

The Resume Is Dead  - yarapavan
http://www.chicagosean.com/2011/01/resume-is-dead.html

======
ErrantX
_If you put this kind of effort in, opportunities will come to you. People
will recognize you and your work. Your well earned reputation will precede you
before you even walk in the door._

 _sigh_ This works for high flying traders, it works for rockstar coders, or
people applying at "indie" companies (i.e. ones with renegade hiring styles).
And so on.

And, typically, someone in that high flying arena misconstrues what he is
seeing around him as the future.

It could well be.

But it ignores the fact that the vast majority of people still submit a CV,
then wait and hope for an interview. CV's are far from dead (should they be?
who knows).

If you want to work at the top, you can't do what the rest of us do. If you
don't want to work there, well, it's a waste of time.

~~~
sliverstorm
Seriously. If the only way to get hired is to be in the top X% (for X << 100),
then what exactly are the other (100 - X)% that make up the majority of the
population supposed to do?

We can't _all_ be famous superhero rockstar coders.

That said, this is a viable strategy for getting a job- it just isn't grounds
to declare resumes gone and buried, because it's impossible for everyone to
secure their job this way.

~~~
stcredzero
Doing a good job and having a good reputation are not just for rockstars. I
doubt this will ever go out of style.

The CV? The CV will always be around, just as many cultural artifacts remain,
despite their obsolete functionality.

------
luu
_This is 2011. Resumes are how your daddy got interviews at Dunder Mifflin. HR
reps get forwarded hundreds of resumes a day. My friends who work in HR tell
me its actually the really crappy resumes that get noticed - but only so they
can make fun of them and then toss them in the garbage. The good ones don't
even grab attention - they just look like the hundreds of other good ones
they've got on file._

Apparently, in 2011, HR departments make fun of bad resumes and toss them in
the trash, rather than interviewing people with good resumes?

 _If you put this kind of effort in, opportunities will come to you. People
will recognize you and your work. Your well earned reputation will precede you
before you even walk in the door._

So the advice boils down to "be famous"? That's great, if you can manage it,
but there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game.

Perhaps this is atypical, but I just have a bog-standard resume, no twitter
account, and a blog that probably averages 2 hits per week. Despite that, I
haven't had a problem getting interviews by submitting my resume through
company job websites. As this guy would say, there's nothing that makes my
resume stand out from all the others they have on file: I got a BS from a
state school, an MS from another state school, and have a job at a small
startup no one's ever heard of. And when I interview, just knowing algorithms
101 seems to be sufficient to get a job offer (and not even necessary unless
I'm interviewing at a place like MS or Google).

This guy makes landing a job sound a lot harder than it actually is.

~~~
stcredzero
_So the advice boils down to "be famous"?_

I don't think that's fair. Why is "be famous" a better decoding than "be
awesome?" Are you seriously telling me that you know of no one who, while they
don't have celebrity status, isn't known in your community or subfield as
someone awesome?

 _there's a finite amount of fame out there: it's a zero sum game._

I'm calling bullsh#t on this one. How in the world can you justify there's a
finite amount of fame? Fame is basically the garnering of attention. Are you
implying there's a finite amount of attention? How is this so in the face of
increasing population and wealth? Not only are there more people, more of the
people have more free time and access to information resources. There's more
and more people able to pay more and more attention. Even if this were not
true, fame still wouldn't be a _zero sum game_ unless you've shown that
everyone's attention is saturated. I posit that there's still room for growth.

~~~
wtn
hahaha... if there's a finite number of people, there's a finite amount of
attention.

~~~
stcredzero
Oh, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It's not effectively a zero-sum
game until you near saturation. Before that point, the dynamics are the same
as for an infinite resource.

How's about a game of poker with grains of sand as chips?

Second, you already admitted that the amount of attention can grow. There's
only a finite amount of wealth represented in the balance sheets of everyone
alive on the planet right this second, but no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum
Game because there's no clear upper bound.

Oh, and BTW, hahaha...

~~~
burgerbrain
A finite number is always finite, even if it's so large that you can't
comprehend it in normal human terms.

Oh, and arguably the amount of fame there is to be had is nowhere near
unfathomable. I can list off the top of my head probably hundreds of "famous
people", and I don't give a shit about celebrity. The only limit there is my
memory, not a lack of famous people to think about. Our culture is absolutely
_packed_ with famous people, it's pretty clearly saturated.

 _"no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game"_

 _Objectively_ wrong.

~~~
stcredzero
_A finite number is always finite, even if it's so large that you can't
comprehend it in normal human terms._

You apparently misunderstood the point I made in the gp post. That has almost
nothing to do with my argument. So, you are saying that any game where the
scores at any moment are finite numbers is a zero-sum game.

Various economic activities are subject to _many iterations across time._

 _"no one claims wealth is a Zero Sum Game"

Objectively wrong._

Okay, not enough words for the slightly uninformed to understand. There are
people historically who have put forth theories based on the idea that
globally wealth is zero-sum. I don't think anyone in economics takes them
seriously any more.

 _Our culture is absolutely packed with famous people, it's pretty clearly
saturated._

The >culture< \-- meaning I presume, the general culture -- are you so soft-
headed that you think this directly relates to the context of getting hired in
a particular field or this discussion?

Exercise for the less than completely clued -- where in the previous
discussion did I frame the _relevant_ context of notoriety. Locate that, and
reframe your arguent in that context. Then I might consider this
intellectually worthwhile. As it is, I keep on having to explain things to
someone who half-understands arguments.

------
Umalu
If the job requires tangible skills that can be demonstrated in a 20 minute
interview, the resume has never been that important. Similarly, if you are
poaching someone with a proven track record from somewhere else, resumes have
never been important.

But if the job requires intangible skills that cannot be demonstrated in a 20
minute interview, and the candidate does not have a proven track record,
employers have to use some method to filter and find. Resumes are far from
perfect, but they are one way to do this, and I expect any rumors of their
death are greatly exaggerated.

------
russell
I'll share my secret for getting past HR. I have been consulting for the past
30 years, so I get to job hunt more frequently than most of you. I have a good
resume, but I am older than most of you and I run into age bias in small
startups. So I have most success with young companies with 100 to 300
employees where the first generation product hack has to be rewritten,
extended or whatever. I have a resume for buzzword content, job history, and
project stories. Experiments with content and style have shown me that it has
little impact on securing initial interviews.

It's the cover letter that has the most impact. During the dot com implosion I
was having little success with a cover letter targeting technical hiring
managers. This was after all San Francisco and I was competing with laid off
dotcomers and programmers for all the infrastructure companies.

I changed it to target HR and technical directors. I rewrote it to show a
little wit and to soften the jargon. I even quoted a Johnny Cash song, "been
everywhere". Immediately the interviews tripled, which is good when you are
middle aged and expensive (putting three of your cohorts through college).

------
mishmax
Is this really the best article that HN has to offer today?

Resumes are not dead. It's just a summary of your accomplishments. If your
accomplishments are outstanding, you'll get noticed. Otherwise, you don't.

------
rmrm
I just recently moved to a new job, the recruiting was based solely on
reputation, I basically had the job before anyone talked to me or saw a
resume. This was a new thing for me. To be completely honest it felt _great_ ,
a wonderful validation.

I'm hard on myself and while I take pride in my work and what I've
accomplished I always focus on the things I'm not great at. That sounds
negative, and it probably is, but I think it has its plus side, and I'm not
sure I can be, or want to be, any other way. But apparently I've done enough
good things, and handled myself in a way that really good people want to
recommend me.

Gratifying, but also a little scary. I'm comfortable with the pressure I put
on myself, but the prospect of letting other people down, people I think a lot
of, is unsettling.

A recommendation is, and the more vocal it is (and the more of them there are)
the more it becomes -- a very generous gift, and with it comes a lot of
responsibility of a different kind.

The resume route might be harder, but it has its positives. Easier to exceed
expectations.

------
PostOnce
Contacts have always trumped resumes.

"It's not what you know, but who you know."

~~~
wglb
Actually, I think it is better said "It is who knows you".

Many have thought that the best way to get somebody to know you is through a
resume. Really, the best way is through contacts. In my long career, I have
had three "starting points" where I got a job without using my contacts
network. And that was without really being conscious about it.

If you are in the programming profession (don't know about trading) then
today's best way is to put up a web site with a project that you are building.
Show your stuff.

(I can't believe how far off the rails this whole discussion has gone. And we
aren't even to the "cover letters are more important that resumes"
discussion.)

------
retube
This is bullshit. There's only one thing a prop desk cares about when hiring a
new trader: how much money did you make at your previous shop? This translates
_extremely_ well on a CV. In fact, I can't think of anything better any
prospective employer could ever hope to see on a CV. Thanks to the
quantifiable nature of your performance, trading is one industry where you
really can keep to yourself and don't need to build some kind of personal
brand.

Of all the traders I know not a single one of them has a public web presence.
Far from it. They are all extremely private and what they think and know they
are not broadcasting on twitter.

------
sown
When I first graduated, I took all of the interesting things I had made over
the years in my spare time (non school work material: a crappy threads library
in C, a packet injector for an exotic network protocol, a patch to the linux
kernel that got committed, etc) and put them on a web page and made sure
people looked at it.

It was instrumental to help get me a job early in my career. I had no contacts
and I do not interview well at all.

However, such portfolios need to be kept current with newer and better code.
I've discovered that in my most recent job search, it did not help so much
because most of the code is stagnant.

------
MJR
The title should have been focused on how the HR department isn't they key to
getting a job anymore. HR requires resumes so they can scan them and look for
keywords. Then if you pass the keyword test you get to move on to the hiring
manager.

Being awesome or having a solid reputation won't help you get through HR. The
author is advocating skipping HR entirely, which is a fine proposition. But
it's not about the resume. The resume is just part of the established process.

Go, be awesome. But keep your resume updated so that you can keep track of
your accomplishments and successes.

------
synnik
The trend for HR to be inundated with so many resumes that the good ones fall
through has much more to do with the current unemployment rate than with the
resume being "dead"

------
kellysutton
Any company that lets HR do the screening of the engineers is probably doing
it wrong.

Every job I've gotten is from networking. Submitting my CV has just been an
after-the-fact formality.

------
d3x
I totally agree. I get much further showing my personal side projects than I
do my resume.

