Yes, regularly. Valley has a very short attention span. NG isn't in the list of hip sexy companies.
Same goes with profiles from Cisco, VMWare, Intel, Synposys, IBM, and pretty much all the big companies that were pinnacles of business and your career at one point, but they are not considered hip anymore.
Looking at Github profiles, however much people talk about it, also doesn't regularly happen. It's a chore to type it out in the browser, if you're looking at a paper resume or if it's not hyper-linked. And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done? It's not Pinterest or Uber.
> And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done?
Applicant: Well, I wrote a code to optimize a UAV flight path to avoid enemy radar and minimize fuel consumption, and debugged another controls code to prevent people from dying. Did some debugging on a computational electrodynamics code for radar simulations...
Recruiter: Oh. You know what's cool? Photo sharing.
On top of that, hope your title was never "Systems Engineer"[1] at one of these companies. If it was, prepare for a whole lot of clueless recruiters and managers to misunderstand your experience.
[1] At Raytheon, if you were the one developing radar avoidance algorithms[2] and code, that was probably your title.
[2] "Algorithms", another word that has slightly different meaning leading to major misinterpretation.
Hmm... That probably does have a lot to do with it.
At my company, you're permitting to choose a public title of either your job description (e.g. Lead Data Scientist), your "engineering rank" (e.g. Lead Scientist/Technologist/Developer/Engineer) or your consulting rank e.g (Lead Associate). All of these are equivalent in rank and promotion opportunities, but it does give you some flexibility on what you can place on your resume.
I frequently put my title on resumes as whatever the company I am applying for is calling it. There's so many names for the same thing. If we call it "programmer" at this job and they call it "software developer" at the place I'm applying to-- well, I can read the requirements in the ad. Usually it is similar enough to not matter. So I just put software developer even if that's not the title on my paystub. Gets me past computer and HR filter, but when they call me/past employer no one balks at the slight difference.
I've never met someone who was like "Programmer" and "Software Developer" are too different! Same with "Coder". "Software Engineer" in some countries would be a no-no but many places it's interchangeable. Further, I've done some research on the psychology behind it and usually "software developer" and "software engineers" is a better way to put it for negotiation if that's possible because you're seen more as someone who makes something rather than "really expensive computer guy".
I've seen companies that are real sticklers for that sort of thing claiming that if one falsifies that what else are they about? Yes,nit is asinine but it does happen
Well if anyone can be a stickler it'll definitely be that programmer that was once burnt by a rogue semicolon.
I'm sure it happens sometimes. I just haven't personally seen it with the roles "Software developer", "coder", and "programmer". That is effectively the same thing everywhere I've seen it. Now if I'm a programmer and say I worked in primarily QA or database position we have a problem, but there's no real nuance between those three titles.
People extoll the virtues of a solid university COS degree, not because it explicitly teaches skills for industry, but because it creates a background to help new and novel problems. Certainly your previous work background provides a similar advantage.
If you can perform those tasks, certainly whatever the consumer-focused needs you can learn. As Aristotle said, "For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing."
This brings up a really good point. Hyperlinking to Github, or other work, in your resume is important. You should make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to say 'yes' in a short amount of time.
What sucks is that even if it's hyperlinked, people probably won't click it. I don't have clickthrough data for resumes (if someone does, that'd be awesome), but anecdotally, clicks won't happen unless you really call out to the reader that it' worth their time.
When you're reading resumes you go into awful zombie mode (I do this too). If you're writing one, pretend your audience is a braindead zombie that needs to be spoonfed everything. If you have cool projects, list them and describe them concisely in a way that makes clear that they're interesting and a big deal. And link to each project if possible to increase odds of click.
Obviously everyone is different in how they review resumes, but I am Software Engineer and whenever I see a resume with a github, I'll usually visit that first before even reading the rest of their resume.
Since I work in and around Github and open source, usually someone's Github will tell me what I really want to know about them (not always, but really good candidates have a Github profile that stands out).
Very true. Although candidates also need to be careful to link in moderation. It's all about adding the most interesting/relevant projects and then knowing when to stop. If you give a zombie too many links to click (like on the web), he/she will most likely click none of them and move on.
I've been writing my programming blog for nearly 10 years and always put it up top on the resume, in all that time only two people actually read anything on the blog, and both hired me. The rest of people who actually read my resume (itself rare) never even looked it up.
Don't overlook the East Coast firms. CSC, SAIC, Unisys, Booz | Allen | Hamilton, Mitre, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and smaller companies are developing very sophisticated software, especially in data science (my field), and not just for the government.
A lot of these positions are highly competitive and involve a great deal of skill and education. Around here, they're still seen as major resume builders.
Anecdotally, I haven't had trouble securing interviews with West Coast firms even though my background is with a major East Coast company.
Maybe that's because I ran a funded startup for a few years, or maybe it's just the demand in my field, but "hipness" seems like a very bad metric for evaluating previous employers.
As for the interesting things they are executing at these firms, trust me, there are plenty of very innovative products, even in the commercial spaces such as healthcare. Machine learning, big data, practical cryptography, and basic research problems abound.
Look through some unclassified materials and talk to some people about their civilian work experiences and one can hear all about many fascinating technologies, all of which certainly trounce Pinterest in terms of interesting projects.
Rogue nuclear weapons location intelligence, international fugitive management tracking, and human trafficking are primarily targeted by highly sophisticated machine learning pipelines at sub-second analysis speeds.
Water basin management, flood gauge tracking, flood inundation maps, roadway construction modeling... Your average mid-senior developer from one these companies has expertise in a variety of fields: data analysis, civil engineering estimation (hydrology, hydrodynamics), physical simulation, DevOps, embedded software, and low-level machine architecture.
If the National Guard ever rescues you from a flood, you'll be grateful for their HEC-RAS's software, the government contractor who created the estimate flood plain in using GIS, and the civil engineer who verified the estimates at the local level.
The "hip"-ness of previous employers is a bad metric. Maybe the employee would need to adjust to the business culture of the West Coast, but in my experience people generally adapt to new working environments quite well.
Disqualifying someone over working at a major East Coast tech firm is a heuristic with a very high false negative rate.
Also, you'll find many people from those firms looking to make a fresh start, work for less to get started, and a lot of them are refugees looking to escape the bureaucracy of their current positions, which renders them extra-motivated as a new hire.
I can't believe this is true. How shallow of some Silicon Valley companies. Who cares if the company is considered "hip"?! I don't care what great chef a candidate got to eat from in a previous job, I care what projects they worked on!
Same goes with profiles from Cisco, VMWare, Intel, Synposys, IBM, and pretty much all the big companies that were pinnacles of business and your career at one point, but they are not considered hip anymore.
Looking at Github profiles, however much people talk about it, also doesn't regularly happen. It's a chore to type it out in the browser, if you're looking at a paper resume or if it's not hyper-linked. And again, if you worked at NG, what possibly interesting things you could have done? It's not Pinterest or Uber.