Resume woes
So my team wants a "Flex and AIR rawkstar". Someone to fly in, throw down an app or two, revolutionize our development mythologies*, but looking through these resumes, I wonder if such a person exists. This is my first chance to be a part of the hiring process from the other side. And if nothing else, I've learned some great tips for building my own resume. I skipped the list of "technologies and stuff I know". People are listing Flex 3, then in their experience they don't mention ever writing a line of code. Writing CFCs and business logic for a site with a Flex front end doesn't mean you can put Flex on your resume. So I skip right to the experience sections.
One resume says "Worked with CFQUERY, CFUPDATE, and CFSTORED PROC for database manipulation". What about CFSET and CFBEER? Yeah, we skipped that one. And yes, there's a space in cfstored proc, apparently. "Used CFTry CFCatch to trap errors..." more tags in the resume. Say that you wrote in explicit error handling, don't say how you did it.
"Wrote modules for header and footer templates and called them all over the site using CFInclude". Okay, for real, stop capitalizing tags like that. Including a header/footer is sooooo trivial. Reading this in the resume makes me think "they think that's impressive? buh bye"
How many years of experience do you say you have for each bit of technology? I worked on Oracle for 9 months, but haven't touched it in 3 years. I've been using CF primarily just to talk between Flex and SQL Server for two years, but have been using it in some fashion for almost 7 years.
The CONSTANT misspellings are killer. It's "ColdFusion", it hasn't been "Cold Fusion" since version 2 and was never "Coldfusion" nor "Cold fusion". 4 years ago I went through a contract house and my agent went through my resume highlighting things and messed up a lot of my technical terms like this. I'll blame those agent-types, but they need to stop, they're making their client look like they don't know what they're working with.
Another resume lists off a half dozen sites s/he** worked on, that's good. But they're all extranets that require login to do or see anything. Don't include links to those.
References to internal systems...? If I said on my resume "Streamlined interfaces to VIDS", would you hire me? Now if I say "Streamlined interfaces to company's internal chargeback and budgeting system", maybe.
DO NOT MENTION FRONT PAGE!!! If you're a real web developer, you don't use Front Page. You never used Front Page. You hate Front Page and are glad it's dead. You can't say "Front Page" without spitting on the ground. Do you design web applications in Word, too? Saying "Designed and developed user interfaces with Front Page" is like "Preformed brain surgery with Playskool's Little Doctor tools". Maybe you can remove the tumor, but imagine the gory mess you'll make.
Include a web site link to your example work. And if it's a locked down site, take screen shots of what you can. I was really impressed with one resume that included a link to the guy's site. But then I go to the site and it's basically a slide show of index pages of, I would guess, site's he's touched. I don't know, it's just the slide show. No other links or text.
*That was a typo, but it works, I'll keep it
**Only one of the 10 resumes here have Anglo-Saxon names. I can't pronounce them, much less know if it's male or female. Nothing at all against Indian developers, but I'm already imagining a strong language barrier.


http://dyingstar.com/dstar/portfolio.cfm
...gah, dyingstar really stinks now, should work on that some day...
Regarding the spelling of "ColdFusion," version 3.0 was the last version to have a space in the name "Cold Fusion." Here's some product images..
http://www.bloginblack.de/images/geschi1.jpg
http://www.bloginblack.de/images/geschi2.jpg
http://www.bloginblack.de/images/geschi3.jpg
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0789718103.01.MZ...
Bangalore Adobe Team is also a part of the Development of the Great ColdFusion 8, Upcoming Centaur, Flex 3, Gumbo etc products of Adobe. Do you want anything more for India Developers ability...Murloc?
Since you think you will have a language barrier with Indian developers then why are you looking peoples from India? Because you can pay less for them and want to get more work done hmm...My Suggestion is better to go with your country peoples and enjoy their names and you can easily identify whether they are male or female.
Do you have a link to this Job Description you speak of? Where are you advertising for resumes?
DW
I have worked a few contracts and I feel guilty when I can't pronounce an indians persons name. For me it's a respect thing. Trust me you should hear the things that people say when they say my name and I'm Italian. But Murloc is correct in every point he made in his post. Granted Bangalore Adobe team created all these applications and I enjoy using them but when it comes to completing a project, if I don't understand what you are saying then that prevents me from understanding where the project is headed or what features I am working on. Sometimes indian people talk a little fast. They don't relax and slow down their speech and I think I am listening to a record backwards but that is my own interpretation.
From the calls I constantly get on a daily basis from recruiters(even when I'm not looking), I think my resume is pretty good but I know there is always something new to learn and to constantly improve my skills means I constantly have to improve my resume.
I am amazed Frontpage is even mentioned on a resume these days Murloc. I don't think I ever used it except for one contract and told them I was all set after first day if they didn't get Dreamweaver and they were next door to the Macromedia offices in Newton.
...it's like asking a programmer, "what kind of experience do you have writing applications?", and having them respond,
"Well, I've used the ++ and -- operators..."
REALLY? WOW. IT BOGGLES THE MIND.
I totally am with you on Front Page. When I first got started doing web sites about 12 years ago, I used Front Page. I was working on a site using it and made some changes outside of FP and it nuked all the changes I made next time I loaded it up. I uninstalled it that day and have never used that horrible POS since.
It does kind of make me wonder if the objection is really the fact that they mention tags or the specific tags these guys are mentioning, because they're mentioning pretty basic stuff like cfquery. Would you have the same impression if they mentioned using the getHTTPRequestData() function or the cfassociate tag? Both of those are more obscure and generally only used for advanced techniques.
I'm not asking to be critical -- I'm just curious. :)
Love the comments about FrontPage btw. :)
@Dan - The request for resumes went out directly just to contract houses and to my knowledge isn't listed on any sites. If you're interested in the wording of it, or know of someone that would be interested, you can email me directly. It's a 4-ish month contract in Detroit, MI. There might be some option to work remotely if you're a real rawkstar.
@Ashok - For this position we're only dealing with Michigan and nation-wide contract houses and (almost) everyone they've given us is Indian. Well I can't say that... Maybe "non-American born sounding". I was **not at all** my point to say anything negative about the abilities of an Indian person or team, I made sure to clarify that. The problem is the communication. Seeing a candidate with a very unfamiliar name makes me think "How well do they speak/read English?" But if the name is Brian Smith I might think "How well can this code?" I hadn't thought of it before just now, but that is racist to think differently based on a name. But also if two developers have exactly the same skill, I'd rather have the English native.
@Alfio - You're right, it's embarrassing to not be able to pronounce the name on the phone interview or to have to ask him to repeat himself constantly. In a phone interview today the first thing my manager asked was "how do you pronounce your name?" and he slightly mispronounced it slightly the whole time. The guy's name is Hari and he was saying Harry.
@ike - Good question... While it might catch someone's eye to see tags or functions of any level, it leaves others wondering why you'd go into specific detail about something. If I'd seen someone with cfassociate, I certainly wouldn't have been as harsh as when I saw cfquery.
Overall, this whole experience has me wanting to put some real time into my resume. Thanks for all the feedback!