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by dmitrygr·12y ago·view on hn ↗
I cannot imagine an article more wrong than this one.

* "A seasoned C developer with 10 years experience can not instantly morph into an advanced front end web application developer" - yes he can. Knowing things on bottom easily allows one to move up. It is the reverse that usually cannot happen.

* "Ignore the usual template based CV padding" - if you got the resume through an agency, it would have never made it to you without this bullshit. Sad but true

* "You often need specialists and not generalists." - false Specialists will become useless when that technology is no longer in use (you move form C# to java, for example). generalists will just help you with your next thing.

* "If you are looking for a C# or Java developer. You would expect their CV to contain those keywords, in context quite a few times." - false. If you have enough interesting things to put in your resume, there is no space to write "java" 1000 times.

* "I would expect to see some of the following throughout their CV; Design Patterns (MVC, Factories, Singletons, ActiveRecord), Classes, Objects, UML" - who the hell puts "classes" and "objects" on their resme. If i have to explain to you what OOP is and includes, I do not want to work for you!

* "Community participation" - maybe accurate. Some people do not like handing out their code for free on github, and instead get paid for it (people who contract for a living, for example). Really want to disqualify them?

* "if it becomes the next big thing, this person could be the one to keep your company at the forefront!" - If you hire based on technology instead of actual understanding (which it sounds like you do) then you will lose long term. Hire people who can actually learn, not those who happen to claim to know the latest buzzwords.

Of all the brilliant people I know, you would have discarded 100% at resume review stage. Probably not the best of ideas, that.

2 comments
"Of all the brilliant people I know, you would have discarded 100% at resume review stage."

Not really, because no one would tick all the boxes. If they haven't keyword dropped, then you can't apply that filter. if they have a brilliant track history then that pulls up the others that have been missed far greater than if they had keyword dropped.

Unless you're someone like Jon Skeet or Douglas Crockford you can't get away with an average CV. Those people have ticked the other boxes so much (social side, conference speaking, etc) which would greatly outweigh some of the other points which may be all the "junior" has got.

Although, like what that blog posts states, if you were Jon Skeet or Douglas Crockford you would already have ticked several of those things in that blog post ;)

Just because I have some pointers does not mean common sense must go out the window.

So no, the brilliant people you know would not of had their CV discarded at the review stage.

That part made me laugh. Including "objects and classes" on a programmers resume is like a trucker including "steering and accelerating" on his.

Unfortunately the person who is going to hire you often has no programming experience. Or if they did it was an intro to vb course. So concepts like objects seem like very advanced stuff to them as its likely some thing they just barely were ever to scratch the surface on.

Truckers have the advantage that their employets probably atleast drive some thing on a daily basis.