Are Resumes Silly?

When it comes to job hunting, especially in the US, but I'm sure elsewhere as well, the key is writing a good resume.

And, boy, are there opinions on writing resumes. So, here's the deal. A company is looking to hire. They want to make a decision quickly. If there were a way to put a number or several numbers, much like SAT scores, that was reliable, companies would prefer that. The numbers might be, say, personality, ingenuity, diligence. Or something.

Instead, we get resumes. This is a spewing of skills, education, etc., that are meant to showcase a person's skills/talents, except that some people are picky about details that may, in the end, not matter.

Here's some advice that people offer when writing resumes. First, if you're recently graduated, put your GPA, if it's good. This one is at least easy enough, and has some value to some employers. It's the one number that people could begin to make comparisons.

I'll list out other stuff that you're supposed to put for a software developer since that's what's familiar to me. First, there's the laundry list of programming languages. People put a list down. Great. But you self-evaluate, and there's no one to tell you how good you are at programming each of those languages. So, someone who is good may look like someone who is average.

And what does it mean to be good at programming anyway? There's familiarity with the language. A person can know the ins and outs and subtle nuances of a language. That's useful. Presumably, they can learn additional libraries? But sometimes there are problems that require an intimate knowledge of hardware, of AI, of really difficult math. In that case, that deep knowledge of a programming language knowledge may not be worth that much except that if you can master a language's intricacies, you might be the kind of person whose willing to dig deep in arcane stuff.

How about grammar? That's always one people pick on. Bad grammar equals bad employees. This is one of the silly ones people use and the use it because they want something--anything--to weed someone out. They claim "oh, it's easy to find someone who will clean up the grammar of a resume". Well, if that's the case, then it shouldn't be worth so much, right? And yet people nitpick because that's what you're supposed to do on a resume.

How about length? Some people don't want to wade through pages of a resume. I guess that's fair. But is two pages enough?

The one thing about a resume most people like is that they write it themselves. This makes introverts and extroverts somewhat equal. The ideal way to write the resume isn't that ideal. This is to let a few other people write it for you. The problem is that this might favor a person who can bully someone else to write it for them. And if this were truly done, we'd discover that many people really aren't all that qualified for their jobs. Resumes are an attempt to hide that from most everyone else.

In the software development industry, maybe 10% are truly outstanding. Maybe 20% more are pretty good. These numbers I'm completely making up with some hope they resemble the truth. The remaining folks are mediocre. But the industry requires folks, and they do a reasonable enough job.

For example, I play tennis. I play much better than a lot of people because most people simply don't play. But I'm sure I can find lots of people better than me. And even the number 1 player in most high school girl's teams would wallop me, even from teams that suck. And they don't compare to competitive juniors, and they don't compare to pro women ranked 200 and below who don't compare to the women in the top 100 but not in the top 10 who don't compare to women in the top ten.

Meaning that the top ten are so incredibly good, at such a higher plane than everyone in the world, that it's hard to even compare them to a really good junior.

The software industry isn't quite like this, only because there's such a wide range of problems and skills one can learn, and we're not playing a simple game with simple constraints. Even so, there are likely to be either frickin geniuses or coders that crank out code so fast, so prodigiously, so intelligently, that the rest of us would be left in the dust. Some of these find themselves writing code where they can express this talent, and some, I'm sure, just do it for fun, their job requiring little of their extreme talent.

Tennis has a way to measure skill, in the broadest sense. Can you beat someone?

The work world does not have this. And in any case, we're not looking to employ the equivalent of Steffi Graf or Andre Agassi. Most companies are looking for the very good weekend hacker, who knows their stuff well, who plays smart, and wins a bit above average, and for the most part, looks like thousands of other players.

And so the work world resorts to resumes. And they build rules about what makes a resume good. And they tell people that's what they need to do. And they assume this will somehow tell the true story.

Which is why the sad reality, that personal recommendations matter more (since you can get past a person's own distorted evaluation of themselves), even as people dole out more advice on writing a better resume.