Yes, for pure coders, this is a terrible resume. It looks like she is using the right side of the brain for something left-sided. But, that's the point.
How many coders do you know can show an interest in both design and code (same for designers)? To have an aptitude and interest in both code and design is something very hard to find, and to be able to express the fusion of the two is a challenging process for many who are aching to stretch the boundary set by text heavy, information-only resumes that do not communicate nearly what you want it to. (How much design skill, creativity, and passion can you communicate with just information?)
Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.
For what its worth though, I do think the graphs are a little hard to read but not hard to navigate, especially if I'm looking for a particular skill to hire for. Its easy to see if she has Ruby skills, for instance - but its hard to see the overall picture of what skills she has without spending a lot of time on it.
Urgh... I really hate to go into rant mode because I know what you're trying to say isn't really relevant to this. However, as an incredibly right-brained person who is a good programmer (or so I like to think :-) and has absolutely zero design skill, I'm always a bit annoyed by this. The whole "right-brained people are creative artists, left-brained people are engineers and scientists" is a 3 or 4 decade old view of how the brain works. Yes, the left brain tends to be a bit more textual while the right brain tends to be more visual, but that doesn't mean that right-brained skills aren't useful to coders or that left-brained people don't have design skills. And even if it did, people can still tap into the other side of their brain.
Ok, that's my rant for the day. :-)
So would I.
> Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.
She'd also probably be good at doing design / front-end parts of a website while communicating with back-end developers (who might be doing algorithm optimisation).
I expect she'd be good at talking to designers from a coders point of view too.
Can somebody explain what's wrong with this design?
The message this resume is communicating is that the author also feels that design is just about ornamentation, and the only way it could be more obvious is if the diagram were in the shape of a giant duck. I have to assume she doesn't actually believe that, not least since she hasn't asked for us to psychoanalyse her and it's really, really unfair to try to do so based on this completely decontextualised link. But even so, the design seems unsuccessful to me because it's communicating the wrong message.
As it stands, all I can say about her is that she has decent mastery of Photoshop but no understanding of good design.
One can take her resume idea even further and create a CV in an interactive form, so it could meet everyones needs.
The issue of thinking in pictures versus words has always interested me. Wiki says[1] 30% of us are explicitly picture thinkers, 25% think in words and the rest combine both methods. Most entrepreneurs (not sure about the ones dealing with start-ups) tend to drift towards the right, because it's usually easier to generalize your idea by visualizing it, rather than coming to a logical conclusion by using words only. Which, I think, would be slower in this case. So, how come are most (if not all?) of the current cv-websites featuring only long walls of text?
I'd suspect anyone who calls themselves a designer/developer is probably good at other things to, like writing, designing meaningful infographics, and playing the resume game with subtlety.
If I posted my resume with two pages of bulleted accomplishments to HN, it would be met with a deafening thud.
I'm not sure about that. When I interviewed at Google, everybody seemed very impressed that I finished half my Honours degree before I graduated from high school at age 17. I had far more questions about my experience with concurrent high school and university than I did about doing my doctorate at Oxford.
But on the broader point, I absolutely agree -- if I was looking to hire someone, this would get an immediate reaction of "this takes way too much work to comprehend; trash it and move on to the next candidate".
Probably not. Most "college credit" earned in US high schools is unfocused coursework that gets you out of (some of) your general-ed requirements. Lots of universities won't even transfer the stuff, and if they do, it's not typically treated as real college credit.
Aside from that, thanks to the prevalence of AP courses it's much easier (and more common) for high school kids to get college credits today. It's definitely not as impressive as it used to be, and citing the number of credits earned as if it were some kind of score is silly, at best. It's the sort of thing you brag about when you have nothing real to brag about.
One thing I hate about bragging about that sort of thing is that it's (unfortunately) more of a reflection on the quality of the high school you attended than it is on your character. The best students at the worst high schools in the US don't have the same access to AP courses as the average student at the best high schools.
With that having been said, what do suggest we can do to help out with districts with less resources? I've done a lot of outreach, but it often feels like a drop in the bucket....
A number of my friends did this though, so I don't think it's quite as big of an accomplishment in the US than elsewhere. Though I'll be the first to admit that my group of friends tended to be the high achievers in high school/university.
-- A undergraduate in CS/Mathematics
But, we take students from some magnet schools here to intern and they're amazing (multivariate calc, AP physics, and a year of Java--before senior year. The student had worked on a team project and was commenting his code unprompted...). I invited a Canadian colleague to a group meeting where they presented what they were working on she was stunned...I think that in the US when students have opportunities, it's great--the difficulty is how to improve the average....
At the best high school in Illinois you'd have roughly 2% of the graduating class be within shooting distance of that number, just to give you an approximation.
It's at least equivalent to bragging about your SAT score.
It really tell you knowing abut how the employee is going to approach problems and how creative their solutions will be.
She is applying for a design / developer job. This is a phenomenal resume because: it shows that she can present things attractively and, most importantly, can be creative.
Lastly, it would appear that it's interactive, but we only have a link to the static image. I think it would be a lot more appealing if you could hover and learn more.
Bug or feature? This could very well cause a potential employer to stop and spend more time on the resume, and end up getting to know more about her than the person whose first couple lines of plain text did not catch the employer's interest.
"Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned"."
To me, the single thing that popped out the most was the quotation highlighting detailed accomplishments ("incredible job managing the launch", "delivered a product", etc.).
"Or is the blue "frequency" and the orange "expertise"? Why is the graphic laid out so that the cutesy venn diagram looks like a color key?"
This absolutely does not work at all and should be scrapped.
"a simple resume would lead with "Rails developer with over 5 years experience" instead of burying the lede in another cutesy picture."
Who gives a damn about yet another "Rails developer with over five years experience"? Was that experience building anything good? Did she learn anything and get better? Did she understand the customer needs and meet them? Was the site usable? Did it perform well? Did it stay up?
There are a lot of potentially better ledes than "Rails developer with over 5 years experience".
Also, in the interactive version, I'm assuming the related experience circles "pop" for the various projects when you hover over the key. That's at least a more interesting way to examine history with a technology than the standard "list technology key words next to as many projects as possible in big wall of text" used in standard resumes.
"What you say with a resume like this is, "I hope someday to have major accomplishments""
And what's wrong with that? If this is the resume of a young person with experience but not enough to fill two pages with small font, bulleted text of major accomplishments, maybe this isn't a bad way to draw attention to yourself and get an employer to take a chance on you?
Lastly, an over-riding fact here, I think, is the "View Plaintext" link. If you were the one considering hiring her, you could have just clicked that and got all the stuff you wanted, probably.
Or it could cause the employer to stare at the bafflingly unfamiliar format for the alloted 30 seconds and then move the application into the not-selected pile.
One of things that bug me about most resume recommendations is that it's incredibly difficult to make a truly general one. For every screener who will be impressed by your cover letter/section X/feature X there is another one who holds the exact opposite opinion, and most of the time you don't know who will be screening your application or what their preferences are. Very few of these recommendation/good resume template/excellent resume showcase posts mention this.
I think this is a ridiculous statement, but we almost certainly have a different definition of what makes an employer (cough) reasonable.
My priorities in a resume read are passion, then applied intelligence, then experience. The information you're ignoring here is valuable with essentially no additional variables (doesn't matter much where they went to high school, or what the website did). How long someone I don't know paid you to write code in whatever technology is almost useless information to me.
OK, I admit, I have dedicated 4 whole lines (3-5% maybe) on my C.V. to my personal interests. If I get an inexperienced interviewer who wants to make me comfortable they provide easy openers (it's cool, I'd rather get straight to business and talk about their business), and emphasise I am not my job.
More broadly, I feel like "technology used" is a pretty weak indicator of how well they'll do. An applicant may have used C for 20 years and be a "C expert," but have poor application/system design sense.
Many hiring managers (and their technical staff) I've talked to lately have been only superficially interested in the technologies (languages, frameworks, etc.) I've used, and much more curious about how I go about solving problems and designing overall solutions. Several have flat-out said they're hiring smart, motivated, creative people, and are happy to train new hires on parts of their technology stack with which they're unfamiliar.
So I agree that an accomplishments-based approach might make more sense. I think it's useful to still indicate what technologies you've used, as it can show things like technical breadth, and a willingness and desire to learn new things. But, "I'm a C expert of 20 years, and I can fill in function bodies based on other people's designs like a pro," is much less impressive than, "I just started learning Ruby 3 months ago, but I designed and built Complex System from scratch with it." Sure, there's a lot of room in between those two extremes, but focusing on "technologies used" doesn't really give you much information.
Infographics ON a resume, good or mediocre: OK.
Infographics AS a resume, if amazing: OK.
Infographics AS a resume, if not amazing: VERY BAD.
Yes, her infographic isn't flawless. But it isn't bad either, it is in fact pretty damn good. And most certainly good enough to stand out in a pile of standard-resumes, which is about as much as it can possibly accomplish.
(b) Instead of simply saying "you're wrong!", why not tell me some things you specifically like about this infographic as an infographic? I am seriously interested in what stories you think this graphic does a good job of telling.
b) I don't disagree with most of the formal concerns that you listed in the top comment. I'm just saying that I think you're judging her too hard.
The goal of a resume is to score an interview. I do think that this one is well enough executed to score above average.
Case in point, so far it's been good enough to score a "Best resume I've ever seen" blog-post and a >60pt Hacker News thread.
For someone who's interest is in working in design and development this is a very distinctive marketing document. Yes it could be improved, but the fact that it is attracting attention means it worked.
It's an interpretation error, the bars indicate expertise and frequency of use (shown below).
One might even go further and say that "people with real accomplishments" wouldn't bother having a 'resume' (in a standard plain format) in the first place. Their work/accomplishments should speak for themselves.
Everything needed is there. So vuala. I think this is great. You still need an interview to get details on projects. What else can you expect? A resume that removes the need for an interview?
Sorry I am french I had to point that out :)
(Actually, in comparison to most self-declared artists out there, her work is pretty considering the limits of her experience and she read, and probably reread the memo suggesting that she get her ass on Git and by quite possibly has a Github/Gitorious/Unfuddle account where here code can be scrutinized. I'd probably hire her)
* Has a graphic which must be interpreted simply to find the last few projects the candidate worked on.
* Uses a proportional diagram scheme that is (a) worse than pie charts (an achievement) and (b) requires a color coded legend to illustrate the simple clause: "[Project Name]: Rails, CSS, jQuery".
* Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned".
* Attempts a comparative analysis of experience with different tools both as a "developer" and a "designer" without explaining the significance of either term; what's a "Photoshop CS5 Developer" or a "Textmate Designer"?
* Or is the blue "frequency" and the orange "expertise"? Why is the graphic laid out so that the cutesy venn diagram looks like a color key?
* Spends something like 1/3 of the real estate of the graphic on an almost entirely uninteresting attribute of the candidate (what terminal she uses, what text editor she uses, what browsers [seriously.] she uses). Designers can be expected to know Photoshop. Nobody cares about your editor.
* I have no idea what the subway-map illustration of command line tools and web services even means; the impression I get is, "this person will add baffling complexity to things in order to avoid boredom". Whoah, where do I sign?
* Extraordinarily inefficient representation of the candidate's Rails experience; a simple resume would lead with "Rails developer with over 5 years experience" instead of burying the lede in another cutesy picture.
* No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school, the age you were when you coded your first website, or what platforms you tech-supported in school, and yet that material consumes more visual weight than the number of years the candidate has doing Rails development.
Resume tip. Here is the terrible thing about spending time on your resume pointing out your favorite dog breed or color-coding your choice of text editors: people with real accomplishments would never, ever do that, because they only have two pages of heavily-bulleted text to convey those accomplishments in. What you say with a resume like this is, "I hope someday to have major accomplishments" --- whether that's true or not.
It's not just that infographics are a crappy format for resumes (and, they simply are.). It's that this is not a good infographic. In fact, since we're all so familiar with resumes here, it's actually a really good example of the problem with all the cheesy infographics that have been floating around for the past year.
The blogger who highlighted this "graphical resume" did a disservice to the person who created it; I have no doubt the author is an totally reasonable human being who sends normal resumes to people when resumes are what's called for.