That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.

Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.

As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice.

I had many, many companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time.

I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.

So as a dev one ends up with bullets like (exaggerated here for effect):

* C# / .Net (ASP.Net webforms, MVC, WCF, Entity framework)

* SQL ( T-SQL, stored procedures, sql-server management)

* Python (Django, Flask, south, numpy, scipy)

* Javascript (jQuery, ES5, ES2016, webpack, bower, npm)

* Front-end frameworks (angular, react, knockout)

* Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit)

* sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker

Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.

Sums it up well

I definitely agree on the benefit of sending a short resume direct to a human like those on a "Who's Hiring" post, but I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.

Possibly. I didn't take a ton of time testing different scenarios. And yeah most of the ones that rejected me were within minutes even applying late at night so I assumed an automated system.

I don't know if I've ever read my own 5 page resume all in one sitting, heh. I use it as more of a career / professional catalog of just about everything so I can pick and choose when I update / tweak my truncated resume depending on the employer.

It's funny though because in general I could pare it all down to maybe two paragraphs, I've done all sorts of tech work and can do everything but if you wanna get past the HR filters and have something to talk about in the interview, you pile on more details in the resume.

Some years ago, I changed my career from Linux System Engineer to Web Developer (Rails and JS). I know that the fact that I was building HA clusters some back then has 0 relevance with the job I am doing now, but it is hard for me to just delete this from my résumé, to leave more room to explain what I am doing now.

I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?

Do you mean for measuring goodness of fit between a prediction and the known truth in training data?

If you want to assess the presence of knowledge, give a test rather than an interview. The interview is just a way to make it easier for the con artist to snow you.

But anyway, you'd get enough for a follow up question, but not really enough to pass. The key is that the sum of uncorrelated distributions has a variance that is the sum of the variance of those distributions. This isn't true for standard deviation. This is useful so we use variance when we think we're dealing with random variables. Standard deviation isn't as useful for intermediary processes.

Another follow up question - actually the first question in my head, but by a mental slip-up I typed out the wrong thing: Why do we use square error when absolute error would do?

The answer to this is actually quite illuminating because there are multiple valid but contradictory positions on it, much like the Bayes vs Frequentist debate.

What makes you think this? Anything aside from intuition?

The big thing for me is that this summarized/editorialized version shouldn't be what you (the one with the career) manage on a regular basis. You should have a source of truth that is far more comprehensive (and manageable) and which allows you to create this summary version easily.

On another note...I've been writing a lot of web copy lately and I've started seeing a lot of similarities between good web copy and good resume copy. Resumes are marketing tools, and don't you forget it.

Unfortunately in the resume writing game, there are lots of failed writers that were never involved in hiring. They are good writers but don't know the audience, so people end up paying substantial amounts for a nicely worded resume that doesn't result in interviews.

Ain't that the truth. I've been an engineer for a decade, I built a career app, I blog about career management, and i definitely still struggle with this.

And you're right. It's not only about good writing. Writing a good resume is a specific skill. There are so many career specific factors that come into play (industry lingo/keywords, being able to quantify value etc), you can't just make it pretty.

I think being modest is a good trait overall just not so good for writing your own CVs.

(As an aside - this also helps with career stagnation. If you're having a hard time deciding what to write, it's time to move on.

Once you've got some accomplishments, refactor to the most efficient use of words. How can I say everything necessary is as few words as possible? This is where a professional might come in handy if you're not a good writer.

You can run your accomplishments by a friend and say "which two or three are most worthy of a resume inclusion?" - gives insight into what is impressive.

I think that covers most of it. The rest is mostly formatting and summarizing (if you choose to write a summary).