* Has a graphic which must be interpreted simply to find the last few projects the candidate worked on.
* Uses a proportional diagram scheme that is (a) worse than pie charts (an achievement) and (b) requires a color coded legend to illustrate the simple clause: "[Project Name]: Rails, CSS, jQuery".
* Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned".
* Attempts a comparative analysis of experience with different tools both as a "developer" and a "designer" without explaining the significance of either term; what's a "Photoshop CS5 Developer" or a "Textmate Designer"?
* Or is the blue "frequency" and the orange "expertise"? Why is the graphic laid out so that the cutesy venn diagram looks like a color key?
* Spends something like 1/3 of the real estate of the graphic on an almost entirely uninteresting attribute of the candidate (what terminal she uses, what text editor she uses, what browsers [seriously.] she uses). Designers can be expected to know Photoshop. Nobody cares about your editor.
* I have no idea what the subway-map illustration of command line tools and web services even means; the impression I get is, "this person will add baffling complexity to things in order to avoid boredom". Whoah, where do I sign?
* Extraordinarily inefficient representation of the candidate's Rails experience; a simple resume would lead with "Rails developer with over 5 years experience" instead of burying the lede in another cutesy picture.
* No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school, the age you were when you coded your first website, or what platforms you tech-supported in school, and yet that material consumes more visual weight than the number of years the candidate has doing Rails development.
Resume tip. Here is the terrible thing about spending time on your resume pointing out your favorite dog breed or color-coding your choice of text editors: people with real accomplishments would never, ever do that, because they only have two pages of heavily-bulleted text to convey those accomplishments in. What you say with a resume like this is, "I hope someday to have major accomplishments" --- whether that's true or not.
It's not just that infographics are a crappy format for resumes (and, they simply are.). It's that this is not a good infographic. In fact, since we're all so familiar with resumes here, it's actually a really good example of the problem with all the cheesy infographics that have been floating around for the past year.
The blogger who highlighted this "graphical resume" did a disservice to the person who created it; I have no doubt the author is an totally reasonable human being who sends normal resumes to people when resumes are what's called for.
Sorry, this is not your type then. I would definitely spend some more time to look into the applicant.
Yes, for pure coders, this is a terrible resume. It looks like she is using the right side of the brain for something left-sided. But, that's the point.
How many coders do you know can show an interest in both design and code (same for designers)? To have an aptitude and interest in both code and design is something very hard to find, and to be able to express the fusion of the two is a challenging process for many who are aching to stretch the boundary set by text heavy, information-only resumes that do not communicate nearly what you want it to. (How much design skill, creativity, and passion can you communicate with just information?)
Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.
For what its worth though, I do think the graphs are a little hard to read but not hard to navigate, especially if I'm looking for a particular skill to hire for. Its easy to see if she has Ruby skills, for instance - but its hard to see the overall picture of what skills she has without spending a lot of time on it.
> Yes, for pure coders, this is a terrible resume. It looks like she is using the right side of the brain for something left-sided.
Urgh... I really hate to go into rant mode because I know what you're trying to say isn't really relevant to this. However, as an incredibly right-brained person who is a good programmer (or so I like to think :-) and has absolutely zero design skill, I'm always a bit annoyed by this. The whole "right-brained people are creative artists, left-brained people are engineers and scientists" is a 3 or 4 decade old view of how the brain works. Yes, the left brain tends to be a bit more textual while the right brain tends to be more visual, but that doesn't mean that right-brained skills aren't useful to coders or that left-brained people don't have design skills. And even if it did, people can still tap into the other side of their brain.
tptacek did an excellent job of explaining it for you already. It sounds a bit like you are thinking of design as "making things pretty", and it's not. It's about communication.
The message this resume is communicating is that the author also feels that design is just about ornamentation, and the only way it could be more obvious is if the diagram were in the shape of a giant duck. I have to assume she doesn't actually believe that, not least since she hasn't asked for us to psychoanalyse her and it's really, really unfair to try to do so based on this completely decontextualised link. But even so, the design seems unsuccessful to me because it's communicating the wrong message.
Design is about communication, but it does not exclude ornamentation. Design can be ornamental (if the purpose of the resume is to highlight some design skill), however it should not reduce the readability of data as this one does.
Having just read "The visual display of quantitative information" I have this to say to the designer of the resume: remove non-data ink. Increase data density and readability. Especially readability.
I understand why it might not be a great resume, but what about the design. The Previous Work tree diagram is sort of neat, in text form the info that it conveys might be even harder to understand.
It's a bad design because it does a bad job framing the contents. It doesn't solve a problem, instead it creates several. It took me several times longer to figure out her resume than it does for a standard one, not to mention that I still came away not knowing several things that I would need to know.
As it stands, all I can say about her is that she has decent mastery of Photoshop but no understanding of good design.
> I would definitely spend some more time to look into the applicant.
So would I.
> Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.
She'd also probably be good at doing design / front-end parts of a website while communicating with back-end developers (who might be doing algorithm optimisation).
I expect she'd be good at talking to designers from a coders point of view too.
>Its easy to see if she has Ruby skills, for instance - but its hard to see the overall picture of what skills she has without spending a lot of time on it.
One can take her resume idea even further and create a CV in an interactive form, so it could meet everyones needs.
The issue of thinking in pictures versus words has always interested me. Wiki says[1] 30% of us are explicitly picture thinkers, 25% think in words and the rest combine both methods. Most entrepreneurs (not sure about the ones dealing with start-ups) tend to drift towards the right, because it's usually easier to generalize your idea by visualizing it, rather than coming to a logical conclusion by using words only. Which, I think, would be slower in this case. So, how come are most (if not all?) of the current cv-websites featuring only long walls of text?
Because all of what you said about how we think has nothing to do with the informational density of the two formats. Words trump pictures for complex ideas.
But isn't "maker of beautiful things" what designer/developers are really aspiring to? And in light of that, isn't recognizing the division just as silly as drawing a venn diagram with yourself in the middle?
I'd suspect anyone who calls themselves a designer/developer is probably good at other things to, like writing, designing meaningful infographics, and playing the resume game with subtlety.
I think this misses the point. There is enough to talk about in this resume that it got bumped up to the #1 spot on HN. The likelihood that there are many people reading HN who might have a suitable job prospect for someone competent in ROR and JavaScript is quite high. While Jamie will not be landing an alpha-developer gig at Google with this resume, the chance that she would find a good fit for her skill-set is high.
If I posted my resume with two pages of bulleted accomplishments to HN, it would be met with a deafening thud.
No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school
I'm not sure about that. When I interviewed at Google, everybody seemed very impressed that I finished half my Honours degree before I graduated from high school at age 17. I had far more questions about my experience with concurrent high school and university than I did about doing my doctorate at Oxford.
But on the broader point, I absolutely agree -- if I was looking to hire someone, this would get an immediate reaction of "this takes way too much work to comprehend; trash it and move on to the next candidate".
You have an anomalous school story. Feel free to revise my recommendation if you are some kind of crazy child prodigy and you think it's going to help you to point that out.
Maybe things are different in the US, but "earned 64 college credits before graduating from high school" sounds pretty anomalous to me -- isn't that half a degree?
Probably not. Most "college credit" earned in US high schools is unfocused coursework that gets you out of (some of) your general-ed requirements. Lots of universities won't even transfer the stuff, and if they do, it's not typically treated as real college credit.
Aside from that, thanks to the prevalence of AP courses it's much easier (and more common) for high school kids to get college credits today. It's definitely not as impressive as it used to be, and citing the number of credits earned as if it were some kind of score is silly, at best. It's the sort of thing you brag about when you have nothing real to brag about.
Aha, quite different from Canada, then. Up here it's unusual for students to get any college credit while in high school, and when it happens it's typically no more than 10-15 credits of AP or IB credits.
Yeah, that's what it was like in the US 10-15 years ago. AP courses were still pretty new/unique when I was in high school, but these days they're as common as clubs or intramural sports.
One thing I hate about bragging about that sort of thing is that it's (unfortunately) more of a reflection on the quality of the high school you attended than it is on your character. The best students at the worst high schools in the US don't have the same access to AP courses as the average student at the best high schools.
Actually, this is true. If I look just one district over, the math level stopped somewhere around Trig. I think. For my cousins who lived just a few hours away, again, the schools didn't offer much. I think that there is something to be said for taking advantage of the opportunities that are provided to you--but we should be aware of the impact of luck in determining what opportunities we are presented with....
With that having been said, what do suggest we can do to help out with districts with less resources? I've done a lot of outreach, but it often feels like a drop in the bucket....
I won't say it's common, but it isn't all that unusual in the US either, at least among my group of friends. I came in with only 20-something hours and was on the low end (really focued on my math, finished all the necessary credits for my Comp Sci. degree before leaving high school). A friend of mine, on the other hand, came in with just under 70 credits, but they were all the gen-ed with some upper level math thrown in. While that'd normally be a little over half a degree, she added a second major that balanced it out.
A number of my friends did this though, so I don't think it's quite as big of an accomplishment in the US than elsewhere. Though I'll be the first to admit that my group of friends tended to be the high achievers in high school/university.
I started with 48 credits and it does get the basic math and general ed requirements out of the way. That way, I could start graduate physics and math course by my 2nd year at the university....
But, we take students from some magnet schools here to intern and they're amazing (multivariate calc, AP physics, and a year of Java--before senior year. The student had worked on a team project and was commenting his code unprompted...). I invited a Canadian colleague to a group meeting where they presented what they were working on she was stunned...I think that in the US when students have opportunities, it's great--the difficulty is how to improve the average....
Washington State has had a program for decades where you can go to a community college for the last two years of high school, for free. I earned an associate's degree instead of a high school diploma.
I could truthfully say the same thing. It isn't listed on my resume because I have done things since the age of 18, too, and many of them are more impressive to a decision maker at a tech company.
At the best high school in Illinois you'd have roughly 2% of the graduating class be within shooting distance of that number, just to give you an approximation.
Correct, but it's the irrelevant half: general education and introductory courses. Also, Florida actively encourages dual enrollment, where high-school students in their 11th year begin working on an associates degree at a community college. The students picked for dual enrollment have to be decent, but the aren't exactly the cream; plus the community colleges they attend aren't very good either. It's basically a way of having something like the AP program (minus the rigor) by outsourcing the education to another school.
speaking as someone whose college education was aided by a significant amount of AP credit, this is a silly thing to brag about. Schools will vary by which AP exams they accept and how many hours they award, and I'm sure this is true about all pre-college transfer credit.
It's at least equivalent to bragging about your SAT score.
I had around 60, but was only able to effectively make use of 30 or so... maybe not even that. Extra "credits" don't really help when your major is already heavy on required courses.
Yeah, but dedication to the schooling environment and being a good employee are 2 different things really. Earning these credits might just be about cramming, I assume most of them are awarded based on exams? I've seen plenty of people preform well on set academic goals that can be gamed without actually taking much away from it. At least with college you usually have things like a software project, assignments and possibly a internship which are a bit harder to cram your way through.
It really tell you knowing abut how the employee is going to approach problems and how creative their solutions will be.
Google also has weird requirements over a candidate's schooling, more than just about any other employer I've ever seen. People with 20 years of experience get quizzed about their schooling decades before during interviews.
The question a resume should answer is "would I interview" not "would I hire." And my answer here, were I looking for a designer who is creative, who could implement designs in HTML and CSS, and who could work with Rails, would be absolutely.
She is applying for a design / developer job. This is a phenomenal resume because: it shows that she can present things attractively and, most importantly, can be creative.
Lastly, it would appear that it's interactive, but we only have a link to the static image. I think it would be a lot more appealing if you could hover and learn more.
"Has a graphic which must be interpreted simply to find the last few projects the candidate worked on."
Bug or feature? This could very well cause a potential employer to stop and spend more time on the resume, and end up getting to know more about her than the person whose first couple lines of plain text did not catch the employer's interest.
"Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned"."
To me, the single thing that popped out the most was the quotation highlighting detailed accomplishments ("incredible job managing the launch", "delivered a product", etc.).
"Or is the blue "frequency" and the orange "expertise"? Why is the graphic laid out so that the cutesy venn diagram looks like a color key?"
This absolutely does not work at all and should be scrapped.
"a simple resume would lead with "Rails developer with over 5 years experience" instead of burying the lede in another cutesy picture."
Who gives a damn about yet another "Rails developer with over five years experience"? Was that experience building anything good? Did she learn anything and get better? Did she understand the customer needs and meet them? Was the site usable? Did it perform well? Did it stay up?
There are a lot of potentially better ledes than "Rails developer with over 5 years experience".
Also, in the interactive version, I'm assuming the related experience circles "pop" for the various projects when you hover over the key. That's at least a more interesting way to examine history with a technology than the standard "list technology key words next to as many projects as possible in big wall of text" used in standard resumes.
"What you say with a resume like this is, "I hope someday to have major accomplishments""
And what's wrong with that? If this is the resume of a young person with experience but not enough to fill two pages with small font, bulleted text of major accomplishments, maybe this isn't a bad way to draw attention to yourself and get an employer to take a chance on you?
Lastly, an over-riding fact here, I think, is the "View Plaintext" link. If you were the one considering hiring her, you could have just clicked that and got all the stuff you wanted, probably.
"This could very well cause a potential employer to stop and spend more time on the resume, and end up getting to know more about her than the person whose first couple lines of plain text did not catch the employer's interest."
Or it could cause the employer to stare at the bafflingly unfamiliar format for the alloted 30 seconds and then move the application into the not-selected pile.
One of things that bug me about most resume recommendations is that it's incredibly difficult to make a truly general one. For every screener who will be impressed by your cover letter/section X/feature X there is another one who holds the exact opposite opinion, and most of the time you don't know who will be screening your application or what their preferences are. Very few of these recommendation/good resume template/excellent resume showcase posts mention this.
I think its a terrible infographic, to be sure, but I also think its good enough to stand out from a pile of resumes on the HR or hiring manager's desk. Probably good enough to get an interview out of it.
The minor design tweaks I’d make aside, it‘s creative and I love it, but having tried the creative cv route before, headhunters and/or HR always come back with “Can you send us something formatted for Word?”
"No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school, the age you were when you coded your first website, or what platforms you tech-supported in school, and yet that material consumes more visual weight than the number of years the candidate has doing Rails development."
I think this is a ridiculous statement, but we almost certainly have a different definition of what makes an employer (cough) reasonable.
My priorities in a resume read are passion, then applied intelligence, then experience. The information you're ignoring here is valuable with essentially no additional variables (doesn't matter much where they went to high school, or what the website did). How long someone I don't know paid you to write code in whatever technology is almost useless information to me.
No, he's right. It's hard enough trying to keep normal stuff to two pages without all that random stuff. My "high school" (UK secondary school), gets 1 whole line. I dropped the bit about being the top student (at GCSE) in my school years ago.
OK, I admit, I have dedicated 4 whole lines (3-5% maybe) on my C.V. to my personal interests. If I get an inexperienced interviewer who wants to make me comfortable they provide easy openers (it's cool, I'd rather get straight to business and talk about their business), and emphasise I am not my job.
I'm not even out of college, and I've already dropped the high school bit from my resume entirely. Does anyone really care what a potential hire did in high school once they've had a real job or graduated from college (save someone being an extreme outlier that completed most of their college degree in HS or what have you)?
Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned".
More broadly, I feel like "technology used" is a pretty weak indicator of how well they'll do. An applicant may have used C for 20 years and be a "C expert," but have poor application/system design sense.
Many hiring managers (and their technical staff) I've talked to lately have been only superficially interested in the technologies (languages, frameworks, etc.) I've used, and much more curious about how I go about solving problems and designing overall solutions. Several have flat-out said they're hiring smart, motivated, creative people, and are happy to train new hires on parts of their technology stack with which they're unfamiliar.
So I agree that an accomplishments-based approach might make more sense. I think it's useful to still indicate what technologies you've used, as it can show things like technical breadth, and a willingness and desire to learn new things. But, "I'm a C expert of 20 years, and I can fill in function bodies based on other people's designs like a pro," is much less impressive than, "I just started learning Ruby 3 months ago, but I designed and built Complex System from scratch with it." Sure, there's a lot of room in between those two extremes, but focusing on "technologies used" doesn't really give you much information.
I agree with your assessment, but it is an interesting try at presenting the information, and the linked png did at least have template for a link to the plain text version.
Willingness to experiment and try new things is an asset for a developer. Inability to edit oneself, or to walk away from an experiment when it has clearly failed, is a dealbreaking liability.
Infographics ON a resume, good or mediocre: OK.
Infographics AS a resume, if amazing: OK.
Infographics AS a resume, if not amazing: VERY BAD.
Seeing multiple comments of yours in here (all negative) I can't help but wonder if you have some kind of axe to grind with her?
Yes, her infographic isn't flawless. But it isn't bad either, it is in fact pretty damn good. And most certainly good enough to stand out in a pile of standard-resumes, which is about as much as it can possibly accomplish.
(a) I am definitely being very noisy on this thread. Sorry. I'm procrastinating.
(b) Instead of simply saying "you're wrong!", why not tell me some things you specifically like about this infographic as an infographic? I am seriously interested in what stories you think this graphic does a good job of telling.
For what it's worth, I reread my comments, reconciled them with the fact that I'm just here to kill time today, and zapped most of them. Thanks for calling me out for them.
It's bad infographic. It presents a lot of unnecessary info in had to parse way.
It stands out just because it is different. I quit considering being different just for the sake of being different to be a good thing long time ago.
To quote Jobs again, design is how it works. This was about how it looks. It looks OK, it works badly.
The point of a resume is to generate sufficient interest to get talking, ideally an interview but even a screening phone call is better than being ignored.
For someone who's interest is in working in design and development this is a very distinctive marketing document. Yes it could be improved, but the fact that it is attracting attention means it worked.
> Attempts a comparative analysis of experience with different tools both as a "developer" and a "designer" without explaining the significance of either term; what's a "Photoshop CS5 Developer" or a "Textmate Designer"?
It's an interpretation error, the bars indicate expertise and frequency of use (shown below).
"people with real accomplishments would never, ever do that"
One might even go further and say that "people with real accomplishments" wouldn't bother having a 'resume' (in a standard plain format) in the first place. Their work/accomplishments should speak for themselves.
I think you are ignoring what the author of the article was so impressed with - "I get exactly the information I need to make an informed decision on this person". Thats the takeaway of why this resume was so valuable to the hirer, right?
If I was hiring a programmer for a creative business though, and I didn't know too much about programming (like most employers), this would definitely set her apart for a number of reasons.
Set apart, perhaps, but not necessarily in a positive way. There are a number of parts of the resume that don't make sense - why would I care if someone uses Textmate, the technology chart is horrendously hard to understand at a glance, the subway-style bit for command-line vs. web service tools is odd, etc.
Do resumes REALLY tell you anything? This is an incredible overview of the woman. She spent quite some time on making such a resume, much more interesting and easier to read than a regular resume, shows her skills off, gets the introduction, shows which tech shes worked with.
Everything needed is there. So vuala. I think this is great. You still need an interview to get details on projects. What else can you expect? A resume that removes the need for an interview?
I guess it really depends if she is able to provide any code from her projects, the design work will be apparent just by looking up some of the sites she has worked on. Some sample code can pretty quickly give an indication of how well the resume stacks up on it's claims.
I concur. This individual could not be the serious type of employee that a serious business would seriously pursue. Matter of fact, and if I could be frank here, the candidate appears to be one of those who think outside the boundaries of normal business discourse and would be a distraction to her colleagues who spend most of their waking moments trying to to stay with the established norms and as we like to say, "not making any waves".
(Actually, in comparison to most self-declared artists out there, her work is pretty considering the limits of her experience and she read, and probably reread the memo suggesting that she get her ass on Git and by quite possibly has a Github/Gitorious/Unfuddle account where here code can be scrutinized. I'd probably hire her)
* Has a graphic which must be interpreted simply to find the last few projects the candidate worked on.
* Uses a proportional diagram scheme that is (a) worse than pie charts (an achievement) and (b) requires a color coded legend to illustrate the simple clause: "[Project Name]: Rails, CSS, jQuery".
* Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned".
* Attempts a comparative analysis of experience with different tools both as a "developer" and a "designer" without explaining the significance of either term; what's a "Photoshop CS5 Developer" or a "Textmate Designer"?
* Or is the blue "frequency" and the orange "expertise"? Why is the graphic laid out so that the cutesy venn diagram looks like a color key?
* Spends something like 1/3 of the real estate of the graphic on an almost entirely uninteresting attribute of the candidate (what terminal she uses, what text editor she uses, what browsers [seriously.] she uses). Designers can be expected to know Photoshop. Nobody cares about your editor.
* I have no idea what the subway-map illustration of command line tools and web services even means; the impression I get is, "this person will add baffling complexity to things in order to avoid boredom". Whoah, where do I sign?
* Extraordinarily inefficient representation of the candidate's Rails experience; a simple resume would lead with "Rails developer with over 5 years experience" instead of burying the lede in another cutesy picture.
* No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school, the age you were when you coded your first website, or what platforms you tech-supported in school, and yet that material consumes more visual weight than the number of years the candidate has doing Rails development.
Resume tip. Here is the terrible thing about spending time on your resume pointing out your favorite dog breed or color-coding your choice of text editors: people with real accomplishments would never, ever do that, because they only have two pages of heavily-bulleted text to convey those accomplishments in. What you say with a resume like this is, "I hope someday to have major accomplishments" --- whether that's true or not.
It's not just that infographics are a crappy format for resumes (and, they simply are.). It's that this is not a good infographic. In fact, since we're all so familiar with resumes here, it's actually a really good example of the problem with all the cheesy infographics that have been floating around for the past year.
The blogger who highlighted this "graphical resume" did a disservice to the person who created it; I have no doubt the author is an totally reasonable human being who sends normal resumes to people when resumes are what's called for.