1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
It's frustrating for the participants, but typically for these "internship programs for disadvantaged students", future employers will not treat it as equivalent to a regular internship.
That includes the company that runs the internship. In my large tech company experience, usually the entire "internship for disadvantaged students" program led to zero job offers.
Honestly, it might be a good idea to avoid those programs entirely. You often don't get to work on "real problems" while you're there. The program exists for PR much more than to give you useful experience.
That said, I don't have experience with this specific program, so this might not fit the archetype.
That's what it says on paper but that's not reality. If you are asian you are suddenly not disadvantaged even if you are an immigrant. It is just legal racism.
The fact that employers even get to play games like this tells you a lot about our current situation ironically.
"Disadvantaged" is not something that is defined purely by race (atleast in the UK) The key factors that are considered in your university application are all pretty much pure contextual factors IE; income, poor academic performance family history of higher education etc..
If you are of Asian descent in the UK the biggest factors to determine if your going to get into a program like this is not your skin color. Its an evaluation of you and your family's history and providing ascent to people less fortunate.
You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless).
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
I'm not sure if this is a good approach or not.. but I've started just exploding my resume out, then feeding it to an LLM to create a job-specific version a few times... I'll edit the job-specific version a bit, which does cut things down.
I don't know it's helped or hurt, as I've only gotten a response from about 1:50 that I sent out before or since I made the shift and I know the job market sucks.
I still need to flush out some of the prior jobs in terms of older history, projects and accomplishments. I've done a lot of contract work in 6-12 month segments in the past three decades... It's kind of wild to look back on the shear variety, scale, scope and size of some of the things I've done and worked on.
At this point, I'm not sure if it's luck, ageism or just the number of short stints in my past... but It's a weird feeling in recent job market that I haven't felt in decades. 5 years ago, it felt like I was being overwhelmed when I wasn't even looking... today it's a mess.
Last time I was job hunting I did something similar: Write out everything I've done, even "silly" things like Haskell knowledge from uni, then comment out everything not relevant to a job until my resume fits on 2 pages. My Latex Template made this much quicker than it sounds, maybe ~10 minutes per application (and 10+ hours to create the CV itself...).
Two issues I see that haven't been mentioned yet:
1. A lot of companies, especially startups, are fake job advertising. They want to look like they are growing, and they might hire a golden goose, but many job ads I saw just stay up for months or even years.
2. A lot of companies, especially large ones, are using AI to pre-screen CVs. So you now have to get through AI, then HR, then a technical manager, each with their own sets of requirements. I've played around with some of the HR AIs, they tend to be quite... superficial. To give one example from the CV above:
> Ran small A/B tests and collected human-in-the-loop safety ratings to calibrate thresholds and escalation rules.
Is a perfectly good sentence, but according to AI should be:
> Optimized escalation rules and safety thresholds by conducting A/B test collecting human-in-the-loop safety ratings, reducing false-positive escalations by 15%.
Put your achievement first? Good. Strike out verbs like 'small'? Fair, it is a sales situation. Make up numbers entirely to provide a 'quantifiable result'? Complete crap. But it seems to be what every HR bot really wants to see, so now you have to sprinkle it in and hope it gets you past the bot, and doesn't make the technical manager think you're a complete charlatan.
It's that second one that I'm trying to actually work around by using AI to generate the trimmed down version. I just haven't taken the time to pull open some of the really old versions of my resume to flush out the history and to expand on older projects yet.
The whole process just seems to suck all around. As much as I never liked filtering through a stack of hundreds of resumes as a senior member in a time hiring, being on this side of the wall is even less fun.
I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
> I think use the time to network with real people
It kinda doesn't work these days. One of the points of DEI was to eliminate the nepotism hiring (and it's kinda good if the hiring wasn't so broken), so these days referrals don't mean shit unless you're referred by someone high-ranked enough.
I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
I was auto rejected from a publicly traded company through internal referral because I applied to a remote position. My friend told me the recruiter told her that position wasn’t available to SF residents, only engineers in LCOL areas.
My experience is completely the opposite, every quick hire is a referral, jobs constantly ask for and bonus for referrals. The higher up the position the more it matters that you have a warm introduction.
Agree. The big public traded companies might be different but if a business owner thinks you can solve their problem and that will gain them more money than you ask for it is very easy to get hired
Just saying "referrals are worthless" or "referrals are useful" doesn't mean much without specifying the type of referral. Obviously if you're talking directly to a hiring manager who's willing to bypass HR, it's much likelier you'll end up with a job than if you're talking to someone who sees an open position on another team and says he'll flag your resume on their ATS if you apply.
> I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
Yes. But not always. Getting an internal referral helps somewhere between not at all and a lot. And it is pretty random, nothing to do with you. Just a matter of timing and attention span and where other candidates are in the queue.
However, it never hurts. So overall, don't expect networking and referrals will get you the job, but do expect it to help every now and then. So it is worth spending some time on that.
I haven't found this to be the case as much. Posted a job, got 100 applications, at least 10 had referrals. 10 is manageable for me to sift through but not the win the applicant thought. More than that, I found a colleague had a whole google form process to farm out referrals.
Bonuses. Usually there is no penalty for failed referrals, so the more people they refer, the more likely someone gets hired and sticks around long enough for the bonus.
That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above.
As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.
I think you need to find one of those people collectors. I know one of them, and I could ask him to introduce me to somebody with <insert skill/interest> and he'll know somebody within a hundred miles.
I've made six figure revenue over the course of the past 5 years from introductions to new clients through a "people collector". Definitely a great person to have in your network!
I wonder how hard it is to become such a person. Just start telling people you're looking to be one, and I imagine they'll give you their business card in case you manage to become one and they need you in the future.
I think it's a personality trait. He actually enjoys talking to dozens of people every day. He's friends with pretty much all the professors at the local uni because he turned up to random events as a student, and somehow he met a director level person at my company at the dry cleaners and they have regular catch-ups. he keeps a notebook of small facts about everybody in his network. COVID lockdowns were devastating for him.
In contrast, my Dunbar number is about 5. I need a few days to calm down from meeting new people. I can't imagine putting in the effort that he does in collecting people. COVID lockdown was a welcome break for me.
I hope I eventually manage to stumble into one of these. I honestly didn't know they had matchmakers for the corporate world. Since most of my connections are within my age group, most people I know are in a similar situation to me and also have most of their network feed back inward to other similar people. Finding someone like this seems pretty unlikely.
he's a lot younger than me, and he was doing it as soon as he started uni. I think it's a personality trait, although of course he spent time on improving the skill.
I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.
My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.
As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true?
Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.
If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.
Hey, I’ve done recruiting since 2005. Here’s the most basic advice I can give you. It’s much more important to have stuff to put on your resume than is it to obsess over how the resume is formatted. Showing what you’ve done and what you can do in the goal. What I typically do for myself is focus on quality over quantity, and then stuff in a few extra keywords relevant to the kind of job I’m targeting.
I've had an interviewer give me resume advice that I implement, then the next interviewer tells me to undo what they said. Thinking about undoing the AI enhancements on mine after I saw a lot of people at a previous team using AI resumes including one that had verifiable lies.
> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels
Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.
I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.
Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!
It doesn't matter at all, if it's not enough that they have a DeepMind internship the rest are just trivia and details. People get hung up on details when they REALLY are just not interested in hiring.
No one rejects candidates based on the color of their shirt if they really need said candidate.
That is the point of OP's article yes, that and the idea that being "out of distribution" is increasingly important. This, mentioning his unique qualities (e.g. a Deep Mind internship) and not his similar qualities (everything else) would probably be pertinent
Eveyone needs to hire juniors, it's how seniors get made. Management thinks they're smart and have found a shortcut to save money, but it's only going to lead to degregation of skill at the senior level as well as raise the amount of money people that truly operate at a senior level can demand. I've already seen both happen where I work.
In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.
That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood. It's a bad situation for both employers and candidates but there doesn't seem to be any practical alternative.
But then you're making it even worse by hiring inexperienced HR staff to do your hiring? Who mostly make their hiring decisions on whether they would want to have sex with a candidate.
> That happened because online job sites made it so easy for candidates to apply that hiring managers could no longer personally keep up with the flood.
Yes, this is a big factor. As an actively hiring manager, there's nothing worse than when HR enables receiving resumes through linkedin apply. We got a flood of many thousands of resumes. While I feel a duty to review them all, it's just flat out impossible so I had to skip most of them without reading.
On my most recent hire I'm glad HR stopped that and required people to file through the company website. Volume was reduced to many hundreds, which is more tractable. I still wasn't able to review them all, but at least a much higher percentage, like 60% instead of 2%
Resumes will be increasingly fake, at the same rate. We're already seeing this. Recently interviewed a guy clearly using AI interview cheating tools, which is much higher barrier and risk than just making up shit on your resume.
Ok - this obviously doesn't work everywhere but recently was flown to a city for an interview. Day long, full loop, 5 45 min interviews + 1 working session with a panel. Had dinner with the team the night before.
There's no way to cheat at that point. You either have what they need (yay btw) or its not a fit
Though honestly 40 years ago, sending out hundreds of cookie cutter applications by post wasn’t that hard.
I do agree that once someone gets through an initial filter and screen they should be willing to meet in person. That has costs on both sides but, during the tech boom, one heard a lot of complaints by applicants that they’re no going to travel for interviews, dinner, etc. <shrug>
When I graduated from college in 2013, the common advice was to keep your resume to one printed page. Because people realized that job applications were all online and people rarely handled physical resumes anymore, that advice started to shift to "you can go onto a second page, if it is warranted." (My personal opinion at the time was that if an employer wasn't willing to expend a staple on my resume, then they probably won't worth working for).
I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).
Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.
Matches my experience. 2 page resume is standard for senior careers, everything below should be 1 page. The reason is simple: I'm evaluating if you are able to summarize the most important points for how you're fitting into this role into a very limited space. This is a important skill that transfers to many other areas and isn't obvious just by looking at the extensive list of your degrees and job positions. I trashed applications for the sole reason when i felt that the applicant missed the whole point of why i'm reading their resume. Yet some hiring folks may prefer it the other way around so it's also a cultural fit filter in some way.
No idea about small companies but FAANG companies get > 1 million resume submission a year. You need to take that into account, the recruiters and other people in the chain do not have time to read your essay.
> I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?
No it didn't. Established (older) people saw it as their duty to help the younger generation become a part of the team. Today's older generation have nothing but hate and resentment against the young, and nobody considers themselves as having even the slightest duty towards younger generations. Maybe for their own family members, but usually not even that.
I agree but then the reality is that we are here now, so it's no longer ridiculous. So if you are that brilliant, you understand that there is no point of fighting the current, so to make your life easier and to get the job where you can feel fulfillment, you might have to adjust your CV to fit the reality. That is a part of the intelligence you need to adapt and has always been.
Buddy, the amount of people these days with MASTER’S degrees that can’t even communicate via 2-3 (short) paragraph email exchanges… yep, it can be rough out there.
He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.
In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.
Resumes are normally tailored for the role. The CV is the raw source you use to tailor them. It's a little strange to have a blanket "resume" available for public perusal.
It would be weirder for that blanket resume to be accompanied by posts about how much your wedding taught you about b2b saas sales with your photo, location, and a list of all the people you met through work and are willing to say you're connected to.
I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.
It's not the formatting, it's the content. A resume that tells me what I need to know without a bunch of extra fluff vs an essay tells me about the author's priorities and it'll be a deciding factor when you have hundreds of applications to go through.
People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were.
As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.
OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.
There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.
It is less about the content and more about the design. It is hard to skim. Recruiters receive thousands of resumes and need to be able to get the key points at a glance, and I just don't feel this design effectively works toward that goal. Everything's there if you spend the time to read all of it, yes, but a resume's goal is often to get someone to notice it fast - not to convince someone after a long leisurely read.
If someone wants to use keywords as a screening mechanism for resumes, they don't need a human recruiter to do that, and some automated tool is perfectly able to parse keywords. You could over-index your resume on the prospect that there's a human recruiter as the first screening mechanism and that recruiter is going through every resume and skimming for keywords, yet isn't very good at identifying relevant keywords quickly, but it's a relatively meaningless micro-optimization overall. Keep in mind they were able to get multiple internships before with presumably the same resume structure, so it's already proven to work well enough.
It's like the old progressive JPEGs or GIFs where the first few kilobytes were enough to render the whole image at a lower resolution and the rest just filled in the detail.
That's what you need to get through ATS. Resumes are for HR. Unless specifically asked (or e.g. directly emailing someone around here) save the fireworks for the interview.
> 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.
I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40).
Yeah, just increasing the font size of the section headers 4 pts and the lines with the job titles 2 pts would do wonders. Maybe also put the locations in italic and decrease the line spacing around the location lines.
But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.
His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight.
I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.
Ad 2.): I finished college in a good economy and got a job with less then perfect resume. When we have been hiring in good economy, again, we hired people with bad resumes. We gave them a chance cause we needed people and everyone was hiring. They seemed ok during interview and turned out to be good employees.
My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed.
When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.
In the US-centric perspective: Most forms of higher-education leave out fundamental job skills graduates need to be successful in the business world. Résumé writing, project management, time management, and team leadership should be covered.
Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.
The last thing we need is to teach people how to do things as they are already done, instead of giving them something that can be used to generate something new. And management skills can’t be taught anyway.
With this in mind, I'd like to propose an alternative to OP. E.g. he may be extremely unlucky in the following 7 months in his job hunt, and tech is not what it used to be.
If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).
As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.
Depends what you’re writing about. The chicken xianxia is something like $10k/mo, a Friren-inspired fic is a whopping 30k (and like 3mo old from a complete unknown), and Dungeon Crawler Carl has fully broken out into mainstream.
“Fun” things do seem to be making money, and if they hit a nerve they seem to be wildly successful.
I don't know the most polite way to tell you that you're demonstrating an almost textbook example of survivorship bias. There are 300 million people in the United States and 8 billion in the world, it's trivial to find individual examples of people making a solid living in almost any career you could conceivably imagine, and in many you couldn't.
You're going on the "Writers getting paid" website and sorting by most paid. That's like looking at the top 10 NBA salaries and saying "Basketball players seem to be making money, and if they're good at the game they seem to be wildly successful"
And, notably, a wildly successful writer makes $120,000 a year. So, you know, the same as any employed coder with more than like a year or two of experience. And that's the very highest echelons of a famously incredibly competitive, rapidly shrinking field, with fewer real jobs than probably anything else not also considered an "art" of some sort.
Yes, survivorship bias is probably happening here; but I’m not doing anything like “sorting by paid”. Each of these authors I discovered “organically”; generally through Reddit or Royal Road, any many I’ve been following (on Patreon!) since before they started making $$.
From what I can tell on RR+P; if you write a decent story regularly (or a tremendous story occasionally) you can make some money. If you then also strike a nerve with the audience, you can make a lot.
The resume design is incredibly poor. It’s a 90% likely instant reject from me just from the resume. It looks like a resume from someone who does not know what they are doing. How hard is it to copy a resume template from google, seriously…
20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on.
I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.
It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.
The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.
Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?
1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.
2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.