On Tue Aug 18 15, David Schwartz wrote:
> Resumes are a horrid way to communicate one’s skills. Unfortunately,
> they seem to be the best thing anybody has come up with.
>
That is the problem. I'm not sure what the answer is.
> I had a screening interview with a recruiter yesterday. He spent 1/2
> hour going through my resume with me on the phone. He called it an
> “in-depth look at my experience”. It was a farce.
>
> The position was for a “senior Delphi developer”. This guy apparently
> knew nothing about Delphi, so he spent most of the time looking for
> evidence of stuff that he DID know about, which seemed to be MS SQL
> Server.
>
Was this a 3rd party recruiter or someone at the company where the position
was? If it was the latter, they have some issues they need to fix. :)
> I have done so many different things over the years in the course of my
> work and other side gigs that I have lots of talents I’ve accumulated
> that cannot ever be expressed in a resume.
>
> For example, for over 10 years I managed my own Linux server that I had
> set up at a co-lo facility. After it died the 2nd time, I dumped it and
> just went to a reseller hosting account and have managed that for
> nearly a decade now. At the moment, I’m switching over to a VPS.
>
> I’m pretty good at Linux admin, php, html, and related stuff. But I
> have never had a “job” doing it. I’ve never been able to convince
> anybody to even interview me for any kind of role where these skills
> are a requirement. I’m no “superstar”, but I’m certainly competent.
>
> Why? I learned Unix back in the mid-80’s working at Motorola on the
> team porting Unix System V Rel III to the 68020. They gave me a box and
> said, “Here, learn how to make this sing and dance!” I did. Today
> recruiters say, “1985? Man, that was 30 years ago!” Yeah, so? I still
> work with Linux systems regularly, and it’s one reason I prefer working
> on Macs rather than Windows, which I’ve used for over a decade now.
>
> I’ve had clients here and there where I helped them fix problems on
> their wordpress sites that required me to use these skills. I’m working
> with someone like that this week, in fact. I got referred to them b/c
> someone posted a question in a wordpress forum asking for someone with
> Excel expertise. Oh, there's another one … Excel.
>
> Anyway, when you “open” a .csv file, it usually opens in Excel, so this
> person naturally figured it was an Excel issue.
>
> It turned out the data was wonky, and it took someone else 4 months to
> discover it. I could see it the anomaly in the data after about 10
> seconds. This guy needed someone to fix it. Not at the spreadsheet
> level, but inside the custom wordpress plugin that they paid a guy to
> write (in php) 6 months ago; it’s counting things wrong, and the
> reports it’s putting out have a column with incorrect data in them.
>
> It’s a nice little 30-40 hour project. If I included every one like
> this on my resume that I’ve ever had, it would be 15-20 pages long!
>
> Nobody takes stuff like this into account. It’s impossible.
>
> I’ve yet to find someone who can suggest how to make it visible in any
> useful way in my resume.
Would something like Alexander's website be a possible place to put this,
and note on the resume that a summary of projects worked on is at [link]?
I have no idea if that would be something that people would take the time
to go look at, but apparently they will take the time to look at people's
work on github so maybe. Any recruiting people here have any thoughts?
>
> I’m mainly a software developer. So they look for programming languages
> and specific software tools. I learn new tools in a few hours when I
> need to use them. Recruiters and HR people look for a job where you
> were using them regularly for 3 years!
>
> Eg., I got denied a programming gig b/c the recruiter said the client
> was insistent that they hire someone with at least 3-5 years of
> “demonstrable hands-on experience using git”. I kid you not. This was
> just a programming job where they used git as their VCS.
>
> Do any of you guys call out your VCS (git, svn, sccs, rcs, etc)
> experience on YOUR resumes, other than in passing?
>
I'm not sure I'd want to work somewhere that had a requirement like
that. My git experience does get called out, but only because I was
the kernel maintainer for Oracle.
I've been very fortunate/lucky in my career so far so I haven't had to
deal with most of these issues and probably don't have much good
advice. My job with Lucent/Stratus came about from applying on
monster.com to a job titled "Storm chasers wanted!". They were
writing software to track lightning strikes in the valley. That
position was gone, but the recruiter had a position at Lucent doing
work on the HP-UX kernel fixing bugs. They were looking to hire
someone that they could grow into the position, and after a fun day of
interviews by pairs of people I ended up with the job.
In 2012 Oracle contacted me about their kernel team and I went
there. I knew people at Red Hat and they had their boss contact me to
come work on the kernel in Support Engineering. Now I'm currently
transitioning to the kernel platform enablement team here, and that
came about because of being noticed by people there from work I'd done
in my current position. So after Lucent/Stratus all of my jobs have
come about by people approaching me, not me searching for work.
What I have done in these cases is tailor the resume to the specific
position they are interviewing me for. Unlike as has been suggested
in another thread, I only put down skills I would be comfortable with
a very knowledgeable person asking me about.
Jerry
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