As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter. The shortest resume is just your last name "Zuckerberg" or "Snowden". If you've achieved something impressive (sold a company, started a well known web framework, fixed some large horrible government or organizational process) it speaks for itself and the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle.
>As I've gotten older my resumes have gotten shorter.
That's refreshing to hear. I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.
Many people do get emotionally attached to the work they've done. I've worked with people transitioning into tech from other fields, and it is hard for them to swallow the thought of distilling their 10 years as a litigator and law school into maybe 2 lines on a resume. If you can detach yourself from the work, are efficient with words, and you know what employers are looking for, it's not difficult to create a one or two page resume even with lots of experience.
> I hear too many people claiming "I have so much experience and accomplishments that I simply can't fit them all in under four pages". The problem there is just an inability to assess what is the most impressive or relevant experience.
As someone who recently did some job hunting I will tell you that while I agree on an idealism level with your comment it's just simply not true in practice.
I had many, many companies outright reject my truncated resume even though it provided an outline of years of experience and some top accomplishments simply because it didn't include enough of the buzzwords they were looking for. Resubmitting with my longer, 5 page resume (which I absolutely hate doing)? Accepted. Every time.
I will say, however, that if you can apply directly to a person via email (the "Who's Hiring" HN posts are perfect for this, typically) then the shorter resume will work just fine.
* Unit testing (mocha, jasmine, chai, nunit, xunit, junit)
* sourcesafe, bamboo, trello, docker
Yes, there's a danger it can look a bit redundant but it's mostly just there for the box ticking buzzword finding recruiters and prospective employers should understand that too and really be reading the other parts to try to get a better picture of your depth of those and the relevance at your more recent roles.
The 'in practice' part might have some non-human readers involved, but even an ATS scoring a resume isn't likely searching for a huge number of buzzwords that couldn't be contained in the average skills section - a list of maybe 3-4 lines of an entire page.
I definitely agree on the benefit of sending a short resume direct to a human like those on a "Who's Hiring" post, but I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.
> I don't think a human reader went through your entire 5 pages, and I'm pretty sure you could have achieved the same positive result with 1-2 pages if optimized properly. Maybe not though.
Possibly. I didn't take a ton of time testing different scenarios. And yeah most of the ones that rejected me were within minutes even applying late at night so I assumed an automated system.
I don't know if I've ever read my own 5 page resume all in one sitting, heh. I use it as more of a career / professional catalog of just about everything so I can pick and choose when I update / tweak my truncated resume depending on the employer.
This is cultural too. In some regions it is normal to list absolutely everything to the extent of "Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, Outlook)". If you did that in other regions they would bin your CV for what looks like mere padding.
When I see a 10-page resume, I sense stupidity. And usually it turns out that, indeed, it would not matter if every single statement in said resume were true or not.
My resume includes articles I wrote in 2007 and the tutoring I've done; why? Because very few software devs have done that sort of thing.
It's funny though because in general I could pare it all down to maybe two paragraphs, I've done all sorts of tech work and can do everything but if you wanna get past the HR filters and have something to talk about in the interview, you pile on more details in the resume.
Some years ago, I changed my career from Linux System Engineer to Web Developer (Rails and JS). I know that the fact that I was building HA clusters some back then has 0 relevance with the job I am doing now, but it is hard for me to just delete this from my résumé, to leave more room to explain what I am doing now.
When I'm writing my resume, I generally chop off all but the last 10 or so years of my career, and then chop off anything else that gets me down to one page. When I'm reading them, I simply toss all but the first page into the trash. Nobody reads past the first page anyway. If you can't fit your resume onto one page, that's a communication red flag--you're not skilled at summarizing. It indicates you may have trouble doing senior-y things like presenting to execs and discussing your work cross-functionally, both of which require the ability to distill the main points from the details.
> the rest of it is just making sure you aren't a conartist, which an interview can easily handle
I would have thought that if there was one thing an interview was not suited to do, it would be detecting con artists. Isn't passing interviews their only core skill?
Not for a useful interview. If you tell me you founded and sold a machine learning company but can't explain the pros and cons of using variance versus standard deviation then you didn't sell a machine learning company.
Hm. I have not founded or sold a machine learning company, or even studied the field. But either of those quantities fully determines the other, so I'd really hope that, if they're part of the model, they'd be exactly equivalent to a learning system.
Do you mean for measuring goodness of fit between a prediction and the known truth in training data?
If you want to assess the presence of knowledge, give a test rather than an interview. The interview is just a way to make it easier for the con artist to snow you.
One (stddev) is in the same units as the quantity being measured, while the other isn't. I know nothing about machine learning and suck at math and statistics. Did I pass?
Yeah, I don't know why I was downvoted, it's a completely legitimate question to ask a data scientist.
But anyway, you'd get enough for a follow up question, but not really enough to pass. The key is that the sum of uncorrelated distributions has a variance that is the sum of the variance of those distributions. This isn't true for standard deviation. This is useful so we use variance when we think we're dealing with random variables. Standard deviation isn't as useful for intermediary processes.
Another follow up question - actually the first question in my head, but by a mental slip-up I typed out the wrong thing: Why do we use square error when absolute error would do?
The answer to this is actually quite illuminating because there are multiple valid but contradictory positions on it, much like the Bayes vs Frequentist debate.
I'd be surprised if there weren't somewhere out there who didn't understand additivity of variance (and linear combination with the covariance terms, or that it is a more natural parameter for the normal distrovution, or some other reason) but had founded and sold a machine learning company. Further, this seems a bit like asking someone with several years of development experience if he knows what a compiler is.
