
Quit Exaggerating On Your Skill Set - ajbatac
http://www.codesqueeze.com/quit-exaggerating-on-your-skill-set/
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blurry
How about "we" quit exaggerating our skillset when "you" quit exaggerating job
requirements.

Let's do a random test, shall we? Here is the very first job on Dice.com in
New York metro area.

Skills required:

    
    
        - Systems Development
        - Systems Analysis & Design
        - Systems Operations & Support
        - Knowledge of Cisco LAN/WAN infrastructure
        - Knowledge of data center infrastructure
        - Knowledge of Windows systems environment
        - Knowledge of Network Appliance
        - Knowledge of Brocade SAN infrastructure
        - Strong understanding of Oracle (both 10g and 11g)
        - Strong understanding of DB2
        - SQL Server 2005
        - Experience in logical and physical design of RDBMS
        - Strong understanding of .net technologies
        - COBOL/Mainframe programming
        - Expertise in desktop software
        - 270 Terminal Emulation
        - FTP
        - IIS7
        - Experience in implementing IT Service Level Agreements
        - Experience in team management
        - Experience in change and asset management
        - WMS including Medicaid, SSI, and/or Food Stamps issuance
        - Collaborative skills
        - Conflict resolution skills
        - SDLC Project Management
        - Commitment to public service
       

Salary range? $50,000 to $135,000 tops (again, this is in New York where a
small home barely suitable for two adults with one child will run around
$800,000 plus $1,500/month in maintenance and real estate taxes).

And hey - you know what I "chuckle out loud" about? When pretentious blog
authors talk about themselves in 3rd person:

<http://www.codesqueeze.com/about/>

~~~
arockwell
Personally, I got burned listing far too many skills on my resume without
quantifying my experience. After that, I got rid of anything that I didn't
have strong experience and I think that helped the credibility of my resume.

~~~
blurry
That's a very reasonable assumption but you don't _know_ that. A more
realistic scenario is that your new, pared down resume lost major points as
far as making it through the headhunters' and HR's dumb keyword filtering
software, lost minor points as far as impressing generalist managers, and
gained minor points as far as impressing technical managers.

I'd say when you tally it all, you get more points than you lose by listing
non-core skills. Technical managers are usually the very last in the process
and if your resume gets rejected upstream, you don't get to impress or un-
impress them at all. Personally, I have never had anyone question my non-core
skills. People usually look at several most recent projects to get an idea of
your actual strengths.

~~~
timr
I customize my resume for each job. If the company is small, I submit a tight,
super-honest resume, and omit the buzzword-bingo.

If submitting to Inittech Corporation, I submit a keyword-optimized resume
guaranteed to please the screening software (then swear never to do that
again...)

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Tichy
Quit pigeonholing programmers...

No, I am not an expert in all the things I have put into my skills section.
However, I have enough experience with them to know that I can deal with them
like an expert in no time (< 1 week).

In fact, I don't think there are "experts" for programming skills. These days,
the job mostly requires digesting lots of documentation fast, for new
libraries, new languages, new tools, whatever. It is unlikely even for an
expert to be confronted with exactly the same problems as in the last job,
even with the same underlying technolgies. So focussing too much on the skills
section is counterproductive for employers.

~~~
potatolicious
Hear hear. I picked up PHP again this past weekend after laying dormant on it
for the last year or so. Yeah, I was rusty for the first hour or so, but
within a few hours I was as strong as I had ever been and cranking out code
like mad.

I have TONS of languages and skills that have been put to the side and unused
for some time simply due to the lack of need, but that doesn't mean I can't
restore my former competency within _hours_ of jumping feet-first back into
that pool. I haven't written C++ for months now, but give me a few hours in
front of a terminal with an interesting problem and it'll all come back.

And you know what, if I'm applying for a job with VB.NET, and having not
worked with it for a while, you can bet your ass that I would have taken the
time to refresh my skills before I step into that interview. The author is
complaining about a non-issue.

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raganwald
My advice is to put a keywords section at the bottom of the résumé so that it
will getthrough the keywords searches but only brag about your highly
competent skills in the body and/or skills summary.

Either that or here's a really novel idea: Attend and present at local
networking events. Find your next cofounder or job there.

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lethain
I put together a simple resume website experimenting with ways to add context
to skills on resumes. I list a number of projects, and when you hover over
each project then the corresponding skills in a word cloud change color and
enlarge. In my mind it does a much better job than a paper resume as
clarifying which skills are actually in active use and which are paper skills.

My example is at <http://willarson.com/> , but its simple to make your own (
[http://lethain.com/entry/2008/oct/18/r-i-p-your-resume-
site-...](http://lethain.com/entry/2008/oct/18/r-i-p-your-resume-site-to-
awesome/) ).

~~~
vlad
I like it a lot, but maybe you could have a dedicated area for the job
descriptions on the right side, just above the keywords? Right now, it is very
difficult to scroll through the list of technologies used because the location
of each job title moves back and forth while moving the mouse down.

~~~
lethain
Good point. I think I'd considered that at some point but lost track of the
idea somewhere before implementation. :)

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nostrademons
One way around this is to include the technologies used along with each
project on the resume. That way, a prospective interviewer can cross-reference
your skills list with the particular project and see if it was 10 years ago,
or if you only had a cursory role in the project.

You _need_ to include all those skills, because so much headhunting is done by
automatic keyword searches. I usually include anything where I would be
comfortable writing code of that technology on the whiteboard with minimal
reference support. I've dropped some skills over time (eg. Perl, which I last
used when I was 19), but I try to keep everything that I wouldn't mind taking
a job in. Otherwise, your resume will tend to get dropped on the floor of HR's
automated screening machines.

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martythemaniak
My last/current resume has a skill matrix of sorts. Along the top I have
"experienced, intermidiate, begginer" and along the left side I have
categories like "Software Development, databases" etc. I think it looks nice
and gets the point across.

------
cabalamat
I disagree with the article where it says: _Tools and languages are like
foreign languages - if you don’t use it, you lose it._

You don't lose it, you just get rusty. I haven't coded in C, C++ or Smalltalk
in years. If I started again, it would take me a few days to get up to speed.
But after then I'd be just as productive as I was.

~~~
nostrademons
I've been surprised how quickly it comes back. When I was working with a YC
company this summer, I had to do some PHP. I was up and running in about an
hour and a half - everything was familiar, I knew where to go to find API
calls, and I wasn't all that much slower than when I was doing PHP daily. And
I hadn't written anything in PHP for about 3 years before then, and had been
actively trying to forget the language.

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cstejerean
I used to list every single thing I ever used on my list of skills when I
first started looking for a job since I didn't really know what I wanted to do
so I thought I'd be safe and list everything. Since then however I've gotten a
very clear picture of what kind of jobs I want and started to remove things
that would likely lead to a flood of calls from recruiters about jobs that I'm
not at all interested in.

But I still see the raw list of skills as nothing more than SEO optimization
for keyword searches on job sites. I'd expect any competent hiring manager to
skip right past that and focus on the specific details that I mention for each
of my past positions.

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bradgessler
The word "Familiarity" is a joke; what does that mean anyway?

I once interviewed a guy who had HTTP on his resume. Just for kicks I asked
him to name 3 HTTP verbs. He could only name GET and POST. I know that's
petty, but if a candidate is going to list something on their resume, they
better know what the hell they're talking about.

The most atrocious phone interview I conducted, I could hear the guy Googling
the answers to some of the questions I asked. Towards the end I asked what his
experience was with DOA web-services. He of course responded that he knew all
about them and was very "familiar" with them. I quickly ended the interview
and said, "thanks, but no thanks."

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gills
Quit depending on your resume and start a business :)

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Locke
The long list of skills is a symptom of a much larger problem. Too many
companies are just clueless about hiring technical staff.

These things don't work: using HR, resume databases, keyword searches,
creating an overlong and too detailed list of requirements and then treating
them as a checklist.

Yet, this is the approach taken by far too many companies. The result, of
course, is a stack of resumes a mile high that each contain a list of as many
buzzwords and skills as possible. How do companies expect to find a good match
in all that?

The way out is simple. Create a simple resume, with a small focused set of
"skills". Leave out anything that's irrelevant to what you actually want to
do. Then send it to a small handful of companies that run reasonable adverts.
There may be fewer such opportunities, but I think a focused approach works
better in the long run.

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lsc
good advice (well, I think so) but then, I've been doing this for some time. I
use xmlresume and use the skilllevel=tag. (which reminds me, I should probably
update my resume.) <http://xmlresume.sourceforge.net/>

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tptacek
My last resume just put dates (years) next to all buzzwords.

