As usual with quirky resumes, I think a lot of people are missing the point. Nobody is suggesting that we all start using rustdoc for our resumes.
It's a fun, different way of presenting a resume. The fact that it made it to the front page of HN means it worked at what it was intended to do: be seen by a bunch of prospective employers and stand out.
> Nobody is suggesting that we all start using rustdoc for our resumes.
Maybe nobody is suggesting it, but these clever resume formats tend to inspire a lot of copycats in my experience.
When infographic resumes went through waves of popularity on social media I started receiving a lot of poorly constructed infographic-style resumes. Most of them came from junior candidates who thought they were going to stand above the crowd and impress us with their ingenuity. Maybe 1 out of every 10 was actually well-designed. The rest were just needlessly cryptic and failed to deliver the information I actually needed to see in a resume format. For example, I don’t want to see that someone rates themselves as 4/5 stars in Python. I need to see some text that explains their Python experience.
After reading 50 resumes in a row, the last thing I want to do is parse my way through non-standard resume formats.
This Rustdoc resume comes close to looking like a normal resume, which is good, but I would strongly suggest the author add a link at the beginning to a regular PDF resume that can be downloaded and shared.
The full resume should expand on the normal resume points, such as explaining their role and responsibilities at their current job and adding dates to employment ranges.
Like 90% of the job interviews I've been to have asked me something along the lines of "rate yourself on a scale of 1-10 on these technologies," so maybe you don't want to see 4/5 stars in Python, but it does seem to be a pretty common wish.
We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). So "Former emergency response driver..."
Mentioning a Twitter handle is only useful if your Twitter has things you'd want people to see.
The professional experience section (Modules here) should be in reverse chronological order - so most recent first. It would be useful to say something that you did while working for RustMinded and maybe tell the reader who the company is. So it might look like:
Software Developer, Rustminded $DATE_- present
RustMinded is a Belgian startup dedicated to the promotion of the Rust language.
As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX. I get a lot of incoming resumes from my tech clients that are written in LaTeX. It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
The project sections are mostly OK other than some language issues.
> We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I').
Who is "we" here? I've always had good results with a first person CV - so far in the US, the UK, and the EU. Maybe I just get away with it by luck or circumstance, but it's clearly not a set-in-stone requirement.
> It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
Anecdotally a friend who at that time worked at Sun Microsystems told me that his team prioritised CVs created with LaTeX over all others.
After all, if the purpose of a CV is not to "try and impress you" then what is it?
Not using "I" on a resume is pretty much the first rule of resume writing. If you were to search for rules of resume writing, I expect that would probably appear on every article. If you've had good results with a first person CV, that's probably because your experience is strong enough that the reader forgives you for the error.
Of course you 'can' write a resume in first person. It's just not the voice that the reader expects. Similar to third person.
A resume is certainly meant to try and impress the reader, but typically we're trying to impress the reader with professional accomplishments. I'm much more impressed by someone's professional accomplishments than their choice to use LaTeX.
> As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX.
I have gone down this path with other types of documents (reports, proposals) not because I love LaTeX but because I hate composing and editing in Word, etc. Especially for long lived or repeated documents. Some of those tech clients might just prefer working with plain text for editing, source control, and/or version branching.
You've never really "lived" until you realize that your document with the different sections, etc. that you've painstakingly setup is broken because of a copy paste issue when adding a new section. LaTex maybe a pain, but at least the output is consistent. There is no magic where the formatting bleeds over due to something you can't see on screen.
I used to do my resume in a custom TeX format.¹ It looked gorgeous. But because so much of tech world hiring is mediated by recruiters and automated resume ingestion systems, having a straightforward document in Word ended up serving me much better.
1. An ancient resume macro (and an ancient resume) that I made while a freshman in college is on CTAN. What I used in my early career was not that, although I doubt I have any relic of that later file anymore.
I never had the time/brains to get past the learn curve with LaTeX.
Recently I started using a pipeline of markdown to html with Pandoc and then to pdf with Dompdf for project documentation.
Turns out you get neatly formatted printable docs with not so much effort, and the raw markdown stays with the code where it can be used and updated by fellow devs
I built my LaTeX resume trying to impress a potential employer yeeears ago. So far it's really easy to keep up to date and to temporarily remove parts (comment them out). I think the end result looks a bit more professionally type-set than a Word/GDocs creation.
> As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX
LaTex is really powerful when you get to a certain point, but unless you’ve tinkered with it until you reach that point, it’s a PITA.
To me the number 1 advantage is that I can easily keep updated various versions of the CV, because by working at startups I’ve always have to wear a lot of hats. I keep a more ‘hardware oriented’ CV, another more ‘software oriented’ CV, and I added a more “management” version that showcases better team leadership instead on focusing on the tech stack.
It’s also very handy to keep everything as text documents when you are asked to submit to different webforms, and being able to adjust things like quality vs pdf size is important when submitting your CV in some places
I don't think a novelty résumé needs to be so conventional, people will mostly, in my opinion, either dislike it for not following layout/organisation conventions or look past all that altogether.
For someone like this with little experience, being unconventional is probably OK because they aren't being judged by the same criteria as an experienced hire. That said, you can be unconventional and still provide the reader with the basic facts they'd want to know (like 'what are your accomplishments?' or 'did you attend school?').
I've written thousands of resumes, and all written using implied first person. My results are pretty consistent with hundreds of clients getting jobs at many of the most selective employers in the world.
I appreciate your response, but implied first person is the industry standard, and has been for as long as I've been in business.
Out of sheer curiosity (and this has nothing to do with the conversation at large), how does one become a "professional resume writer"? Is that a recruiter who helps write resumes, or are you solely focused on resume writing? Is it a side gig, or do you do enough resume writing to make it a full time job?
I apologize if these are well known answers but I stick with a fairly technical crowd and, well word of mouth usually gets us passed around to be brutally honest. I hate to admit it, but a half way legible resume and it's usually just references after a point =/
I was a recruiter for 20 years, and I've always been a strong writer. As a recruiter I read tens (perhaps hundreds?) of thousands of resumes, and I knew the audience. I had always done some resume editing or helping my candidates with their resumes, and I decided I wanted to see if I could support myself as a writer instead of a recruiter.
I do quite well as a writer. My hourly rate is $100/hr, I also offer flat rate services, and for the past few years I've consistently had a roster of anywhere from 30-40 clients at any given time.
My clientele is about 50% tech, as that's my specialty and I was a tech recruiter for my entire recruiting career. Word of mouth does sometimes get you by if you have a good network. There are quite a few reasons people hire a resume writer. Some just simply struggle to write. Some struggle to understand what the reader wants to know. Some aren't comfortable taking credit for their accomplishments, so a writer makes it feel less 'braggy'.
Furthermore, I’d describe GP’s comment as encouraging ‘pro-drop’ rather than any ‘voice’. (Though I suspect the technical details of syntactic terminology are somewhat irrelevant for résumé-writing.)
Ugh, LaTeX resumes. They're a dime a dozen (I've interviewed hundreds of engineers) and they utterly fail to make people stand out, which is the whole point of a resume. When I get a resume that was done in LaTeX from someone who isn't a mathematician, it makes a bad impression. I'm not saying that's right, or fair, but it's true. It comes off as trying to look smart without the substance to back it up, and because so many people do it, it also comes off as really unoriginal, and makes the resume forgettable.
So please everyone, stop with the performative LaTeX. If you had any idea how many people do this, you'd be embarrassed.
(And to add a dash of humility to this comment, I'll confess that I used to write my resume in LaTeX. After seeing how many other people do too, I stopped.)
I don’t have a math background but I learned LaTeX out of necessity. If I needed a resume I might use it just because it seems easier than messing with Word. It’s not like LaTeX is that hard to use so I don’t see why you see it as performative.
My impression: this is cute, but confusing. I don't like having to mentally translate things like "modules" and "constants" into headings that would appear in a resume.
I've used both Manjaro and Arch and Manjaro is far away my favorite distribution, because (to me at least) it's Arch for the lazy.
I ran Arch for years before Manjaro and so maybe that's the reason, but I don't believe Manjaro abstracts you away from nuts and bolts layer as much as Ubuntu does?
INB4 the ubuntu comment: I know, I know. You can still do a lot of fiddling under the hood, it's just not in a manner i'd describe as "the linux way". There are a lot of helper layers that break if you try to subvert them, but i will admit that update-alternatives is the only example coming to mind now
Yeah, I remember Arch breaking systems completely back when they moved the entire /bin and /lib, setting python3 as the default python, etc. Took hours of fucking around to fix.
I'm a tinkerer typically, but it seemed like they were going out of their way to break things and generate maintenance work for me, I've never had that issue with any other distro and I will never run Arch again because of it.
That's a bold claim considering Homebrew has been wildly successful on Mac & been doing the whole rolling release thing the entire time. Everything in the world is tradeoffs so I can also say "Arch is for the professional who understands the pitfalls of random OS distro updates/patches to upstream packages that don't get updated for years".
I recently spent some time evaluating a bunch of different systems for migrating away from Ubuntu, including several Arch-based ones.
I was the most impressed with Manjaro, it seems very well polished. From Gnome 40 on Wayland, to the the default ZFS shell with custom Powerline prompt, to the GUI desktop layout switcher which even includes the tiling PoP Shell as an option.
The Manjaro team has done an excellent job at assembling a configuration that is simultaneously power-user-focused but also user-friendly.
I definitely agree with you. Manjaro is a great distro and I have used for multiple years. I especially liked that they offer such a broad range of supported desktop environments, each with their own downloadable ISO image.
If you are looking for something that's closer to pure Arch under the hood, your should give Endeavour OS [0] a try. It's basically vanilla Arch with a nicely configured XFCE desktop and a graphical installer.
> [Ubuntu] You can still do a lot of fiddling under the hood, it's just not in a manner i'd describe as "the linux way".
I use and like Ubuntu, but I have to agree with this. Even before I finished reading this paragraph I was thinking of update-alternatives. Networking config springs to mind as well for me.
If you want the Linux-way, nuts-and-bolts Slackware is where it's at. Slackware and Void Linux were my favorite distros. These days I'm just using Ubuntu for plug-and-play convenience.
If the resume has a good content, the only rule IMHO is it needs to be easy to read. It doesn't matter if you use LaTeX, Rustdoc, MS Word, Libre Office, HTML or markdown as long as I can quickly get all the information I want.
When I dealt with hiring for my team, I've never paid any attention to the formatting. Making formatting stand out from other resumes did not increase the chances for the resume to be picked and moved to the next stage. It did decrease them though, if crazy formatting made it harder to read.
Using Rustdoc might be "clever", but I don't find this resume very readable honestly. It took me some time to figure out what modules or structs mean in this context. Don't do this.
Recruiters have really little time and they often get hundreds of resumes. If they can't get the essential information quickly enough, they'll just throw it out.
What makes an outstanding resume is in the content and how well it matches the job requirements. If I'm looking for a database engine expert and I get 999 resumes which all mention building websites in JS or machine learning models in Python, but one mentions experience on Linux kernel performance work (proven by accepted patches), which one do you think I'd choose?
To OP - I think the resume is a clever format, and riding a language's popularity is a great way of putting yourself out there, especially as a junior.
To others, the "Traits" section -- how much impact does this really matter to the hiring managers? You're hired for what you know, but you're fired for who you are. Is it worth it to expand on these "traits", or is it a fluff area that can be replaced with something more meaningful?
For hiring software devs, I don't care about soft skills on a CV. If I'm concerned, I'll pull that thread in an interview. I'd much rather see those traits demonstrated rather than claim you have them and fall short of my expectations.
Recently, I've also seen people put progress bars for soft skills on a CV, as if they're close to mastering the skill or at least levelling up. It normally takes up a lot of space and is virtually meaningless.
Was once hiring for a IT Support role and someone applied with a star-based system for their skills. I still to this day do not know what 4.5 Stars in "Cables" could ever possibly mean.
For soft skills, saying "can do X" isn't useful. The only written example that I'd even consider is you demonstrating X as part of a written sample (STAR answer), or BQ during an interview.
I really like your header. As someone that makes hiring decisions, starting by showing your curiosity and reasoning as clearly as the Linux example, then immediately casting your mentorship and current position as an opportunity shows that you will be an engaged coworker that can push things to the next level. The resume itself showing that creative thinking.
It's not so much the way the content is presented, as much as the content itself!
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It's a fun, different way of presenting a resume. The fact that it made it to the front page of HN means it worked at what it was intended to do: be seen by a bunch of prospective employers and stand out.
Maybe nobody is suggesting it, but these clever resume formats tend to inspire a lot of copycats in my experience.
When infographic resumes went through waves of popularity on social media I started receiving a lot of poorly constructed infographic-style resumes. Most of them came from junior candidates who thought they were going to stand above the crowd and impress us with their ingenuity. Maybe 1 out of every 10 was actually well-designed. The rest were just needlessly cryptic and failed to deliver the information I actually needed to see in a resume format. For example, I don’t want to see that someone rates themselves as 4/5 stars in Python. I need to see some text that explains their Python experience.
After reading 50 resumes in a row, the last thing I want to do is parse my way through non-standard resume formats.
This Rustdoc resume comes close to looking like a normal resume, which is good, but I would strongly suggest the author add a link at the beginning to a regular PDF resume that can be downloaded and shared.
The full resume should expand on the normal resume points, such as explaining their role and responsibilities at their current job and adding dates to employment ranges.
We don't use first person voice on resumes. We use 'implied first person' (no 'I'). So "Former emergency response driver..."
Mentioning a Twitter handle is only useful if your Twitter has things you'd want people to see.
The professional experience section (Modules here) should be in reverse chronological order - so most recent first. It would be useful to say something that you did while working for RustMinded and maybe tell the reader who the company is. So it might look like:
Software Developer, Rustminded $DATE_- present
RustMinded is a Belgian startup dedicated to the promotion of the Rust language.
As others have said, I don't really get the fascination with LaTeX. I get a lot of incoming resumes from my tech clients that are written in LaTeX. It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
The project sections are mostly OK other than some language issues.
Who is "we" here? I've always had good results with a first person CV - so far in the US, the UK, and the EU. Maybe I just get away with it by luck or circumstance, but it's clearly not a set-in-stone requirement.
> It feels more like "I built it using LaTeX to try and impress you" than "it's the best tool for the job".
Anecdotally a friend who at that time worked at Sun Microsystems told me that his team prioritised CVs created with LaTeX over all others.
After all, if the purpose of a CV is not to "try and impress you" then what is it?
Of course you 'can' write a resume in first person. It's just not the voice that the reader expects. Similar to third person.
A resume is certainly meant to try and impress the reader, but typically we're trying to impress the reader with professional accomplishments. I'm much more impressed by someone's professional accomplishments than their choice to use LaTeX.
I have gone down this path with other types of documents (reports, proposals) not because I love LaTeX but because I hate composing and editing in Word, etc. Especially for long lived or repeated documents. Some of those tech clients might just prefer working with plain text for editing, source control, and/or version branching.
1. An ancient resume macro (and an ancient resume) that I made while a freshman in college is on CTAN. What I used in my early career was not that, although I doubt I have any relic of that later file anymore.
Turns out you get neatly formatted printable docs with not so much effort, and the raw markdown stays with the code where it can be used and updated by fellow devs
I built my LaTeX resume trying to impress a potential employer yeeears ago. So far it's really easy to keep up to date and to temporarily remove parts (comment them out). I think the end result looks a bit more professionally type-set than a Word/GDocs creation.
LaTex is really powerful when you get to a certain point, but unless you’ve tinkered with it until you reach that point, it’s a PITA.
To me the number 1 advantage is that I can easily keep updated various versions of the CV, because by working at startups I’ve always have to wear a lot of hats. I keep a more ‘hardware oriented’ CV, another more ‘software oriented’ CV, and I added a more “management” version that showcases better team leadership instead on focusing on the tech stack.
It’s also very handy to keep everything as text documents when you are asked to submit to different webforms, and being able to adjust things like quality vs pdf size is important when submitting your CV in some places
Sorry but no, that’s bad advice.
I appreciate your response, but implied first person is the industry standard, and has been for as long as I've been in business.
It's not meant to impress you, a resume writer. It's meant to impress other techies.
I apologize if these are well known answers but I stick with a fairly technical crowd and, well word of mouth usually gets us passed around to be brutally honest. I hate to admit it, but a half way legible resume and it's usually just references after a point =/
I do quite well as a writer. My hourly rate is $100/hr, I also offer flat rate services, and for the past few years I've consistently had a roster of anywhere from 30-40 clients at any given time.
My clientele is about 50% tech, as that's my specialty and I was a tech recruiter for my entire recruiting career. Word of mouth does sometimes get you by if you have a good network. There are quite a few reasons people hire a resume writer. Some just simply struggle to write. Some struggle to understand what the reader wants to know. Some aren't comfortable taking credit for their accomplishments, so a writer makes it feel less 'braggy'.
I hope I answered your questions.
So please everyone, stop with the performative LaTeX. If you had any idea how many people do this, you'd be embarrassed.
(And to add a dash of humility to this comment, I'll confess that I used to write my resume in LaTeX. After seeing how many other people do too, I stopped.)
I've used both Manjaro and Arch and Manjaro is far away my favorite distribution, because (to me at least) it's Arch for the lazy.
I ran Arch for years before Manjaro and so maybe that's the reason, but I don't believe Manjaro abstracts you away from nuts and bolts layer as much as Ubuntu does?
INB4 the ubuntu comment: I know, I know. You can still do a lot of fiddling under the hood, it's just not in a manner i'd describe as "the linux way". There are a lot of helper layers that break if you try to subvert them, but i will admit that update-alternatives is the only example coming to mind now
I'm a tinkerer typically, but it seemed like they were going out of their way to break things and generate maintenance work for me, I've never had that issue with any other distro and I will never run Arch again because of it.
I was the most impressed with Manjaro, it seems very well polished. From Gnome 40 on Wayland, to the the default ZFS shell with custom Powerline prompt, to the GUI desktop layout switcher which even includes the tiling PoP Shell as an option.
The Manjaro team has done an excellent job at assembling a configuration that is simultaneously power-user-focused but also user-friendly.
I just wish there'd be some more love on architect.
But maybe I need to learn more about the default installer, I couldn't get it to run on LVM and/or LUKS
If you are looking for something that's closer to pure Arch under the hood, your should give Endeavour OS [0] a try. It's basically vanilla Arch with a nicely configured XFCE desktop and a graphical installer.
[0]: https://endeavouros.com/
Correction: ZSH shell.
I use and like Ubuntu, but I have to agree with this. Even before I finished reading this paragraph I was thinking of update-alternatives. Networking config springs to mind as well for me.
When I dealt with hiring for my team, I've never paid any attention to the formatting. Making formatting stand out from other resumes did not increase the chances for the resume to be picked and moved to the next stage. It did decrease them though, if crazy formatting made it harder to read.
Using Rustdoc might be "clever", but I don't find this resume very readable honestly. It took me some time to figure out what modules or structs mean in this context. Don't do this. Recruiters have really little time and they often get hundreds of resumes. If they can't get the essential information quickly enough, they'll just throw it out.
What makes an outstanding resume is in the content and how well it matches the job requirements. If I'm looking for a database engine expert and I get 999 resumes which all mention building websites in JS or machine learning models in Python, but one mentions experience on Linux kernel performance work (proven by accepted patches), which one do you think I'd choose?
To others, the "Traits" section -- how much impact does this really matter to the hiring managers? You're hired for what you know, but you're fired for who you are. Is it worth it to expand on these "traits", or is it a fluff area that can be replaced with something more meaningful?
Recently, I've also seen people put progress bars for soft skills on a CV, as if they're close to mastering the skill or at least levelling up. It normally takes up a lot of space and is virtually meaningless.
It's not so much the way the content is presented, as much as the content itself!