Seriously. Marek, if you're reading this - get a full-time job. People will pay you serious money for your work and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I increasingly come to expect this sort of product since kids coming up expect their products to be like this.
He may be a leader in this, but the group coming up definitely will be demonstrating the "Yes, and..." attitude in terms of design and features. The new kids invigorate the game, which is great.
Hey your resume looks impressive. Can you tell me how you made the resume? Latex or anything? The design and presentation of skills is great! I'm 20 too and want to update my resume.
Small advice: do something with those brackets. They are in the middle of the page and their misalignment with coding skills section is infuriating (at least for me).
Looks like those are spaces, while everything else is tabs. Probably has his editor set tabs to 4 spaces where it matches up - Easy to overlook unless you have your editor show spaces with a character.
Listen to this person. This is the one glaring thing I noticed, it makes your wording sound stereotypically Eastern European, and is jarring in comparison to a document that otherwise flows quite well.
If he were sending a standard printed resume through the mail then you might have a point. This online version is something different and I doubt that anyone looking for talent would disqualify him for having his picture on there.
I'll be completely honest and say that it makes me feel slightly awkward because it's a major component of the resume and yet is completely irrelevant for deciding if he's qualified or not. To me, it's distracting and actually makes me feel slightly pressured to cut him some slack because he put in extra effort on making the resume pretty.
All that said, for someone who hasn't even started college yet, I think every little extra bit helps. I would never recommend this for an experienced hire or someone who's had several internships already in college, but for someone trying to break in for the first time any way you can find of displaying your interest and passion is going to help some.
I review resumes and have a say in hiring decisions in my company. I would probably have a tendency to disregard this resume because of the picture. It is pretty distracting and frankly makes me uncomfortable. I don't wish to evaluate a candidate based on their looks but this one says "my looks are important to my job qualifications." Perhaps I'm old fashion and this is over the top but it just rubs me the wrong way and I feel the "type" of candidate who includes a picture like that isn't the "type" of candidate I'd like to have on my team. It comes off to me as narcissistic.
Perhaps the younger, hipper crowd appreciates this sort of thing - if you are going for that type of work. Long established companies might pass this one up.
I might be completely out in left field here though.
I think it may be a cultural difference thing. In many parts of the world, including Eastern Europe it is common to provide your age and a photo on a resume.
Distracting? You can't see the photo when you're looking at the 'resume' part of the page.
It's pretty a standard marketing format - big friendly picture of one or two people from the waist up, whether it's a support person speaking into a headset or a hard-working suit-wearer tapping into a computer.
Some larger corporations are required by company policy to throw out resumes with pictures on them (I know this from first hand experience). This is due to discrimination laws and attempts at eliminating bias.
With this crap becoming "standard" then the implication is if you don't include your photo with your "digital" resume or "social media" profiles you are undesirable/not an attractive male.
I'm in my 30s with 10 years of experience. I look like I'm 12. I get mistaken for a teenager - very often. Nobody will take me seriously if I include a picture with my resume.
At the same time, most companies check your social media profiles online and some even decide if they invite you to interviews based on what they see there.
The reason for not including pictures is entirely a legal issue. If a picture is included in the resume and the company decides to not hire that person (despite being qualified), they could sue for discrimination. If the company instead throws out ALL resumes with pictures, they don't ever get sued. Logically, any company that is large enough to have a legal team should be expected to throw out all resumes with pictures on them for this reason.
It is common practice at larger companies now to also obfuscate names of candidates to further eliminate bias and lawsuits.
I'm well aware it's entirely a legal issue. Notice how I said the law is outdated? Laws aren't known for keeping up to date with technology.
Imagine a resume for a technological position as a programmer in a company. The person includes their Github account, where they are using a picture of themselves as their avatar. What do you do in that scenario? A personal picture is frequently used as an avatar on Github. Their repositories are highly relevant to the position in which they are applying - but you now have a photo of them.
Do you throw out the resume in fear of a discrimination lawsuit? Would you throw out a supermajority of the resumes you get because of this issue? Regardless of how qualified the individuals were?
Placing your Github handle is pretty common practice if you have good contributions. Using a picture of yourself as your avatar is also pretty common practice on Github.
The law doesn't say "you can't ask candidates for their photo" it says "you can't discriminate based on race/gender/pregnancy status/ethnicity/age (>40)/national origin in hiring practices."
If you are soliciting or encouraging photos of someone for a software job it looks suspicious - why would you need to know what a candidate looks like when looks aren't part of how well you can write software? Then you start looking like you plan to discriminate. The idea is not to solicit photos of candidates when their looks are irrelevant to the position. One HR policy may say "don't accept resume with photos so it doesn't look like we encourage all candidates to send them." Note: that isn't law but it could be company policy to protect them. Where the line is drawn probably varies by company and is probably arbitrary. Linking to your GitHub that happens to also contain your photo is probably not a big deal to anyone. Having an online resume where half the screen is taken up by your picture is different, it is no different than a paper resume that has your smiling face in the corner. I don't use GitHub (I don't have the time - I'm too old) but I understand it to be a more "social" and "casual" atmosphere which a photo is acceptable while a resume is a "professional" document that might also link to a more "casual" document.
The "rule of thumb" of not including your photo with a resume is because it is irrelevant to your job qualifications and was previously used to openly discriminate. This is a big deal since people here at HN have shared their stories of discrimination based on age - would someone who is aging an a little over weight want to dedicate half a computer screen to their picture?
Companies may just request that any information sent to them doesn't include a photo - this is a reasonable request. With this request they have covered their legal basis of saying "we aren't judging your resume based on how you look" but also might not throw out something that gives away your looks.
The issue here isn't soliciting photos of candidates. In this case it's the employer possibly throwing out a perfectly fine resume because it includes a photo because of laws that do not account for the existence of social media profiles and the increasing likelihood that people have their actual visual personas online as pictures and avatars.
>Linking to your GitHub that happens to also contain your photo is probably not a big deal to anyone.
Nor should it be.
>Having an online resume where half the screen is taken up by your picture is different
Discriminating in 5 seconds after seeing the first image or discriminating after viewing the Github profile changes nothing if there is going to be discrimination (intentional or not) take place. In this case, his Github profile (which also contains his picture) is one of the first things you end up seeing while looking through his resume.
>Companies may just request that any information sent to them doesn't include a photo - this is a reasonable request. With this request they have covered their legal basis of saying "we aren't judging your resume based on how you look" but also might not throw out something that has a photo.
A statement that protects a company on legal grounds but is not actually enforceable is one of the issues with our legal system. This statement, if anything, introduces a legal scapegoat for actual discrimination and bias to take place without punishment. Any minority that sends or includes a picture by accident or slight could be tossed into the trash with this statement as the scapegoat. "We said not to include pictures or this might happen!" If anything it hurts more than helps.
The entire area of discrimination can be a tricky one - as proving it is discrimination is rather tricky and troublesome. This is why many discrimination lawsuits take place after a person has had an interview. Where, regardless of the lack of photo, your employer now knows what you look like and can openly discriminate against you.
Removing photos from resumes may lower open discrimination - but it also makes it more difficult to prosecute for discrimination. If an employer is throwing out any resume with a picture of a minority - it becomes far easier to prove they are discriminating against minorities. Wouldn't you agree?
Require a company to retain any applications from the past 6~12 months and to require photos. Discrimination based on age, race, or gender would be easier to prove - as well as if a candidate was lacking required credentials on their resume, etc.
I'm willing to hear flaws with my proposed method and how the current method is superior.
But how would you change laws to best account for this? It is not a trivial task, and current lawmakers are on average not very good with technology, so there would be a lot of research.
The best thing to do as an employer is to ask the candidate to directly provide code samples. If they don't understand why this would be necessary (or understand your explanation), they are probably not going to be a good employee anyway.
That said, when I receive github links with resumes, I always look at them (and often spend a long time reviewing the code). If the user has a non-picture avatar it is very relieving. I wish GitHub and LinkedIn would provide a build-in service to change your photo into an avatar or something to avoid this.
I don't believe it is out of date. The reason is the resume is the first impression of you - someone has to make a 60 second choice to look into you further - to call you or Google you. If you include a photo you are asking the company to evaluate your looks as part of the initial resume which have zero to do with your job qualifications. (we are talking about software here)
Like it or not employers make snap judgements without consciously thinking about it based on irrelevant characteristics. We know people with black sounding names get callbacks significantly less than white sounding names.[1] I can't imagine how much more difficult someone who was a dark skinned black would have it if they included a photo. Remember - employers give a resume a once over and their unconscious bias in in effect.
No hiring manager or HR person will tell you they are openly racist or disregard candidates based on their name - and they aren't lying! They just do it because social biases effect their evaluation without them realizing it. As much as we love to believe we are rational beings in a lot of ways we are not.
Also the reason why employers asked for a photo in a resume in the olden days was to openly discriminate against candidates. They didn't want to waste their time interviewing or following up with someone who is black, Hispanic, ugly[2], or a woman when they were seeking a white male. Their resume would just be discarded. Now that sort of discrimination is illegal in hiring so they stopped soliciting photos because they stopped (openly) taking that sort of information into consideration. Since your looks are irrelevant to the job they will often throw out resumes that contain photos so they aren't accused of taking looks into account when reviewing resumes.
Your page looks great because you have great skills and achievements to show. Remember that. You are getting A LOT of attention in HN, that will sure be picked up by another places on the interwebs.
So, my piece of advice: do not use this fame and fall in temptation to start capitalizaing solely on your personal brand, giving lectures, interviews, writing books on how to be hired by the hottest startups and other distractions. Keep focusing on working hard to build things. You are doing a great job on this so far. Congrats!
If you already know how to build simple things, why not write some books and get publicity if you have the chance? It would only increase demand for things that you are hoping to build in the future. I can build things like crazy and I'm still hoping to write a book...someday...
Before you write your own book, I would recommend taking an assessment of the number of books that are already out there and really making sure that you have something to say that isn't already being written about. 99% of books are trash. Don't write one unless you know it will help someone better than all those already existing books would.
I'm a 20yo college student...definitely feeling inferior for not being this proactive as a high schooler. But I'm currently in my second internship and I can definitely say I got hired because of personal projects such as this that highlight your skills and your interest in using those skills inside and outside of class/work environments, so great job and good luck!
This guy is selling out hard. Coming from a guy with a more active GitHub and projects, I don't see how this guy is any different than any American college kid.
He isn't much different from a run of the mill college kid. He just has a "startup style" website with gratuitous pictures of himself all over it. It's called "personal marketing." Apparently software engineers are supposed to do that nowadays - our code no longer speaks for itself.
code still speaks for itself. it just has to be framed and delivered to an audience. your side project that's sitting on your hard drive or even your unpublicized github account isn't doing you any good.
Um... I am old and I don't have time to work on side projects - I have dying parents I need to spend time with because I won't get that time back. I have friends that live all over the East Coast now and visiting them is very important and now time consuming. My point is this is incredibly superficial and the stuff that matters (his actual work) gets lost in all the needless fluff.
Plus I'm too busy getting my actual work done to "market" myself.
Since he's from Slovakia, does he have the visa status to work in the US? Will a startup go through H1-B process for a summer intern?
Also, if he doesn't go through the formal visa process and tries to do his summer internship with a visitor visa, he may be banned from the US for 10 years. Given that he's publicly publicizing coming to the US to work, it would be very easy for USCIS to block his entry into the US.
I think it takes time though to apply for the J1 visa. I remember the process to get mine being 6-7 weeks and I was interning for a UC university, meaning they have 'easy' access to it.
But will it cause him any problems if he wants to come to the US to work or go to school in the near term after his internship? From what I remember, don't J1 visas require you to return to your home country for a certain period of time? It was something we (in the US) worried about when thinking about having an intern from India who was planning to attend graduate school in the US in a year or so...
He doesn't say that he wants to work in the US though, or maybe I have missed it.
But there are some pretty cool startups in Europe too, and given that Slovakia is part of Schengen he wouldn't have any problems with the visa if he were to work in Europe.
Meta keywords in HTML source include palo alto and california, so that's a strong indicator.
> But there are some pretty cool startups in Europe too, and given that Slovakia is part of Schengen he wouldn't have any problems with the visa if he were to work in Europe.
Schengen does not abolish visas across member states, as they had already been non-existent. Schengen removes border control. Visas and work permits are abolished as part of EU treaty.
> Schengen does not abolish visas across member states, as they had already been non-existent.
I think that's not entirely true, as countries like Switzerland or Norway are not part of EU, so they have had visas which were abolished with Schengen.
It's probably even more complex than that. Just took a quick look at the original Schengen Agreement: they only talk about harmonising visa policy. According to Wiki, visa policy is still set by the EU and all members of Schengen Area must abide by it.
One thing - pretty much everything you wrote is about you...Which is great, but it would be more compelling if removed any mention of yourself and made it all about the company who is going to hire you.
I managed to graduate high school near the end of the early 90s recession, university at the beginning of the dot com bust, and B-School in the beginning of the 2008 meltdown.
> "There is still 1 month, 1 day, 6 hours, 55 minutes and 21 seconds until summer, which gives me a lot of time to learn new skills that you might need!"
I don't know if that's the case here, but a lot of European colleges require summer internships. Compensation is sometimes permitted, but status of employment must be an internship.
He may be implying that he might as well work now and do college later if he feels like it.
I went this course. I started working in my current office as a high school co-op and 4-5 years later I'm still here. I might as well work now earning a good salary and go to college whenever I feel like it.
Agreed, if indeed he is using "internship" to mean "unpaid internship". Far too much importance is placed on unpaid work these days, particularly in tech, and it just isn't needed. He clearly has enough experience to spend his summer doing actual work, and should be compensated for it.
Generally speaking in the US unpaid internships are illegal (for for profit companies) if the employee is doing real work that brings business value to the company.... The DOL has a six point test to see if an employee needs to be paid:
Doing an internship is sometimes more 'profitable' than not doing one. If you go with one of the big companies, you'll have a similar to full-time new grad salary plus free accommodation of really high quality that would normally cost you in the Bay Area easily upwards of 3k a month.
It's been my experience that tech internships are paid some reasonable fraction of what a full timer would get in exchange for a more interested program of work - I get paid 50% of what a full timer does, but I get more training and more flexibility in what I work on.
A lot of places won't hire someone full-time for just the summer. I was in the same situation: I could have applied for a full-time job, but I can't be full time once school starts up again.
In the US tech industry, internships are actually fantastic, fantastic investments. You get paid incredibly well, get good names on your resume without 2+ year long commitments, get to network with a variety of people (2-4 companies/regions/industries in 2-4 years) and gives you amazing bargaining power when you head into a full time position.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 267 ms ] threadOtherwise it looks great -- good going! Very impressive for a high-school student.
And yeah, I do feel kinda awkward criticizing such a beautiful portfolio for its grammar :)
App to make uploading and downloading exam results more easier.
Just need to take out "more"
Unless he wanted to keep the emphasis and them "much easier" would be a nice fit.
He may be a leader in this, but the group coming up definitely will be demonstrating the "Yes, and..." attitude in terms of design and features. The new kids invigorate the game, which is great.
<!-- Hello stranger... Yep! I write clean code, enjoy it! :) -->
Nice.
All that said, for someone who hasn't even started college yet, I think every little extra bit helps. I would never recommend this for an experienced hire or someone who's had several internships already in college, but for someone trying to break in for the first time any way you can find of displaying your interest and passion is going to help some.
I review resumes and have a say in hiring decisions in my company. I would probably have a tendency to disregard this resume because of the picture. It is pretty distracting and frankly makes me uncomfortable. I don't wish to evaluate a candidate based on their looks but this one says "my looks are important to my job qualifications." Perhaps I'm old fashion and this is over the top but it just rubs me the wrong way and I feel the "type" of candidate who includes a picture like that isn't the "type" of candidate I'd like to have on my team. It comes off to me as narcissistic.
Perhaps the younger, hipper crowd appreciates this sort of thing - if you are going for that type of work. Long established companies might pass this one up.
I might be completely out in left field here though.
It's pretty a standard marketing format - big friendly picture of one or two people from the waist up, whether it's a support person speaking into a headset or a hard-working suit-wearer tapping into a computer.
[1] https://hbr.org/2012/03/photos-of-attractive-female-jo
I'm in my 30s with 10 years of experience. I look like I'm 12. I get mistaken for a teenager - very often. Nobody will take me seriously if I include a picture with my resume.
The reasons for not attaching a photo are largely out of date.
It is common practice at larger companies now to also obfuscate names of candidates to further eliminate bias and lawsuits.
Imagine a resume for a technological position as a programmer in a company. The person includes their Github account, where they are using a picture of themselves as their avatar. What do you do in that scenario? A personal picture is frequently used as an avatar on Github. Their repositories are highly relevant to the position in which they are applying - but you now have a photo of them.
Do you throw out the resume in fear of a discrimination lawsuit? Would you throw out a supermajority of the resumes you get because of this issue? Regardless of how qualified the individuals were?
Placing your Github handle is pretty common practice if you have good contributions. Using a picture of yourself as your avatar is also pretty common practice on Github.
If you are soliciting or encouraging photos of someone for a software job it looks suspicious - why would you need to know what a candidate looks like when looks aren't part of how well you can write software? Then you start looking like you plan to discriminate. The idea is not to solicit photos of candidates when their looks are irrelevant to the position. One HR policy may say "don't accept resume with photos so it doesn't look like we encourage all candidates to send them." Note: that isn't law but it could be company policy to protect them. Where the line is drawn probably varies by company and is probably arbitrary. Linking to your GitHub that happens to also contain your photo is probably not a big deal to anyone. Having an online resume where half the screen is taken up by your picture is different, it is no different than a paper resume that has your smiling face in the corner. I don't use GitHub (I don't have the time - I'm too old) but I understand it to be a more "social" and "casual" atmosphere which a photo is acceptable while a resume is a "professional" document that might also link to a more "casual" document.
The "rule of thumb" of not including your photo with a resume is because it is irrelevant to your job qualifications and was previously used to openly discriminate. This is a big deal since people here at HN have shared their stories of discrimination based on age - would someone who is aging an a little over weight want to dedicate half a computer screen to their picture?
Companies may just request that any information sent to them doesn't include a photo - this is a reasonable request. With this request they have covered their legal basis of saying "we aren't judging your resume based on how you look" but also might not throw out something that gives away your looks.
>Linking to your GitHub that happens to also contain your photo is probably not a big deal to anyone.
Nor should it be.
>Having an online resume where half the screen is taken up by your picture is different
Discriminating in 5 seconds after seeing the first image or discriminating after viewing the Github profile changes nothing if there is going to be discrimination (intentional or not) take place. In this case, his Github profile (which also contains his picture) is one of the first things you end up seeing while looking through his resume.
>Companies may just request that any information sent to them doesn't include a photo - this is a reasonable request. With this request they have covered their legal basis of saying "we aren't judging your resume based on how you look" but also might not throw out something that has a photo.
A statement that protects a company on legal grounds but is not actually enforceable is one of the issues with our legal system. This statement, if anything, introduces a legal scapegoat for actual discrimination and bias to take place without punishment. Any minority that sends or includes a picture by accident or slight could be tossed into the trash with this statement as the scapegoat. "We said not to include pictures or this might happen!" If anything it hurts more than helps.
The entire area of discrimination can be a tricky one - as proving it is discrimination is rather tricky and troublesome. This is why many discrimination lawsuits take place after a person has had an interview. Where, regardless of the lack of photo, your employer now knows what you look like and can openly discriminate against you.
Removing photos from resumes may lower open discrimination - but it also makes it more difficult to prosecute for discrimination. If an employer is throwing out any resume with a picture of a minority - it becomes far easier to prove they are discriminating against minorities. Wouldn't you agree?
Require a company to retain any applications from the past 6~12 months and to require photos. Discrimination based on age, race, or gender would be easier to prove - as well as if a candidate was lacking required credentials on their resume, etc.
I'm willing to hear flaws with my proposed method and how the current method is superior.
The best thing to do as an employer is to ask the candidate to directly provide code samples. If they don't understand why this would be necessary (or understand your explanation), they are probably not going to be a good employee anyway.
That said, when I receive github links with resumes, I always look at them (and often spend a long time reviewing the code). If the user has a non-picture avatar it is very relieving. I wish GitHub and LinkedIn would provide a build-in service to change your photo into an avatar or something to avoid this.
Like it or not employers make snap judgements without consciously thinking about it based on irrelevant characteristics. We know people with black sounding names get callbacks significantly less than white sounding names.[1] I can't imagine how much more difficult someone who was a dark skinned black would have it if they included a photo. Remember - employers give a resume a once over and their unconscious bias in in effect.
No hiring manager or HR person will tell you they are openly racist or disregard candidates based on their name - and they aren't lying! They just do it because social biases effect their evaluation without them realizing it. As much as we love to believe we are rational beings in a lot of ways we are not.
Also the reason why employers asked for a photo in a resume in the olden days was to openly discriminate against candidates. They didn't want to waste their time interviewing or following up with someone who is black, Hispanic, ugly[2], or a woman when they were seeking a white male. Their resume would just be discarded. Now that sort of discrimination is illegal in hiring so they stopped soliciting photos because they stopped (openly) taking that sort of information into consideration. Since your looks are irrelevant to the job they will often throw out resumes that contain photos so they aren't accused of taking looks into account when reviewing resumes.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/opinion/nicholas-kristof-i...
[2]Being ugly/fat isn't a protected class under federal discrimination laws in the US.
So, my piece of advice: do not use this fame and fall in temptation to start capitalizaing solely on your personal brand, giving lectures, interviews, writing books on how to be hired by the hottest startups and other distractions. Keep focusing on working hard to build things. You are doing a great job on this so far. Congrats!
A WaPo article I randomly dug up: http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2014/10/24/48765a5e-5...
Plus I'm too busy getting my actual work done to "market" myself.
<!-- Hello stranger... Yep! I write clean code, enjoy it! :) -->
Hahah, you sure know HN! Good luck!
Also, if he doesn't go through the formal visa process and tries to do his summer internship with a visitor visa, he may be banned from the US for 10 years. Given that he's publicly publicizing coming to the US to work, it would be very easy for USCIS to block his entry into the US.
[0] http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/study-exchange...
I'd suggest checking this out: http://culturalvistas.org/
But there are some pretty cool startups in Europe too, and given that Slovakia is part of Schengen he wouldn't have any problems with the visa if he were to work in Europe.
> But there are some pretty cool startups in Europe too, and given that Slovakia is part of Schengen he wouldn't have any problems with the visa if he were to work in Europe.
Schengen does not abolish visas across member states, as they had already been non-existent. Schengen removes border control. Visas and work permits are abolished as part of EU treaty.
I think that's not entirely true, as countries like Switzerland or Norway are not part of EU, so they have had visas which were abolished with Schengen.
One thing - pretty much everything you wrote is about you...Which is great, but it would be more compelling if removed any mention of yourself and made it all about the company who is going to hire you.
I promise to never to go back to school again.
Awesome attitude towards learning new skills!
I went this course. I started working in my current office as a high school co-op and 4-5 years later I'm still here. I might as well work now earning a good salary and go to college whenever I feel like it.
http://www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/whdfs71.pdf