Showing posts with label Resume. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Resume. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

The Longer the CV, The Better

[for part 1 of this series, click here]



As we said, the prevailing Whiz-dumb thinks a long CV sucks.

But this is wrong on several fronts.

To see a real CV, and simply to demonstrate that TheHackerCIO never "Makes Shit Up", please click here, to see a real CV. This is Donald Knuth's example.  Academics understand what makes up a real CV. They live and die by them. They are an essential tool.

Now, is Donald Knuth an idiot for having a 40 page CV?

Or, are these Recruitment Pundits who tell us to keep it down to one page missing something?

Short answer: it's the pundits who are wrong.

Yes, Donald Knuth needs a CV. A long one! He needs to catalog everything he has done in the course of his career. Every book, video, audio, and paper he has written needs to be stated, whether refereed or not. That's hundreds of papers!

Now, maybe you're saying at this point, "But I'm not an academic. I haven't written three or four hundred papers. I have no need to itemize all of this." And I'm sure that's probably true. But if you're a senior technologist, you have worked on hundreds of projects. And every single one indicates  your unique skills, learned context, and achievements. All of that has contributed to make you the technologist you are. Why should it be ignored or forgotten? Is what contributed to making you the technologist you are now unimportant?

Far from it.

I know that this series is starting out as a bit of a teaser, but bear with me ...

Next time, we'll look at further reasons why all this detail is MANDATORY, for your own personal career development.

Until then, I Remain,

TheHackerCIO


Monday, April 28, 2014

A Contrarian Resume



"Contrarians" are a kind of investor who wager against the conventional wisdom. Of course, the words extends beyond just the financial world.

TheHackerCIO is a contrarian.  

He sees no reason to respect conventional wisdom. Historical tradition isn't enough to justify decisions, policies, or edicts. They must be reality based. They must be true. They must make sense. They must have reasons and good ones that justify their prescriptions.  Otherwise, it's time to ignore them, or defy them with everything you've got.

ManagementSpeak, for example is the accepted convention.  Wikipedia explains that:
Corporate jargon, variously known as corporate speakcorporate lingobusiness speakbusiness jargonmanagement speakworkplace jargon, or commercialese, is the jargon often used in large corporationsbureaucracies, and similar workplaces.[1][2] It may be characterised by sometimes-unwieldy elaborations of common English phrases, acting to conceal the real meaning of what is being said. It is contrasted with plain English.
Readers of TheHackerCIO will recognize this as the  language of the Bloated Behemoth Enterprise. One of many pathologies found there.

This one has to be opposed with everything you've got. Why? Because it has evil purposes: dishonesty, evasion, pretense, concealment of truth, deliberate confusion to distract, or at best, a lack of candor, openness, or transparency.

And one of the most pernicious effects of ManagementSpeak is the nearly universal impact on resumes:

  • Boilerplate is mandatory. 
  • Never use a personal pronoun. 
  • Only 3rd person. 
  • Use acronyms to blast the brain. 
  • Ungrammatical Bullet points describing accomplishments which never even feature a subject, but start off with a verb, such as
    • Analyzed requirements with end users
                     instead of
    • I analyzed and discussed requirements and features with key users.
  •  Then, since the result is so mind-stultifying, no more than 2 pages of that, thank you very much.


What brought this to mind was that I applied for a job. The e-submission had a check box for a free resume evaluation, so I unchecked that box, having no desire for more spam to deal with. Naturally, the software ignored my selection and the next morning I had my free evaluation. I immediately clicked the link to unsubscribe, and haven't been troubled again, luckily.

But ...

I read their "eval." ; and it was evil.

They wanted $300 to fix these problems:
1. It was too long.
2. It had a personal pronoun.
3. There were deceitful ways to as they put it "minimize," short term assignments.

Needless to say, TheHackerCIO isn't coughing up hundreds of bucks to get his resume into conventional shitform. But he has been acutely aware that rewrite-time was nearing. Now I just have to do it. Starting as soon as I post this, I'll be doing a full top-to-bottom rewrite.

Contrarian resume is coming. I'm going to be 100 percent grammatical, spelling out the first person for every one of my many accomplishments. It's all about me, as indeed it should be, being my resume, so "I" and "me" are going to be a major element. (I'll report here later with the final count, so be sure to check back here in a couple of days. UPDATE 2014-05-02: I counted at least 60 instances of self-reference, including I, Me, I'll, I'd, and so forth. ) I also will pay no attention to length at all. I will only concern myself with showcasing relevant experience. If I fall one word over to another page, that's the way it's going to be distributed. If it takes 10 pages, so be it. I'm going to highlight my short-term projects, as well, by explaining that the instability was the clients, not mine. I might even mention that I resent them for it.

In short it's going to be fresh, honest, clear, relevant, personal, non-deceitful. It's going to be a blast to write it.

Never yield to evil. It leaves a bad taste. And you won't find happiness that way...

I Remain,

TheHackerCIO