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Shame Boner posted:I quit the Friday before last, for better or worse. Things had just gotten so toxic at my old position that I just cleaned up my work computer, turned it in, and resigned on the spot. Probably not the best decision considering I didn't have anything lined up, but I have some savings and now a lot of free time to look for a new job. What's your discipline? You could always build something on your own while you're looking. Even if you just re-create something thats already been done before, at least you could show your style and such. Also, I know that if I ever left my current company, I wouldn't be able to show any code or anything from those projects. I imagine a lot of places have similar agreements in place. Just talk about the work you did do, and hopefully you never even have to mention the project was canned.
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Feb 19, 2013 00:28
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Rurutia fucked around with this message at 14:03 on Apr 18, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 01:03
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 I feel kinda dumb not realizing I could just take a screen shot from word until now. The same resume minus the most recent internship got me an internship, and yet it's been a week since I sent out emails with this and haven't gotten a single email back from anyone, which is odd since I've spoken to all of these contacts in person and gotten their personal emails. Bad luck or is something blindingly bad?
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Feb 19, 2013 04:17
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Bad luck or is something blindingly bad? The main problem I have with it is that your average SA post has much better attention to detail than your resume. Let's start with the typos.
Other than that, I think there's unnecessary description of courses (I don't think anybody needs a description of what a data structures or C programming course teaches you), some bullshit items on Skills and Qualifications that I'd remove or replace (namely, "Excellent written and verbal communication" and "Strong OOP mindset..."), and a lot of unnecessary verbiage like where you say "Basic proficiency with C programming" instead of "Basic proficiency with C." I'd also rephrase anything that uses the words "basic" or "proficiency," and it's probably a good idea to at least consider alternate phrasings of anything with a conjugation of the verb "to be." shrughes fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 06:19
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Rurutia posted:I posted this earlier, but we've made some changes and we're still concerned with how strong of a candidate he comes across. He's doing very well at his current job (they're looking into getting him another promotion), additionally his previous job was very much just being a code monkey, so he's not sure how to put that into a positive light. Is there an attribute frequently looked for that he's not talking about on his resume? I don't understand the field enough to really help, so any perspective/advice would be appreciated. (This is deidentified, all names of companies/products/projects/people and locations are fake.) He uses the wrong kind of bullets in the first Development section.
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Feb 19, 2013 06:23
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Am I the only person who is sick and tired of mountains of bullet points in CVs? They're nicer when you have a larger body of text and want to emphasise a list, but when you just have mountains of lists, they add nothing. Pretty much every bullet point could be removed and nothing would be lost.  Edit; The L e t t e r s p a c i n g in the titles looks awful. Don't do that. The headings and text seem to be bolded and italiced and underline with no real rhythm between them. For ex: Spaced all caps -> Unspaced All Caps with bold, underline, to either bold, regular, or bold italic. The company name is a title followed by an italic indented block, then followed by a bold subheading at the same weight, with a bullet pointed block. While I am at it, I would really like it if the CVs I saw were less like a fountain of bulletpoints, outlines and indents. If you're not going to give me an ascii plain text cv, please put some effort in to the layout. TeX makes excellent typography possible, but the templates you find on the first page of google all look terrible. tef fucked around with this message at 06:52 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 06:41
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2banks1swap.avi posted:
Whenever I see "proficient in X", I think of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCbf4DjlHuM&t=61s Try to find a more meaningful way of describing what you can do. I've seen complete incompetents and real experts who would both describe themselves as "proficient". It's a meaningless term unless you already know something about the person saying it.
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Feb 19, 2013 07:11
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tef posted:While I am at it, I would really like it if the CVs I saw were less like a fountain of bulletpoints, outlines and indents. As a quick experiment, here is some of the content, with the same sort of structure, formatted differently original alternatives i knocked up in pages    These are quite rough and not that nice, but hopefully i'm demonstrating you can play with a grid and see what happens, rather than mountains of indents. I only just found out you can put tables in Pages documents
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Feb 19, 2013 08:08
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Rurutia, that ornate italic is a pain to read and using it for complete sentences (ie significant info that should be read) is even worse. I'd suggest chucking it or, if absolutely necessary, a "slant italic" font like the one in the headings is preferable to one that alters the letter forms.
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Feb 19, 2013 08:16
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Milotic posted:Courses taken is very handy for me as an interviewer as it gives me a chance to ask you about stuff you should know, rather than having to guess. Nothing worse than seeing a CV with no classes on for someone fresh out of or at uni. Agree. I like classes (as an interviewer). I also especially like the elective computer science classes. I don't particularly care that you took CS1. Everyone takes CS1. And CS2. But I do like seeing that you took a database class, or a human design interaction class - etc. At least for my school - those were the things that let you differentiate yourself somewhat.
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Feb 19, 2013 10:39
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tef posted:TeX makes excellent typography possible, but the templates you find on the first page of google all look terrible. This is actually depressing. Formatting was the last thing I was expecting the resume to get criticized for because it's the only thing we didn't change from the resume we bought from Duvet. Also, this is in word, not latex. I'm not sure if we should switch over to latex? My CV is done in Latex but I think this would be harder to port over completely. Neither of us have pages. Honestly, I wasn't even thinking about formatting with his CV because, clearly, both of us have 0 design instinct or taste. shrughes posted:bullets tef posted:bullets Gazpacho posted:font Should I be just removing bullets from the Tech Skills portion and the Italicized portion? I'm not sure how to fit the whole thing in one page without it looking like a huge blob of text otherwise. I'm also having issue trying to think of how else to emphasize that italicized portion. I agree though, it's hard to read and I'm not a huge fan.
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Feb 19, 2013 13:42
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You're overthinking the layout and formatting (and so is tef, who I think is being a bad poster). What matters is that the resume be reasonably scannable and that the content be useful and concise, and that there be no inconsistencies that are a sign of poor attention to detail. The resume that you (Rurutia) posted seems relatively fine when it comes to formatting. One main thing I would do differently (and maybe this is just my style) is to drop all trivial technologies from the list (like XML, GDB, Valgrind, NAnt, JUnit, all the AWS services, and more) and separate C and C++ instead of writing them as C/C++. Sometimes I mention specific technologies (like the use of AWS for something) when describing what I did at my job. I'd also edit every sentence in that resume to be as concise as possible. For example, you could replace "England, Canada, Sweden, and the United States" with "North America and Europe." Of course, you could drop the list of countries altogether in that sentence. And I wouldn't say things like "the Interaction service" when the reader has no clue what that could possibly mean. (LexisNexis Interaction was the only thing I could imagine it being.) Nobody cares that he mentored developers both on his team and outside his team. "Mentored junior developers" could be a line. I could go in more detail in specific sentences but that's too high-effort since I can't copy/paste anything because for some reason you've inexplicably decided to post an image. Edit: My general opinion of this developer is that I wouldn't bother interviewing him because he probably wouldn't pass the phone screen. He seems like a typical developer-with-big-list-of-technologies and a strange emphasis on all the process he's undergone instead of the problems he's solved and the code he's written. The fact that he'd say he improved the performance of something by 14% is a horrible sign, to me. Why would you bother going through such development effort for such a small gain, on the server side? As far as I know, he spent half his time working on that, and the other half getting some bullshit patent (and mentioning that on the resume, as if getting a patent was any more impressive than having used XML, is a sign that he has his head in the sky when it comes to finding value-add). There is such a strong emphasis on vague people-skills stuff. I presume he's not targeting some management position with this, since he starts off with a list of irrelevant technologies. shrughes fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 14:34
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Being from the UK, ive always had my cv on two pages. Recently though someone mentioned to me that for a technical cv, more people are leaning towards the american style one page. Can anyone confirm that this is a trend or is it down to personal preference.
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Feb 19, 2013 15:11
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shrughes posted:I could go in more detail in specific sentences but that's too high-effort since I can't copy/paste anything because for some reason you've inexplicably decided to post an image. Thanks for the criticism and prespective, it's really appreciated (and the edit was exactly what I was looking for). I'll have to talk to him about most of it first because it is largely over my head. Just to address the image, I had originally posted it in docx and pdf. It got no responses and I saw a lot of people posting images getting responses, ergo posting it as an image might help. But of course, I forgot to link the docx and pdf again. So here it is, if that makes a difference: (both are dropbox links) docx and pdf Rurutia fucked around with this message at 15:43 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 15:20
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shrughes posted:separate C and C++ instead of writing them as C/C++
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Feb 19, 2013 15:36
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Rurutia posted:Thanks for the criticism and prespective, it's really appreciated (and the edit was exactly what I was looking for). I'll have to talk to him about most of it first because it is largely over my head. Just to address the image, I had originally posted it in docx and pdf. It got no responses and I saw a lot of people posting images getting responses, ergo posting it as an image might help. But of course, I forgot to link the docx and pdf again. So here it is, if that makes a difference: (both are dropbox links) docx and pdf You have to note that I'm a bit of a sperg, and my boss is a bit of a sperg, and my previous bosses were half-spergy too. Maybe there is somebody who actually likes big lists of acronyms. An HR department, perhaps, and other nests of ick. And of course, please remind the resume person that this is my impression of him based on his resume and not my impression of him  I actually like the term "C/C++" but yeah I recommmended splitting that for the people who get butthurt about it.
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Feb 19, 2013 15:48
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shrughes posted:You have to note that I'm a bit of a sperg, and my boss is a bit of a sperg, and my previous bosses were half-spergy too. Maybe there is somebody who actually likes big lists of acronyms. An HR department, perhaps, and other nests of ick. And of course, please remind the resume person that this is my impression of him based on his resume and not my impression of him He's a bit of a sperg too and honestly I think this resume is his way of trying to cater to what he thinks HR/management wants to see. Anyways, when I showed it to him he just said: "Well, that's a pretty brutal response." But I think he largely agrees with you so he's working on it now. No good comes of being coddled.
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Feb 19, 2013 15:54
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shrughes posted:The fact that he'd say he improved the performance of something by 14% is a horrible sign, to me. Why would you bother going through such development effort for such a small gain, on the server side? There are plenty of places at large scale where a 14% performance improvement isn't just worthwhile, it's huge, and on a critical path where the low hanging optimization fruit has already been picked it can be quite impressive. "Tell me more about this" would be a likely interview question.
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Feb 19, 2013 18:41
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Karanth posted:There are plenty of places at large scale where a 14% performance improvement isn't just worthwhile, it's huge, and on a critical path where the low hanging optimization fruit has already been picked it can be quite impressive. "Tell me more about this" would be a likely interview question. This is actually the case here. As far as I'm aware, doing this got him a promotion. But I think the takeaway from shrughes' post is that it really doesn't come across. Rurutia fucked around with this message at 19:28 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 19:20
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Plorkyeran posted:This is a really minor and dumb thing, but potentially pretty important. People who actually know both C and C++ tend to view "C/C++" along the same lines as "Java/Javascript" At Apple I worked with a guy who would routinely ask people who did that in-depth questions about the differences between C and C++ out of spite. He was kind of a dick.
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Feb 19, 2013 20:49
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I have some questions for you fine folks, now that I'm starting to get phone interviews. Quick background: I've had 2 phone interviews so far, one with Energy Enterprise Solutions and another with Aerotek Engineering; I have 2 more scheduled within a week for Intuit and Cerner. Intuit is the one I'm the most excited for, by far, but I'm still curious about the others. So Aerotek Engineering is apparently a staffing agency of some sort - they pulled my resume from careerbuilder and called me themselves. I'm a bit wary of this kind of position [and confident enough in my other pursuits to be willing to drop it], but I'm still happy to humor the opportunity. Have any of you been accepted for this sort of position and gotten success out of it? I'm under the impression that this would be temp work, but some people get job offers from their placements when their contracts end; is that at all common? So far my phone interviews have been mostly casual - and it seemed to me that the HR staff were mostly concerned about specific technologies. Going into these should I just be ready to basically list off what I've worked with [and what's already on my resume]? Are there any specific questions I should be asking, either about the work or the company? While this is probably all common-sense stuff I should already know, I'm still quite new to it, and really want to put my best foot forward for the Intuit interview.
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Feb 19, 2013 21:03
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pr0zac posted:At Apple I worked with a guy who would routinely ask people who did that in-depth questions about the differences between C and C++ out of spite. He was kind of a dick. If you don't know them both, then why would you list "C/C++" instead of just one of them? Wouldn't questions about their differences also be appropriate for resumes that list "C and C++" instead? If I list "Java, C#, Javascript, and Python" on my resume, I wouldn't feel like someone's being a dick when they ask me how I'd implement private class members in each one.
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Feb 19, 2013 21:38
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Safe and Secure! posted:If you don't know them both, then why would you list "C/C++" instead of just one of them? Wouldn't questions about their differences also be appropriate for resumes that list "C and C++" instead? I think the idea is that someone who lumps C and C++ together like that is more likely to be someone that isn't aware of as many of the ways in which C and C++ are different than someone who lists them separately (like, perhaps people who know C++ and think that because they know C++ they also know C). I haven't seen many if any resumes that lump together C and Objective C like that, even though that's arguably less unreasonable because (afaik) Objective C is an actual superset of C, and C++ isn't.
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Feb 19, 2013 21:49
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That's mostly because "C/Objective C" is awkward. And I'd recommend finding a way to make that 14% number more useful. Like, 14% which saved the company $7 million. Or something like that. 14% measured in widgets is much different from 14% measured in CPU time. It was rather unclear.
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Feb 19, 2013 21:53
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I wasn't getting any interviews at a company I was applying for earlier this month so I asked my friend, who used to work there, if he could forward my resume to someone. The thing is, I'm looking for an internship but the recruiter that I was referred to is looking for a FT. I don't want to screw my friend over for helping me out but 2 other groups (who I wasn't referred to) in the company suddenly e-mailed me about interviews for an internship. How do I deal with this? Also for the internship, the first team wants to do a 30 minute phone interview but didn't specify it was technical. For the job my friend referred me to, they specified a 45 minute technical interview alongside Colabedit. Is the internship interview also a technical one? Thanks for reading all that. Acer Pilot fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Feb 19, 2013 |
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Feb 19, 2013 21:59
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Sarcophallus posted:So Aerotek Engineering is apparently a staffing agency of some sort - they pulled my resume from careerbuilder and called me themselves. I'm a bit wary of this kind of position [and confident enough in my other pursuits to be willing to drop it], but I'm still happy to humor the opportunity. Have any of you been accepted for this sort of position and gotten success out of it? I'm under the impression that this would be temp work, but some people get job offers from their placements when their contracts end; is that at all common? My first job out of college actually went through Aerotek. They're a pretty typical, large, nationwide recruiting firm. Basically everything depends on the client company and the specifics of the position. Generally, Aerotek works for some client company--they find and screen you, and then send you on an interview at the client company. If you get hired, you get paid by Aerotek and Aerotek gets paid by the company. Usually they get a margin of 20-40% of your salary (but they're also on the hook for benefits/etc). There will usually be some term of contract (usually a couple months to a year). After that it kind of depends on the position, the contract might just be over, or you might have the opportunity to get hired permanently on at the client. Usually you know--it'll be described as temp, perm, or temp-to-perm. Don't discount temp positions though--projects often get extended or renewed. The only thing that sucks is when that turns into a multi-year thing. Temp-to-perm is pretty common though, and is benefits the client because it makes it easy for them to get rid of who don't work out--they just don't renew the contract. The one thing you want to avoid (and I don't know if Aerotek does this) is shady recruiters who aren't working for a client, but are just trying to combine job listings they find on Monster/craigslist/wherever with job seekers they find in the same places. In that case nobody wants to pay them some huge fee for doing nothing and they just end up being a giant problem. Anyway if you get a decent recruiter they can be a pretty good asset, since it's in their interest to get that position filled, and they usually have an ongoing relationship with their clients and know a little bit about what they are looking for. On the other hand, they're usually HR types and can be a little clueless about technology, so most of their screening process is seeing how many keywords in the job description that you have in your resume.
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Feb 19, 2013 22:11
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shrughes posted:That's mostly because "C/Objective C" is awkward. Should I just bullshit those numbers if I don't have them? None of my work really is measured in any quantifiable way.
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Feb 19, 2013 22:18
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evensevenone posted:My first job out of college actually went through Aerotek. They're a pretty typical, large, nationwide recruiting firm. Basically everything depends on the client company and the specifics of the position. Generally, Aerotek works for some client company--they find and screen you, and then send you on an interview at the client company. If you get hired, you get paid by Aerotek and Aerotek gets paid by the company. Usually they get a margin of 20-40% of your salary (but they're also on the hook for benefits/etc). This is quite informative, thank you! With regard to the salary: do you know if you still get a competitive wage after their margin or would you expect to see roughly 70% of the median salary?
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Feb 19, 2013 22:38
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20% seems a bit ridiculous, why is it that AeroTek is doing the actual hiring vs the "client company?" Aren't you essentially consulting at a lower rate?
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Feb 19, 2013 22:49
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Strong Sauce posted:20% seems a bit ridiculous, why is it that AeroTek is doing the actual hiring vs the "client company?" Aren't you essentially consulting at a lower rate? I can see the appeal of it, from a business sense. Aerotek is adding value to their 'employees' by effectively networking for them, and to "clients" by making hiring less tedious. With regard to the rate, I imagine they can negotiate a higher base salary because they effectively take payroll taxes and benefits off the table; those combined could easily save more money than is lost by the 20-40% margin. If they're not capitalizing on that and only asking the median 65k salary or what have you, then it's a pretty horrible deal for everyone but the client business.
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Feb 19, 2013 23:30
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Sarcophallus posted:This is quite informative, thank you! With regard to the salary: do you know if you still get a competitive wage after their margin or would you expect to see roughly 70% of the median salary? Your wage should be competitive. Their margin should be on top (and invisible to you). If it isn't something is wrong. The benefit to the employers is less acquisition cost. Payroll taxes and other overhead are covered by the contractor. The rest is finders fee which I guess is worth it if it saves the time of several highly paid managers. I mean the company I ended up with billed its customers at 200-300% of salary. So in that context it actually made them money I think.
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Feb 20, 2013 01:03
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Safe and Secure! posted:If you don't know them both, then why would you list "C/C++" instead of just one of them? Wouldn't questions about their differences also be appropriate for resumes that list "C and C++" instead? Also be sure to target your language list to the company - you get serious points down for listing java as programming language if someone's looking for a C++ developer.
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Feb 20, 2013 01:51
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Aerotek pays also pays weekly, which often means that they pay you a good month before they get paid. Worry about whether you're getting a reasonable wage, not whether or not the company you're working for is getting ripped off. Steve French posted:I haven't seen many if any resumes that lump together C and Objective C like that, even though that's arguably less unreasonable because (afaik) Objective C is an actual superset of C, and C++ isn't.
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Feb 20, 2013 02:17
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shrughes posted:The main problem I have with it is that your average SA post has much better attention to detail than your resume. Let's start with the typos. Thanks for the thorough critique. I'm gonna try something a lot less wordy:  Obviously the top is a lot fuller without me blanking out my personal info, but it still looks a bit barren. Is that fine for a entry level resume? I should get some projects of mine to put on there.
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Feb 20, 2013 02:44
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Sarcophallus posted:This is quite informative, thank you! With regard to the salary: do you know if you still get a competitive wage after their margin or would you expect to see roughly 70% of the median salary? When you're contracting, you should be getting a little more than you would if you were salaried if you're not getting any benefits because you'll be expected to cover those costs out of pocket or at least that's how a few different recruiting companies explained it to me. Strong Sauce posted:20% seems a bit ridiculous, why is it that AeroTek is doing the actual hiring vs the "client company?" Aren't you essentially consulting at a lower rate? It's easier to let someone go if they're contracted through an outside recruiting company. They're technically not getting fired at all, they just don't have a placement. It also cuts costs for the company, they don't need such a large HR department. If you can, avoid contract to hire. It's awful working for a couple of months, not knowing if you're going to get hired in or not. Oh, and to update my status from a page or two back, I just got offered a full time position today.
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Feb 20, 2013 06:06
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2banks1swap.avi posted:Thanks for the thorough critique. I'm gonna try something a lot less wordy:  It's really not that horrible, and I've seen far worse, but you could do easily do better.I'd make the font for section or sub-section titles stand out more (size and/or font change), use more indentation, and restructure the Skills and Coursework sections so that you don't have that awkward space at the right. edit: if you let us see the personal info section (but replaced with fake info) it'd also be easier to judge the overall appearance. Cicero fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Feb 20, 2013 |
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Feb 20, 2013 08:31
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mariooncrack posted:It's easier to let someone go if they're contracted through an outside recruiting company. They're technically not getting fired at all, they just don't have a placement. It also cuts costs for the company, they don't need such a large HR department. Contract to hire isn't necessarily bad if you know the hire percentage. My job used to almost exclusively hire contractors. It was how they did trial periods. But yeah without that knowledge I'd be worried too...
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Feb 20, 2013 13:35
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Cicero posted:This looks really bland. Obviously you don't want to go overboard with ornamentation or formatting, but this seriously just looks like I was experimenting with minimalism - I'll play with more interesting fonts and throw in some personal stuff later today. Two columns side by side, one for skills and one for coursework, would probably work better. I'll also put up Twobanks Oneswap's contact information to help give more outline of the structure. TY for the additional feedback.
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Feb 20, 2013 19:26
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I have limited experience in interviewing, so I'm wondering this: how much different in terms of difficulty is a company's (~1hr) technical phone interview and in-person interview? I had a phone interview today that I think went pretty well, and honestly I was expecting something much harder since I've heard this company only does recruiting at top 5 colleges and is somewhat algorithms-heavy. The questions were a couple easy "problem -> describe a solution" type ones, and two coding tests (one easy recursive tree algorithm, another one easily solved with hash tables). Is their 4-5hr in-person interview more likely to have similar difficulty, but longer/larger breadth problems, or straight up more difficult ones? I'm actually more nervous now that I'm doing well in their process (after completing their code test and phone interview)  (or maybe it's just that working while interviewing makes each interview worth a lot more)
Pie Colony fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Feb 21, 2013 |
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Feb 20, 2013 23:43
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Pie Colony posted:I have limited experience in interviewing, so I'm wondering this: how much different in terms of difficulty is a company's (~1hr) technical phone interview and in-person interview? I had a phone interview today that I think went pretty well, and honestly I was expecting something much harder since I've heard this company only does recruiting at top 5 colleges and is somewhat algorithms-heavy. It depends on the company. I would expect both more difficult and more technically in-depth problems though. I recall recently I interviewed at a place, had a great general phone screen, and I get there and all everyone wants to talk about is Spring (not on my resume, not on job description). At the in-person there were no technical challenges, just general philosophy. So it can be random too.
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Feb 21, 2013 00:01
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