Resume Evaluation By HR vs A Programmer

A comparison between how someone from Human Resources judges a resume, and how a programmer judges a resume:

How A Programmer Evaluates Your Resume vs. How HR Does

How A Programmer Evaluates Your Resume vs. How HR Does

On a serious note: you will get a more meticulous and subject-related examination by a programmer for no other reason than they know what they’re hiring you to do, and will be looking to see if you’re capable of doing it. A human resources person, in contrast, only knows what the technical managers told them, and it’s hard to judge programming skill and technical aptitude without being a programmer or technical person yourself, and most HR people are not.

And then, of course, there are the usual stereotypes (not always false) that programmers are hyperfocused on the fine details. And while many programmers can be, I argue that it’s not fair to make that generalization without also making the generalization that they’re able to step back and take a very broad look at a complex picture as well. If they couldn’t, who would architect the massive software projects we deal with every day? (Think about the DNS infrastructure, the Linux kernel, Microsoft’s Exchange server, Google’s web indexing operation, etc.)

– Neil.


~ by Nocturnal Discourse on 27 May 2009.

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