This doesn't always help either though. I have only ever sent PDFs to recruiters for this reason. Yet I have still had a recruiter completely rewrite my resume and add false information.
I generally keep a resume on me when I go to an interview just in case an interviewer had not seen it. I'm glad I do that.
Turns out it was a different resume that the recruiters would send us. They were garbage in quality and I hate them.
Fuck recruiters.
At a past role we were looking for a contract Tableau person and one of the agencies that was approved by HR sent me 20+ resumes. All of them were 5+ pages, with things like "Made a Bar Chart in Tableau," "Made a Pie Chart Tableau", etc.
After looking at 10 of these, I told our HR exec these resumes all looked the same and I thought they were fake. I had a meeting with the agency rep and they said they smiled when I said these resumes were BS. Their response was "Usually we send resumes to a manager and they have a 30 minute phone conversation with some of them. After that they sign a contract with one of them."
The point is, a lot of hiring managers want a person to do X on a contract basis, but they don't understand X or have anybody in their group that does X. For all they know, connecting to a SQL database and making a bar chart is rocket science. These agencies target these managers.
I did end up interviewing 2 people from that agency, both of which were actually quite good with Tableau. Of course, those people were curated by the agency after I made my comment.
I'm an immigrant to the US, and in my home country resumes are all really long. Even people who have never had a job and just finished their bachelors somehow find a way to have 5 page resumes. I think immigrants to the US in IT/Tech roles figure out fairly quickly that they need to drastically reduce the lengths of the resumes.
I'm actually in Australia myself. Guess my choice of reference for "nearby offices of competent tech companies" had unintended geographic connotations, woops
Apparently everyone keeps forgetting that PDFs are editable.
Certain tools, such as Word and LibreOffice, make it a bit easier as most of the source text is in the document, others like LaTeX end up looking like garbage through machine processing.
I once refused to let a recruiter send my resume to this company because I thought the company was slimey (it looked like they used SEO to trick people who were actually looking for a free government service to use their paid service instead... but it was purposely ambigious they were not affiliated with the government)
The recuriter started getting angry at me, so I made it clear I would not work with someone who didn't respect me, and hung up. A recruiter who views you as simply a product to sell is not worth keeping. There's a million recruiters.
He called me once screaming at me because he thought I was not being exclusive to him with regards to a particular job. I told him quickly where to go, it was him who called me, grow up and stop wasting my time. To this day I have no idea what he was smoking that day cause I'm as bewildered now as I was then about what he was on about.
healthcare.org? (the real one is healthcare.gov)
>Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?
Yea, hear that from the other side:
I went for interview at Amazon (~2017?) for Java backend engineer. During the interview they were asking me only JavaScript questions from what looked like a standardized form to filter out phonies. I obviously failed the interview. Was told if this isn't the job I wanted I should apply for a different job and come back when I get some more experience in... Java. The recruiter had absolutely no idea that Java isn't JS and was interrupting me when I tried to explain the situation. I really should have applied for a job I wanted. One of the worst interviews I event went to.
Java devs with wide recruiters network got such emails weekly, calls monthly, until TypeScript came to rescue.
There's almost a dangerous level of knowledge among some recruiters where they think they know enough to do crap like this.
All those new terms like React, Vue, SaaS, Azure, AWS etc. They don't really know what they mean.
I was asked if I could code in Azure. This led to a weird conversation where I was trying to explain what Azure was, whilst he wouldn't listen to me and was adamant that it was a programming language.
I'm so lucky, I think I found the best recruiter in all Vancouver. He helped me get my ideal role and was generally kind and competent. Just to offset the horror stories.
“Sure, can I pay you in ATM?”
"5+ years experience in using Fastapi"
The position seemed right up my alley. The directions part explained he was the recruiter for this position, and to reach out on LinkedIn first. So, I did that. I guess it was a pre-screen to see if I read directions.
He accepted the request but didn't respond to my message for a few days. I'm really not good at self promotion, but I also really wanted to get his attention. I saw that he posted regularly to LinkedIn and also engaged with a lot of posts. So I posted a cool side project[0] to LinkedIn that I had recently done. I was feeling pretty exasperated, I think I wrote something like "if i will do this just for fun, imagine what I will do if you hire me." I don't necessarily recommend that exact approach, but he did notice it and that is what got the ball rolling. Thankfully he thought it was cool, because it is a little bit edgy. I was looking for a smaller company that valued a hacker mindset, so it was a bit of a filter as well I suppose.
We immediately hit it off. He seemed to understand what I was all about, which is cool. I'm an aspie and a lot of ppl just don't get me. He has over 20 years experience so he really knows his stuff and he was just nice and down to earth.
I got extra lucky because he was friends with the hiring manager for 20 years, they worked in the game industry together in the 90s.
I'm not capable of generating any takeaways currently, as I am real tired, so I will leave that as an exercise for the reader. Hopefully my response was vaguely coherent and at least tangentially related to your question. Sleep time!
Edit: Forgot link! [0] https://jeremypoole.ca/posts/evofinder/
Writes in resume: 10 years coding in API, expert level.
paraphrased from a rejection phone call - swap the acronym with the word "interface" if you want to get closer to the original
Sure!
But your comment is the pithiest most succinct one here. Throw away the OP's tweet and all these comments, especially mine, and just put your comment on a blank page and let's call it's the succintestist summary possible.
If I told you I once had a recruiter assume MVS and TSO were the same, you'd pretty much be able to guess my age from that.
Keyword-happy business HR: "Sorry, we're looking for Java. Case-insensitivity? No, we have to be sensitive to everyone. Being insensitive is not what HR does."
That is, unless the company in question has made a complete mess of their pipeline and aren't aware or unwilling to admit it.
Also, rejecting someone because they can't rote memorize ecosystem specific incantations is... a pretty big red flag.
Arguably, I'm more valuable because I have the capacity to eventually figure this out, rather than having already memorized it. But if this were a crisis rather than a minor bug, it would be much, much better to have somebody who'd already spent that decade learning all of the many, many, many incantations that Spring Boot requires.
(I'd also argue that Spring Boot in particular is much, much, much too dependent on incantations, and the main lessons I've learned could be put on my resume as "Expert in Spring, and you can be too in one lesson: Don't.")
That really applies to all ecosystems. Hiring somebody smart is better. But there really is something to be said for having somebody with X years experience, who can therefore do some things in 10 minutes because they've already done the painful part on somebody else's dime.
That's when I realized 1) how much Spring and Angular were NOT doing for me (compared to Rails), and 2) how much knowledge lies buried in BOTH stacks. I feel that Rails is by far the better tool for creating CRUD simple web apps, but the ability to be quick with it comes from years and years of living with it, and understanding how 3 or 4 lines of configuration work together to produce the effect of several hundred lines of explicit Java and JS in Spring and Angular.
Disclaimers: YMMV. TACMA. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Et cetera. Et alia. Ad nauseam. E Pluribus Unum. QED.
That is, unless I use Spring. The stupid Spring-related errors only appear at runtime.
Ok, honestly, after a year, using Spring is more convenient than not using it. (Basically, there are two or three types of stupid errors I usually do, and I learned how to decipher the intimidating error messages.) But the first experience is quite a shock. You write something with algorithmic complexity of Hello World, then you run the program, it throws a screenful of error messages, and you want to scream.
It reminds me of my childhood experience with Turbo Pascal, where you had to wait until the compiler told you that you missed a semicolon... and then it pointed at the wrong place -- not the place where the semicolon should have been, but usually the beginning of the next line. After some time, it becomes obvious, but the first time it's definitely not.
Inversion of control means you have no control.
At least Spring has switched mostly to annotations, which are sorta like Java. The IDE can spot some errors.
C++ template expansion and linker errors come to mind. First time you encounter those it's typically either very short and cryptic or at least 500 errors and the compiler hitting an internal limit of how many of them to display.
I find that most of my business logic ends up being really compact and powerful, but the tradeoff is that one chunk of the project is really dense.
I know exactly the difference between having to deal with the Java ecosystem for SOAP and the Microsoft ecosystem for SOAP—I had to deal with both at the same time at one job a decade ago. At that job, I worked with a lot of really smart people, but it was a Windows shop. Most of the people I worked with _could NOT_ work with the non-Windows platforms we had to deal with (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, Linux, VMware, and HP-UX). They would _constantly_ break code that was written to be cross-platform safe because it wasn’t what they were used to. On the other hand, at least I didn’t have to become familiar with how Exchange worked in order to integrate with _that_.
The number of people who can make the level of context switch you’re referring to, or working with multiple contexts like this, is vanishingly small in our industry. It can be done, but I think that you deeply underestimate the surface area of those ecosystems and the _willingness_ of people to put themselves in uncomfortable positions. The OP who talked about knowing C# but being interviewed for a Java position would have been _deeply_ uncomfortable writing Java because the tools they were used to weren’t available.
I would not make the same judgement you’ve made here. That said, if someone _wants_ to learn a new ecosystem, I’m happy to have them explore that (I prefer ability to learn over proven experience when I’m in a hiring position).
‡ Shipped: made it so that others could use, not just myself. This would include a project that I ported from Ruby to IO so that I could learn IO and a project that I ported to Elm in order to learn Elm. It does not necessarily indicate pickup. If we restricted this to stuff that I know that other people used, I might lose a couple more than the two I just mentioned.
° Languages: I include variants of languages that are _sufficiently different_ from their predecessors so as to require translation. This mostly affects the shell scripting variants (Posix sh, ksh, bash, and zsh are all _similar_ but sufficiently different that I count them; I have shipped substantial scripts in each). I don’t count gawk vs awk. Regardless, I vary between 3–4 languages and ecosystems weekly at my current job.
Where there’s time for new developers to get up to speed with a new tech stack, I completely agree with you.
If we're talking about a lead or solo dev position, it would cause issues though.
Ruby/Rails in particular became this. Javascript rocketed to this complexity level, with the added chaos of seemingly reinventing the entire toolchains every 2 years.
The testing framework I saw in a React app were almost straight from java, but somehow (despite JS being more flexible and script) MUCH uglier.
On top of that comes SQL backends, Web and occasional C++ for some native libraries to plug on.
At previous jobs the employer followed similar development approach.
I never got the Developer X mantra.
I wouldn't have gotten my first .net job without this line of thought. Sure enough, I picked up enough c# to be effective in the first week.
While it was extremely unethical for him to change your CV, Java and C# are indeed very similar, to the point that most organizations use devs with that background interchangeably.
If that company really ruled you out because you had 7 years of C# experience, and not 7 years of Java experience, you likely dodged a bullet.
Respectfully, I disagree. Things that you should learn over 7 years of experience go far beyond learning the language itself or the fundamentals of its standard library. We're talking about two very different ecosystems.
Are we talking about the vast differences between Akka and Akka.NET? ;-)
Honestly, to the extent the ecosystems are different, it is probably more valuable to add someone to a team with experience with a different ecosystem unless there is literally no one on the team with experience with the current one (and in that case, you might question your commitment). Yes, it takes a while to learn a given ecosystem thoroughly, but that's not really what is going to drive the productivity of your team.
Would I hire a bright candidate that require retraining given absence of those that do not? Quite likely yes.
Would I be pissed at false advertising? Again, yes.
Now, I tell people to look at my LinkedIn profile as that is the only resume that I keep. I’ll download the PDF of it if they want, but I haven’t maintained an actual resume in at least ten years.
I generate my resume as a PDF from HTML/CSS. It's fun to see how recruiters handle that. I think most use image manipulation to insert their header. One recruiter sent me some image assets and let me add the header/footer myself.
I'm sure some recruiters go too far with the .doc, but there are legitimate reasons too.
I only had experience with recruiters who work for the organisation I'm interviewing for. None of this contact info / skills tampering makes sense in that context.
Where the hell are these recruiters at? I’ve retreated most of my information back because all I ever got was spam from the former.
If you're not going through internal recruitment then this is a great way to go about it. The recruiter isn't just trying to get their 20%, so they spend a lot more time getting to know you and also getting to know where you're going.
The biggest down side is that you'll never hear a negative word about anything, so you gotta be good at asking some pointed questions.
Same goes for references, always, "available on request for the employer who can reach out if they like, no you can't have them. Go find your own clients".
I'll also take a copy along with me just in case.
I later had a job interview, and saw what the potential employer had been sent. They had re-typed it, and it looked awful.
I keep remembering everyone that thinks PDFs are magically safer than Word.
Are those types of exchanges still take place at the interviews? I was lucky enough to avoid them, having worked at companies that are able to afford to spend extra time training people. Those types of discussions often remind me of the Linus' quote: "Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships."
In my experience most employers say they want good programmers, but in reality they want quick programmers. People who can get the product out the door ASAP. And that's why I wouldn't take a Java job without learning the ecosystem first. Even if they promise training, there's a high chance of them reneging. So I would end up in a stressful situation trying to learn as I go.
I'd rather stick with what I know and what I'm good at.
+1 to the PDF resume, if for no other reason than you don't have to deal with format issues on windows/mac.
Make sure it's digitally signed and locked. I've had recruiters do hacky edits to plain pdfs before.
Although it depends how you generate it how easy it will be, Word has built in support for editing PDFs. So does LibreOffice (in Draw I believe). It's pretty accessible to non-technical people without expensive software to edit PDFs nowadays.
But the ecosystem is way different, i think the recruiter mimicked someone else and thought c# is equivalent to java, while it's not.
Anyways, in this interview I was being asked about Java and I answered every question by saying I don't really know Java. The interviewers were obviously getting annoyed. So I asked "Sorry, I thought this was a C# job?". No, it was a Java job and magically my CV had modified itself to say I had 7 years of Java experience.
I told them I did not put that on my CV, I actually had my own copy with me and showed them that. We all realised the recruiter changed my CV. They apologised and wished me luck.
Thirty minutes after leaving the recruiter is on the phone to me, screaming at me and berating me for not going along with the ruse. He said "Sure aren't Java and C# are pretty much the same thing?"
Now that is why if I ever have to send my CV to someone it will only be a PDF version.