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Admin
1st One: Funny.
2nd One: Gotta love the government. Incompetence at it's best. Look at the pretty resume, he must know his stuff!
3rd One: Yep, now we know what the Patent Office grants patents on nonsense. Real WTF is not mentioning that Computer Science IS an engineering (and math!) degree and is usually awarded by the College of Engineering.
P.S. first!111shiftelevenitsover9000
Admin
Who puts HTML in their resume? Honestly! Not to mention DHTML... you might as well start putting Web 2.0, etc in there.
Edit: I posted first, but ObiWayneKenobi's post was better formatted and got first place.
Admin
I think anyone who didn't think that the formatting of your resume made at least a little bit of difference hasn't gone job-hunting recently.
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I always put puppies and kittens on my resume ... who doesn't love puppies and kittens?!?
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I tried that, but it was hard to get them in the envelope. Plus the staples never held them very securely.
Admin
The real WTF is that someone thinks it makes sense to write 'C/C++'. That's about on par with 'JavaScript/Java'.
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"Let me show you something," the interviewer said, pulling out another résumé from his folder... "Just look at it," she responded...
Good to know the CIA isn't prejudiced against cross-gendered individuals.
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It's actually not as stupid as it looks. A recruiter/HR screener who is told "we only want applicants with C experience" might see C++ and disregard, or vice versa... and especially if we're talking about online resumes that people search for keywords.
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np: Tocotronic - Aber Hier Leben, Nein Danke (Kapitulation Live)
Admin
C++ is a proper superset of C. Java and Javascript are completely unrelated to each other (syntax may look vaguely similar, but so does c# and a plethora of other languages).
Putting JavaScript and Java together makes no sense (means the person most likely knows neither), but clumping C and C++ together does make sense. They ARE seperate skills (someone with skills in one won't necessarily have skills in the other), but the languages are directly related and it's quite easy to do a project as a mixture of the two.
Admin
Comments unrelated to the wtf:
1.) Don't put C down on your resume when you obviously don't know it.
2.) The CIA guy is obviously a wtf, but I get the feeling a lot of people scoff at the idea of making their resumes look good. If you get 500 applications for a position, you're literally looking for reasons to skip reading a resume. Don't let formatting or general crappiness cause your app to be passed over.
Admin
#1 isn't really a WTF if they're building C/C++ modules for OKWS http://okws.org
Admin
I'm going to defend the guy/girl in the 2 one. Like they said they had a folder full of applications already. Let’s face it they aren't going to read them all and a 1st "screening" of how good the CV looks is as good a “random” filtering process as any.
Sure this may rule out some perfectly good candidates but also some perfectly good candidates will get through along with many bad one obviously. If you apply for a popular position then you need to make sure you CV stands out before they even read it, and once they start reading it get’s their attention. Otherwise they won’t bother even reading it and hire the guy with required skills and the pointy bullet points.
At least he/she gave them a chance to go away make it better and reapply with a fighting chance.
Admin
right, good formatting on a resume is a must but more from the idea of cleaning up clutter.
as soon as you find some brain-dead recruiter who likes arrows over bullets, you'll find another that like smiley faces or thumbs up.
skip these companies, they might be great but when the idiots with the right bullet-type character get interviewed, we get more WTFs.
Admin
In the case of the CIA guy, the "avoid being skipped over" issue doesn't apply. He was already looking at both resumes, but ignoring the content. It doesn't say that the poster's resume looked awful, just that it didn't adhere to some arbitrary criteria the CIA guy made up. There's no way to prepare for completely random and meaningless criteria.
That said, I think it's a fundamental problem with our economy that so much of hiring decisions depend on factors irrelevant to the job. I don't have a fix, I just think it's unfortunate.
Admin
I'm not shocked about the C bit.. A couple of years back I wrote a comms system for multi player poker in C. I did a fairly good job and the performance was magnitudes better than several other attempts (mostly in VB or using MSSQL for comms). Next thing I know my boss wants to replace everything with C and I'm stuck trying to lower his expectations and explain why the PHP and flash apps shouldn't all be rewritten in C.
Admin
He could just as easily be collecting resumes for someone else in HR to review.
Admin
Incorrect. There are all kinds of things that are legal in C that are not legal in C++. void * conversions are the obvious example. C++'s compatibility with C is more or less limited to making sure you can use C headers and libraries in programs without any difficulty; running non-trivial C code through a compiler as C++ will generally not work.
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I seem to recall someone giving advice on résumés and pointing out that some jobs get like 100x more applicant than they have positions and just to cut it down, some of those résumés get trashed in the first pass at a rate of about 1 a second. Never done it, never seen it done but if you have more résumés than you even have time to skim what else are you going to do?
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That's Clinton's CIA for you. Can't wait for Panetta to "change" things.
Admin
They tried to get me in that patent job too. Evidently they had realized the value of having CS people on staff by that time, but they clearly had a problem with CS people getting bored and quitting.
I think that's the real reason for the problem of wacky patents. The only people who stick around to do it are losers who can't get jobs elsewhere, or just have no motivation. Could possibly be why they didn't want a CS person anyway. Maybe this guy just knew you'd burn out in a few months. Of course, any other engineer probably would too, unless they scraped the bottom of the barrel and hired only civil engineers or something.
Admin
The more I think about it, the first one isn't even necessarily a wtf (except on the interviewees part). It's an electronics manufacturer. Perhaps they were developing embedded web servers/applications for their electronics. In that case, C would be a perfectly acceptable language if not the best language.
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Sorry to correct your "incompetence" sentence, but "it's" should be "its". I won't say that you're incompetent, though...
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Sure, it's fun to work with fun people, but it's a lot more fun to work with smart people that do their job properly. I don't want to see ASCII flowers in comments, I want to see as few comments as possible, because the source code is self-documenting.
Admin
What kind of actual criteria can you get in 3 seconds? That's not enough time to actually read the resume. Do you mean stuff like reading the name, guessing the person's ethnicity, and letting your prejudices make the decision?
If you really have an overload of applications (and there are many positions that fall in this category even in a good economy), filtering based on how the resume looks doesn't sound so bad. At the very least, it shows the person spent the time to make their resume look good.
edit prior to posting: pretty sure the code for this website is one big wtf... so slow
Admin
I think the telephone is an invention already working in the US and other countries. Before spending time of two people for an interview that will fail in the minutes, you can make a basic interview by telephone, explain what you wait and listen if the guy is eligible for interview or not. I Got this while jobhunting, and generaly I skipped 90% of the nasty web development things through simple phone calls.
Admin
Thankyou... as I said over on stackoverflow.
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If a person considers text typed over lines and triangles to be pleasant to read, that person is a moron. Your know, black on white wasn't chosen by accident.
Admin
In regard to #2, no doubt it's a WTF to risk passing up a great candidate because you couldn't be bothered to read their drab CV. However, I wouldn't really count this as a true WTF because like it or not, this is just how life is. HR types are of limited intelligence; they need bright, bold colours to drag their attention away from their nail varnish. We all know this deep down.
I always have a very pretty CV, it is currently fashioned in red and black type with an art-deco theme and a soft abstract background that I rendered myself specifically for it. That may sound like too much for a software developer but I would add that I have never been turned down for any position in my entire career.
I like to think it's my experience and skill that gets me the work but there is no way I would ever rely on a plain old black and white CV.
Admin
I've always thought if you have a bunch of resumes, you should shuffle them randomly and immediately throw out the top half or so. This screens for luck. You don't want unlucky employees working for you, do you?
(On the other hand, if the job you're trying to fill sucks, it might screen for luck the other way.)
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I invented the comment! But my patent was refused :( That's why you may all post comments without paying me royalties.
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Sieg heil, o Grammar Nazi!
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No grammar for you!
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these are my stories, and they ended up being posted on my birthday! Oh Alex, your mysterious workings worked out again.
Captcha: appellatio. Is that like...fellatio...on an apple?
Admin
1st: if they are using C for web development, that's not a WTF. TRWTF, is that they seem to imply that they just shifted to C. We don't expect entreprises to shift to an older technology.
2nd: Actually, it's well known that developpers are awful interface designers, so whoever has a cute CV either didn't do it himself, or can't be a true developper. So, this HR department has put itself in the position where it doesn't consider the CV of good developpers.
3rd: erm, Computer Science is Engineering. Oh, and this WTF explains a lot about the state of patents today.
ROFLAdmin
Argh! I hate people who keep claiming that because C++ is not a proper subset of C that therefore they are completely different languages.
Firstly, are we talking about K&R C, ANSI C, or C99(doubtful)? What code would you write in ANSI C that you would actually want to write that wouldn't compile in C++?
Yes you can write crap C code that a C++ compiler won't compile, but why would you want to?
For all intensive porpoises C++ is a superset of C.
Admin
It's difficult for me to get upset or surprised about the fact that something's being written in C. To me, plain C plays the role of lingua franca in the world of programming.
There are good reasons for this fact - C's not just an unfortunate artifact of the past. It manages to abstract the true nature of the hardware without hiding it, in a way that, uh, Anaconda, Gem, and Visual J-Widgets, for example, cannot.
I'm not saying everything should be written in C. But during the tools selection phase of many projects, I think a good starting point is to ask "should we just do this in C?"
And during the programmer selection process, one can ask "does this candidate know C?" and that question will basically be a proxy for "does this candidate know the basics of computer programming?
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This is completely a WTF. Passing over a resume because it has dots instead of arrows for bullet points is one of the biggest WTF I've ever seen and as someone who lives in America, I now fear for my safety if this is the criteria that the mighty CIA is using to select candidates.
Admin
Ok, but...
For the purposes of a resume, I don't see the problem with relating the two languages. If you can write one, you can figure out the other pretty quickly, so if (as another poster pointed out), HR Guy is going off a checklist that says "C" or "C++", he will overlook a resume with the one that is not mentioned, whereas an experienced developer who sees a resume has a lot of great qualifications, with several years of C++ experience will say "Well, this guy/girl looks more than qualified, and with that experience, they will learn quickly".
Hey, maybe tomorrow we can stop being insufferable nitpickers? At least through lunch, maybe....?
Admin
Exactly. a few months ago I tried to upgrade one of our programs to C++ (an old C code for thermodynamically calculating gas compositions involving H2,H2O,CO,CO2 and CH4) in order to include it in a new interface which was to replace a Perl wrapper script. Turned out it was MUCH easier to just use the C executable as it was and call it from the C++ program when needed....
Admin
Any interview where you have to sit in a room with other applicants is a WTF. If they don't schedule an appointment for your interview, politely decline. If you get there and there's a crowd of people you'll have to wait for, quickly exit.
Admin
Stop trying to be obstinate. For all intents and purposes C++ is a proper superset. The is nothing wrong with writing C/C++ on a resume (while Java/Javascript is indeed wrong).
From the IBM document in your own link (boldness emphasized by me):
and
and
Admin
At job fairs a company usually sends multiple people to talk to the prospects. Since you have to work a career fair you weasle into talking to the best person you can. You can't just say hi and give a resume especially with a small company.
If the company isn't hiring people like you then grab the swag and go. Don't waste time on crap swag though. Go in pairs, one distracts while one grabs, take turns, make drop offs at the car when the bag is full. Some recruiters might remember you as a mooch, if you do it wrong. I now work for an awsome company. Awesome to hand me a 2% bonus last month. (economy problems are less important when you work at a company with people who work)