for the most part, I enjoyed long, complete résumés, and would have killed for things like GH repos (they weren't really a thing, when I was a hiring manager). I tended to look for "orthogonal thinking," and "diamonds in the rough." Very few folks would come in the door, with the skills we needed, so I expected to invest a lot of training.
Now don’t get me wrong. Some of the stuff in the article is good, if tailored for new grads and junior people, but some is just bad and wrong.
I’d say pretty much anything everything billeted in this article is trash. The insights in the prose.
TL;DNR Don’t skip the keywords folks.
No one gives a fuck about your social media (eg StackOverflow, GitHub, Kaggle, etc). I don’t have time to read some rando’s code, and all it does it show me that you don’t have a hobby outside of promoting yourself on social media.
- I still read every resume
- I ignored the keywords
- I pretty much valued exactly what the author does.
This is just plain wrong. When doing interviews at my previous company, we always looked at their github repo if provided.
1) It's a toy. There are like two files and and ~100 lines in total. In which case, the repo is meaningless.
2) There's a fuckton of code. In which case, you are absolutely not reading it. You can't. You have no context, nor do you have the time. Reading code is Hard. You absolutely are not going to spend several hours inspecting some rando's code. So what's the point?
You can get the same amount of information from reading the resume and a 30 minute phone screen.
And remember, this is just to decide whether to invite someone for an interview. Looking at the repo is just to get some extra signal.
I’m surprised this needed to be explained.
Also, there’s no point to look at the code in a library you’re using, because you’re not maintaining it. When was the last time you popped open some random file in Kafka? I bet never.
I’m surprised this needed to be explained.
I don't see it that way at all. Short programs can be very meaningful. For example, I wrote a python program that generates Verilog code for a rational rate resampler that is under 100 lines. That would be very useful to discuss in an interview.
> 2) There's a fuckton of code. In which case, you are absolutely not reading it. You can't. You have no context, nor do you have the time. Reading code is Hard. You absolutely are not going to spend several hours inspecting some rando's code. So what's the point?
I absolutely read the code. I'm not digesting every line, but I take a look at the general structure and try to get a feel for it. If I can clone it and get it to run easily, even better. I can do this because I'm an expert in my field, and we only interview people with relevant experience and skills.
> You can get the same amount of information from reading the resume and a 30 minute phone screen.
Not for me. I've had people BS their resume and the phone screen and then fail miserably in the in-person interview. I've yet to have someone who had a strong github resume not ace the in-person interview too.
On the other hand, the company I work for has draconian publishing policies. I can’t have a technical blog, can’t have GitHub repos of hobby projects I work on my own time, can’t write about any of the work I do on my resume. If I want to contribute to other repos, I need an approval for legal which takes forever and if you’re lucky enough to get it, you have to write “not a contribution” in the submission. When asked about what to write in the resume, they say to copy the job posting (or parts of it) I was initially hired for.
Aside from these crazy policies, I love working at my current workplace but sometimes I wonder if I’m hurting my future by staying on and letting my resume for these years spin into a black hole.
You'll tell her you did X and she'll be like "well it sounds to me like that was Y, so write that down" and you're like "well... kind of? But not really" and she's like "yes, it's Y, you're cutting yourself off at the kneecaps if you don't put Y". Where Y is usually something to do with leading or managing or "architecting" something, and it's maybe technically true but I'd never have characterized it that way and would be struggle to talk about it as if it were that.
That said, the title is, explicitly, "What WE Look for in a Resume". The intro makes it clear this is about them and them only and is more of a transparency report, an encouragement for others to be more open too. So I wouldn't blame this particular post of trying to be too general.
More importantly, if you're directly applying to a role, or you're applying through a recruiter, it's useful advice.
I generally follow these practices, too, and I'm quite happy where I've landed.
Aside: if using an agency you might need a CV for them and then when you talk about the job switch to the role-facing CV. I got burned by this in the past presenting a microsoft heavy story to a non microsoft using company they didn’t want to talk.
¹ like those "good metrics" examples such as having picked a store location using <magic> and the location worked out doesn't mean as much as the "bad metric" example of how many code reviews you've done (tells me you've seen a lot of code and collaborated, even if "you could have done it in just one year" as the post argues)
This is... not true? Also not necessarily something to even select for in a corporate environment (even if you want to tell yourself that it is).
It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game and attempting to maximize their chances for success. It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is -- either they optimize for the reality that resumes are largely computer screened, or they optimize for humans hoping that it's not. I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.
> It seems unfair to penalize people for playing the game
Particularly when they started out by saying they're "looking for reasons to say yes", not for reasons to say no.
Especially this one, because I do that for the human reader, not just for the machines.
The point of the resume is to show that you meet the requirements for the job—asking a candidate to rephrase the job requirements in their own words actually obfuscates the parallels between their work history and your requirements, creating more work for everyone involved.
If a resume just lists word soup, you’ve really given the reader no choice. What you should be doing (if you want to work somewhere where humans read resumes) is not keyword spamming, but using those key words in sentences that are also meaningful to humans.
At first, I disagreed with you because I assumed if Chip took the time to write this post, she must be linking it or at least making it clear from the job postings. I just checked the job postings[0, 1], and they never tell the candidate that a co-founder reads every application personally nor give any indication that they're handling applications with more care than the average company (and the average company treats candidates like garbage).
So, I agree. If you don't tell candidates that you're unique in the way that you process applications, you can't expect candidates to approach you differently than they approach most employers, who reward keyword stuffing.
I have a similar hiring process to the author, but I spell out in my job posting that I, the founder, am reading every application personally.[2]
[0] https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/7b38b49f-baa4-42b6-a58f-bab653...
[1] https://jobs.lever.co/claypot/9c6fedbf-3c91-4a48-98b9-467d00...
[2] https://tinypilotkvm.com/jobs/support-engineer
That's a pretty specious conclusion.
Everyone's experience is different but on average, tailoring has better results than spam.
I mean, the real question is if the job candidate will actually believe it.
From personal experience, I put my website's URL into my CVs. When you bother to visit the website, I have a little shibboleth there that says to mention a certain thing in the job interview and I'll give you $50. I've only ever had one person ever mention that in ~20 years of the shibboleth being there, and I gave them the $50. I used to put the shibboleth in the CV, but it felt a bit crass after a while.
Also, great note there at the end of the application. I would believe you in this case.
OTOH, I'm pretty sure most companies have rules against hiring candidates who offer money to the interviewer (even if the interviewer declines, the candidate is rejected anyway).
> We read every resume. This means that a lot of tricks you’ve read about how to beat automated screening such as include certain phrases of job descriptions in your resume, repeat “hot” keywords, fill your resumes up with random metrics, etc. doesn’t work on us. They can even hurt when you apply to companies like us, because the resume space used for these tricks is the space you aren’t using for things that are relevant to us.
Emphasis mine. They're not penalizing folks for the alphabet soup, but pointing out it's a lost opportunity when you have finite space.
https://web.archive.org/web/20230125042620/https://huyenchip...
So they're apparently not counting it against someone, which is good.
That's okay. You're not writing a resume to get hired. You're writing a resume to interest the places you'd like to work and repel the places you'd be miserable at.
Unless you are going against an entire culture, for example you want Fridays off but applying to high frequency trading companies.
If you're applying to megacorps, fine, optimize for searching in a resume database. An early/mid-stage startup doesn't want to select for people who have megacorp offers; that's a waste of time.
Once upon a time I knew of a college job board that required resumes to be uploaded in HTML. I heard of multiple startups that would simply View Source and check if the resume's HTML appeared handwritten or if it contained the tell-tale meta tags set by Microsoft Word when it exports HTML. (Said job board was replaced by a new system that uses PDFs, sadly.)
Because otherwise, I don’t really see the point of that approach. People using whatever tools allow them to produce an adequate result in an efficient manner, that’s a good thing. For some people, that tool might be Microsoft Word.
If the specification said “use HTML format” and the application was indeed in HTML, I don’t see a problem.
Not to take away from your point in any way. This discussion just reminded me of that and I realized the irony.
I personally wouldn’t care. I can see good reasons for both.
Remember, every hiring manager has different things they look for; and different criteria for accepting / rejecting a resume.
Almost every time I'm given advice (by people who should know, by being SHRMs having X years experience as a hiring manager) that isn't taylored to a specific reader, I learn yet another hardline contradiction of somebody else's advice. For example, another commenter here asserted that you should use sentences (to put keywords in perspective/context), which I've heard multiple times, but I have far more often been told to use phrases and keywords because sentences take too long to read. Proponents of each seem to view it as a MUST, and auto-reject anything that looks like the other. This same pattern holds for almost every bit of résumé advice I've ever gotten.
Some people even say to submit multiple different copies with different style variations "so that one might get through, while others say that if they receive more than one for the same role, they discard the candidate.
["Include $this!" | "NO! Never include $that!]
There is no Win.
Only "do a thing, until somebody tells you to do a different thing".
Often you can figure that out from the job description.
Instead, completely arbitrary rules are in play with hard disqualifiers unshared. Things like:
"Every job should have at least four bullets."; "But only one page, or I chuck it"; "But-but, if it's only one page, _I_ wonder what they've been doing with their life (except new grads), and chuck it."; "Don't include more than title, company, and duration for irrelevant jobs."; "But any job without details looks like they're hiding something or didn't accomplish anything there."; "Start with a mission statement!"; "Never waste my time with a mission statement."; "ALWAYS include a cover letter, or I chuck it."; "NEVER waste my time with cover letter, or I chuck it; if it's worth saying, it should be on your résumé."; …
It's just like if you write that you are an expert at JAVA, GIT, and Python. Java is not an acronym. Neither is git. Is it unfair that I judge someone negatively for this? Perhaps you would consider that so. For me, it's just signal. If I'm wrong repeatedly, I will have a higher hiring cost and someone will beat me in the market. I am making those choices for the business on a hundred different axes constantly. I have no problem trusting my intuition here.
Not spelling it JAVA or GIT is a minor, but important detail in an industry full of acronyms. People who miss out on small details like this are also make massive mistakes elsewhere in their work and tank the productivity and morale of their teams as a result.
But at the end of the day, software startups want hackers. And hackers know how to spell Java.
Spelling it JAVA means you are ignoring that it could stand for an acronym. I don't see how that's biased against non-native English speakers; languages other than English have acronyms. I suppose it could perhaps against speakers of languages that don't have the concept of uppercase/lowercase; but then wouldn't you expect speakers of these languages to reproduce the (unfamiliar) name "Java" exactly?
Given that this is a forum and low stakes, I just find it rather amusing.
The discrimination is already built into the system, so if you have to discriminate, if i was hiring, i'd want to do so against the game players. At least in high skill data science-esque jobs, the ability to hire for people who aren't playing games and actually doing the task seems like a plus. and additionally, if you structure your resume in such a way, you filter for companies in such a way as to avoid the dystopian megacorps and managers who expect you to play games.
that being said, I've yet to figure out a way other than networking or optimisation to reliably get past any institution big enough to have a significant HR presence professionally incapable of judging the things they're notionally hiring for. I've had the experience where I've found HR has culled resumes and chosen which ones go through to the decision maker, which is incredibly frustrating when they're by definition unqualified to be making such decisions.
ps: I will read every resume I see. I despise word-soup/algorithmic/ business catchwords/someone told me to use active language resumes.
> It forces people to make a choice where they're effectively rolling the dice as to what the best course of action is
The best course of action is to make good resumes. If the scanner can't pick them out, the company will notice in any spot checks that it spits out only garbage. If you optimize for a computer, computer says yes, then a human opens it to see what your experience is and what to talk about in the (phone) interview, human would still see you're trying to cheat their system (which could be a good thing if you apply for a hacking company, perhaps).
This is giving the companies a huge amount of credit. The problem isn't that the only spit out garbage, just that they are 'unfairly' rejecting strong resumes.
If you bring up the topic of attending _college_ on here, there will be at least five people who say "I make a point of never hiring college graduates, because I knew one once who was incompetent". Penalizing people who play the game is something of a sport in nerd circles.
You are making that choice, though. Any time you make a resume, you are making choices about the profile of the one reading it.
> I don't think you should blame people for optimizing for what is likely the most common scenario.
Not interviewing a candidate is very different from "blaming".
- Making commits on github everyday for a year
- Making many pull requests to popular open source projects
- Show commitment!
- Spent 3 years traveling the world before Stanford.
Meanwhile, has no real technical commits/PRs on GitHub herself... ever. No streaks to speak of... ever. https://github.com/chiphuyen
This is such an elitist and superficial article.
I think this one is often tough for junior ICs and even senior ICs in big companies. It's still tough for me after decades. A lot of us are far down on the totem pole, 8 managers away from anyone who knows anything about business objectives. If your job is to turn protobufs from one API into json on the other API, it's going to be difficult to turn this into a description of adding business value.
Projects in tech companies are gigantic. "Impact" is always super hard to quantify. Down at the bottom of the totem pole, you're working on a tiny 0.01% piece of the product. That's my impact?! Not very impressive. Higher up on in management, or off to the side in product management / project management, you're not really physically doing any of the actual product, but are making architectural decisions, serving as tech lead, herding cats, submitting status reports and so on. How do you quantify that? Some people just punt and focus on the product's performance: say [PRODUCT] earned the company [$X] and won [Y] awards. But you're still not quantifying your own impact. I think for the last 10 years of my career at BigTech, I can't possibly quantify my impact in numeric terms because they were such small pieces of gargantuan projects.
Honestly, this would make me depressed rather quickly. I can't imagine not knowing/experiencing my impact via the work I do. Maybe it is one of the personality differences between people choosing to work for startups/scaleups vs. big tech (no judgement either direction, just my conjecture).
I’ve generally noticed attaboys and prestige aren’t really personally fulfilling anyways, no one cares and my work will probably be irrelevant in a year or two regardless. A bit nihilists, but it helps one detach after a long day and deal with the occasional failure.
Why cant a company be expected to put in similar effort to background crawling? Why cant there recruiters be not expected to properly vet the jobs they contact me with? Why is the effort expected so low, from those who have the biggest ressource pool?
All of the advice sounds great, but not at all practical for some of the best engineers in I’ve met.
>Regular contibutions to personal GitHub for a year,
well too bad I work 15 hours a day in this tech company that has private git repos
> open source contributions, or stackoverflow answers
Well too bad that I don’t want to work opensource or use stack overflow (I don’t for work because we have our own internal one for years)
> show measurable impact
Well too bad, whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.
How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it, instead of expecting me to cure cancer for a job position that has me change colors of a button every few days?
Edit: to be clear, I do agree with some of the things said like “look for a reason to say yes”. This is generally good advice outside of hiring. It brings new opportunities and when it goes wrong, lessons.
Same. I've been in the industry for nearly 25 years and have written hundreds of thousands of lines of code and tens of thousands of sql queries, but I can't share any of it.
If someone was actually trying to pass this off as relevant work, I’d disqualify them for being dishonest. They’d be 1000x better off by having no GitHub history.
Resumes are for communication. Communicate! Tell the reader what you do, and demonstrate it as much as you can. Everyone knows that private repos are a thing, that’s okay. This can be articulated.
It is well known that many engineers can’t share their work. It isn’t a requirement. But if you do share your GitHub, make sure it adds value to your resume and doesn’t detract from it.
I don't know if that's truly obvious from a candidate's POV, especially if they don't know the person reviewing their stuff
In what scenario does it? I am suggesting that such a scenario does not exist.
There are three types of people who might read your resume:
* people who are technical and will look at your code. (Likely, the author is in this camp)
* people who are technical and don’t have the time to click on your GitHub link
* people who don’t know what a commit is
But early stage startups, as mentioned in this article, don’t really work that way. You’ll be working closely with people who are enthusiastic enough about the company to make major sacrifices to be there, and they will want to work with people who feel the same way whenever possible. You’ll be interviewing with these people, they will be senior, and they’ll recognize feigned enthusiasm.
Not every SWE can work at every company, that is pretty much true. But creating arbitrary “signals” to figure out who will be a great fit will doom your company with a very specific type of people, which is not what you want when every candidate can make or break your company.
We understand that not everyone has time to contribute to public discourse, so #2 is optional.
If it is optional, and it doesn't have bearing on the application process, then don't ask me to include it.
If it is optional, but it does have bearing on the application process, then I assume that I'm not a good fit for you.
If it is optional, and it officially doesn't have bearing, your screeners and interviewers may still have an internal bias that favors applications which "go the extra step" to do the optional work. Even if they don't, I'm going to assume that they do and that we're all wasting everyone's time in asking me to apply.
It’s a way to expand the pool. Startups especially need a lot of diversity of skills, so rather than specifying the one ideal set of skills/experiences, it’s better to be open to a wider range and then use what you’ve gained from this hire to inform what you need in the next.
Rigid checkbox criteria makes sense in dinosaur companies, but not small ones.
Well, the difference is that my candidate fit model is not a pure product. It has some sums in it. Your teammates at my org will be people like that.
Then communicate that. The point in the article is just to demonstrate that you deliver consistently. If you have meaningful contributions to an internal system, tell me about it.
> whatever impact I have in the corner of a 50000 employee company is probably not going to be enough for you.
Working at a large company is definitely different than working at a small company. The breadth and depth of the job responsibilities will be different.
That’s okay. Not every job is for everyone.
> How about just checking I know what I put on the resume and being done with it
What do you mean by “check”?
Resumes are a place for the candidate to tell me about themselves, they’re not some sort of background investigation. I presume they are honest unless the candidate gives me a reason otherwise. And if the candidate gives me a reason to believe they’re not honest, I’m not wasting any time sleuthing about their background — they’re disqualified.
Which would bring us to another favorite Hacker News topic, i.e. venting about how tech interviews are terrible, and why don't interviewers just look at the candidate's resume and projects instead :-)
In some of those corps there actually is a "dont ask dont tell" kind of policy around personal projects/blog posts/oss contributions/etc. as the company forbids them unless you have special approval. However on the flip side managers know that the people with those projects and experiences often have a stronger drive than those simply treating coding as a 9-5 job.
I also know of cases where the interviewers were very impressed by the candidate's Github repo/oss contributions but stated that the candidate would have to stop working on that stuff after being hired. I know people who upon graduation seperated their projects for this purpose, continuing some under a screen name and having other less important ones for resume purpose knowing that they may not be able to continue working on them under that name in the future.
I just tell them "this is something I do" and if that's a problem "I'm not giving that up". Leave it to them to end the interview, no need to get an attitude.
but you do give a classier way to handle it which does leave the off chance that they'd make an 'exception' for some "special" candidate, still I wouldn't like to work in a place like that.
Most are chill about adding exceptions (they don't actually want to claim copyright to that children's book you're writing in your free time) though. Still, sucks and probably ought to be illegal.
If you say you don’t have any open source contributions due to company policy, that’s not a bad thing, it’s a demonstration that you respect the policy.
Also, for professionals who have a life besides coding and work, they might prefer spending their time with family, kids etc.
I spend my entire day at work in front of a screen coding, writing documents, meetings etc … the last thing I wanna do in my non existent spare time is to spend more time indoor in front of screen working on side/open-source projects and stack overflow.
You might use that as metric for junior/fresh out of college, but definitely not for experienced professionals.
It would not work for me and I have built tons of staff.
Personally I'd be wary of hiring someone who had done just the right amount of all this stuff, and who appeared to be soulessly gaming metrics instead of actually being interested in stuff. Otoh, there are jobs and work environments that fit well for that kind of person, and screenings that optimize to make sure that's what they get. It's just as important for people that aren't that way to not get accidentally stuck in such an environment. Like a "17 pieces of flare is only the minimum" kind of vibe
I remember interviewing for a startup that sounded pretty promising. The interview was going well and then I was asked for a presentation. I told them that I was more than happy to present on personal projects (of which I had plenty) but was not comfortable sharing details of work related projects while not explicitly representing that company.
They basically said "too bad" and where shocked that I cancelled the rest of the interview. I've worked at plenty of a companies in the past where being willing to share other companies' internal work would be the red flag, and turning down such a request would be seen as a good sign.
> I would actually not apply to this company.
Sadly that was the same impression I've had, and this is from someone who has been following the author's writing for awhile. Especially in the current economic environment.
That said, I agree that the advice is much less helpful for anyone who has significant industry experience as an ML engineer.
But what you quoted is not what she wrote. What she wrote was
I get that the idea here is to look for positive signal but for someone talking about daily github contributions her own https://github.com/chiphuyen?tab=repositories falls a bit short. Not a good look.That said I get the impression overall that the OP preponders each CV and tries to evaluate it on its merits. Small companies can’t afford to turn good people away because of silly reasons like you haven’t produced code on an open license and uploaded it to Azure.
Impact is about understanding the impact. Which talks to then getting jobs where you can write a good story about them after. Which you might do. I don’t. I optimise for joy and teamwork so I take the hit in bragging rights. However there is usually a story to tell of how you helped the company be better.
All this said I am curious if the “no cv” approach of fly.io will catch on. They have an interesting sounding application process.
If you can't show anything, you're a tough sell no matter where you apply, and that's not meant meanly but it's the problem literally everyone has when looking to get their first serious job without having done side projects or other demonstrable things in the past. You might be offered an entry level position if they don't simply take your word for it or have tests available to assess claimed skills. (On the other hand, a friend once took a test for a job, like hacking some application for a security consultant position, did very well at it, better apparently than someone who joined a month earlier and gets a principal consultant title and salary, but my friend was given a junior position... YMMV how much they care about tests if you can talk the talk and are of the age to get grey or bald.)
I don’t play these games. I don’t take tests, I don’t have public repos, and I’m not going to change that.
Why? Because these tests are arbitrary, faulty, and highly based in subjectivity. They are costly to me both in time and mental health.
Back when I was fresh and did them, I found that I always ended up starting a new job with a bad attitude. Well duh, it’s abusive to make a person stand in front of others and have them evaluate their worth live. It’s abusive to ask someone to work for you for free so that they can see if they like you.
It’s a terrible cycle and it shouldn’t be justified or normalized.
There are plenty of people out there who want to hire you without coming up with idiotic games for you to have to play. Seek them out.
I know it's not a very "scientific" and objective criterion, but it has never failed me :-)
The origin of this test is that I do not actually want to read your resume. I'm not going to look at the other pages if page 1 is boring! So tell me who you are first and if I'm interested, I will follow along.
ehh, metrics oriented CVs feel like bullshitting
>If you’ve been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and coursework. I care more about your work experience.
I do believe in this too, yet I've been told a few times that in some countries or corpos people tend to care about this and I do wonder whether I should have "targeted CVs"
I get this, yet, at the same time, I've been asked by recruiters if I was comfortable working with "git flow with Gitlab and Jira" since I did not name any of those in my Resume.
I wonder if I've ever been filtered at first instance for small annoyances like this, it's hard to build a good resume when everyone is looking for something different so I would appreciate if things like adding keywords would not count as a deterrent.
Maybe under "Skills" I'll add something like "git is my bitch and I eat merges and shit rebases". Or is it too formal? XD
Great question - I might start asking this, and shitcanning anyone who claims to be both experienced and comfortable with the idea of working with Jira.
Obviously not everyone has the capacity to do some jobs -- you can't turn an Amazon warehouse worker into a ML engineer in a year.
Let's not forget that HN is a bubble of elite coders/educated thinkers in the top 10 percent of income, education, and intelligence distribution in society anyways. I feel you are inflating element of artificial scarcity without considering other perspectives.
Anyone can put keywords, metrics and effective processes.
I’ve never found a comp sci undergrad to have any trouble learning. Lack of passion, yes but this doesn’t translate to poor work performance.
Ultimately it boils down to how well the individual will work with the team and management. It’s more of a personality question.
A great resume and the person could be a dick despite being technically able.
And it's good for people to post those things so you know what each group is looking for.