July 23rd, 2005
by Tim Cull
So I’m sure this has been commented on before, but I am truly stunned at the level of resume inflation going on out there.
I’ve been around long enough now to go through a dozen or so hiring cycles and every single time, in boom time and bust, I’ve seen piles of inflated resumes come through the door. Usually there’s a strong correlation between people who suck and people who have the most inflated resumes. In fact, there’s almost a linear relationship between suckiness and inflatedness.
Consequently, I’ve learned to spot inflated resumes fairly quickly in a phone screen and I make an inflated resume an automatic “pass”, even if the candidate might have been otherwise qualified if they’d told the truth. Unfortunately, that means I have to pass on quite a few people before I can find someone to bring in for an interview. But I’m going to have to rely on the person I hire to give me the full story on projects, some of which might be going badly and might be just as high-pressure as trying to find a job. If they can’t tell the truth on a resume, how will they tell the truth reporting progress on a project that’s fallen way behind?
So given my approach, an approach I’m sure I share with many hiring managers the world over, I’ve been stunned recently to come across some resumes of people I’ve worked with closely in the past and who have completely mis-represented their roles back then. Some of them were indeed people who weren’t very good, but some of them are people I thought were very good and highly recommend.
What does that mean? Does it mean there’s such an automatic expectation for inflatedness built into the general hiring atmosphere that you can’t get an interview unless your resume says you walk on water and have served as a technical architect on 4 different billion-dollar projects at the same time? Am I an anachronism?
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July 21st, 2005
by Tim Cull
So I’m vying for a different position at work that’s much more technical than my current pure managerial job. In preparation, I’m brushing up on J2EE stuff, in particular EJBs, which I haven’t touched in more than 3 years.
It’s fairly complicated! Now I’m remembering what I didn’t like about EJBs in the first place. One thing that is a relief is seeing the fairly universal recognition that entity EJBs are a bad idea and course-grained session beans are better. Not too surprising that having your business objects expose fine-grained, remote interfaces was a bad idea, performance-wise. And other frameworks like Hibernate do a better job with object-relational mapping and persistence.
Ok, back to reading…
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July 10th, 2005
by Tim Cull
So I just made my first contribution to an open source project
at SourceForge.
It’s a small one, but I’m quite proud of it nonetheless. Now I’m on an open source tear, looking to replace all the code we have at work with as much open source as possible.
I’ve always used open source stuff, but I’ve never approached it with the attitude that it’s changeable. But now I’ve developed an attitude that open source code is basically just a good starting point, and I can modify it myself as I please to make it do what I want. I think it will almost always be faster to understand a well-written existing system than write one from scratch myself, and this way I can do just the interesting stuff, which to me is stuff nobody’s done before. That and when we hire new developers there’s some chance they’ll already be familiar with the system, whereas with 100% home grown you’re guaranteed to have to train them from the beginning.
I would love to take our compliance system and release it into the world as an open source project. Systems you have to purchase cost nearly $1 million a year in licensing fees, and the technical problem they solve is nearly the easiest there is. The hard part is coming up with the rules you want to test in order to ensure compliance with the law.
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