_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

It gets interesting when the employer asks for a full work history... hard to fit everything I've done in the last forty-odd years onto the recommended two pages without using two-point type! I've had potential employers complain that I didn't include my O-level results (UK exams taken at age 16 in the 1970s; they've changed somewhat since) even though I had included my bachelor's and master's degrees - both significantly more recent though still too long ago to be strictly relevant: my bachelor's included a segment on the care and feeding of the 8080

Experience suggests that you are far more likely to get noticed if you're applying to a small firm where the person employing you will be the person reading your CV; when a HR drone gets his hands on it he is _always_ just looking for keywords and is very unlikely to have the technical expertise to assess your abilities.

I've always been a bit leery of mentioning my hobbies on the CV, even as a throwaway couple of lines: among others, homebrew electronics? okay, seems hopeful... vintage cars? perhaps he wants too much money to support his habit... paragliding? eek, he's going to die! but when I was interviewed for my last job (the one I retired from and then got persuaded to come out of retirement and contract for) I took along an SBC I was developing (65c02 as it happened!) because even though it was incomplete it _demonstrated_ a handful of skills they were looking for: I could (apparently) design the circuit, design a PCB, write and program the eprom, build the thing etc but perhaps more to the point an interest in the subject beyond just paying the mortgage (nobody gets into this level of job because it pays a fortune: it doesn't, at least in the UK). Practical skills which are simply not covered on a CV other than to claim you have them.

Neil

p.s. two spaces, Garth? That's a whole nother argument. I'd claim that it only applies when single-spaced fonts are used - it dates from typewriter days. A sensible word processor will automatically space sentence interstitials, but then, most people use Word and have never heard of typesetting. LyX for the win!

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Um...

I have many issues with the above posts and the job market as a whole - things like dictating style, fonts, etc. just don't work for me.

And these things shouldn't be a barrier.

Take traditional serif style fonts...

A lot of folks, like myself in the IT industry (and I'm specifically referring to programmers, engineers, designers and not management) are neuro diverse or autistic, "on the spectrum", or whatever. Normies just don't have a clue what our world looks like. My ASD extends to dyslexia, so reading fancy fonts with twiddly bits is often tricky. I don't see words, I see individual letters. I don't see a forest, I see individual trees. Simple things to normies like the lower case letter a. There are very few fonts that make an 'a' look like an 'o' - most, even the sans-serif ones like a little tail over the round part and yet it's recommended to use a more plain font without the curly twiddle twaddle added for teaching... Two spaces after a full stop? Who gives a shit.

A lot of us have learned to outwardly "mask" our condition, but some can't and never will and even when masking, there can be "triggers" that will cause us to drop the mask.

Using TeX/LyX,LaTeX? Great, but agencies want WORD so they can edit things out and their own things in when putting you forward to companies...

The trick is to not use agencies and not work for mega-corps and forget the "career path", but maybe that's just me. I've been self-employed for the past 20+ years and done mostly OK, but have had some interesting times. Fortunately before lockdown I worked with some little startups created by people I knew but it's not always been plain sailing - I know I've mentioned this before but the IT "industry" let me down big time some years back - and it seems ironic that while we embrace the special skills and talents that neuro diversity brings, we so often leave those people behind when things so south - where the word we don't like using is depression, so normies talk about "burn -out" or something similar because they can't cope with the D word...

I turn my hand to other things as a coping strategy - I ran a little artisan bakery for a while and a few years back I decided I needed to get back into the water (I was a very active scuba diver for 20+ years - had to give-up for other medical issues) so I trained as a lifeguard and swim teacher. These days, I teach swimming to kids for 3 days a week and I never set out to do that.... However it's amazing. I'm meeting all sorts of kids and am able to identify many neuro diverse even though their parents are in denial or feel it's a stigma of some sorts. I keep up my lifeguard training to be fully versed in CPR, Defibrillators and procedures.

At school I was regularly punished for my bad grammar, poor reading ability, spelling, etc. In the 60s and early 70s these things just hadn't been realised and I was just "thick". Fortunately someone, somewhere recognised something in me (maths, engineering and physics skills were good) and I ended up spending 8 years at university doing all sorts of wonderful things with computers, electronics, robotics, etc.

Where does that leave me? Well I'd love to get back to little paid project work but it's not going to happen now - I'm too old. (Even too old for the leisure industry who prefer younger and often female staff - fortunately I appear to be good at teaching and a nearby award-winning swim school snapped me up after an hours spoken meeting and an hour in the pool teaching rather than look at my age, etc.)

I did get lot of work some years back when I did a lot of open-source stuff - but that's what led to a breakdown - open source does not mean free support, but that's what people expect and demanded off me. Even when others took my free work and incorporated it into their commercial works (perfectly legit) but then left support to me... At one point I had over 10,000 emails on one particular project demanding support when it was nothing to do with me... So no more open source from me - it's "fire and forget" and accept nothing from users.

Back to jobs - I really liked working with little engineering startups - there you can get away with using an Arduino or some lashed-together Pi project, but as soon as the suits move it and start to use words like PLCs, SCADA, cloud and so on - the price (of basic equipment to run their thing) goes up some 30x and I move on... Trouble is now, little engineering startups are becoming harder and harder to actually start-up and expectations are larger and larger, so they try to start big in the first place. Need a microcontroller programming? Well, there's an agency in India that'll do that for you...

Time to get ready for my first pool visit today (I'm in 2 different pools today) The 134sxb can wait.

Cheers,

-Gordon

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--
Gordon Henderson.
See my Ruby 6502 and 65816 SBC projects here: https://projects.drogon.net/ruby/

Donald Knuth would disagree with you, as would:

• The Chicago Manual of Style
• The American Psychological Association
• Microsoft Manual of Style
• The Gregg Reference Manual
• The Associated Press Stylebook

https://www.grammarly.com/blog/spaces-after-period/

But ultimately it's going to be the choice of the reviewer, not the author - as Gordon points out. Not knowing those, I'd say go with the single space standard, and hope that your word processor output is legible that way.

(I've argued this (and other issues of invisible contextual metadata in printed output) far too much on authorial sites previously so I'm letting this ride; my apologies for derailing the discussion)

Neil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curriculum_vitae

When I got hired to teach at the college, they didn't ask for a resume. They asked for my CV. It has two lines: Bachelors in Mathematics, Masters in Mathematics. Where I work, they ask for transcripts because we are legally required to have someone teach only courses they "have experience in" according to the state. I remember before those rules, I would teach Engineering classes, and once they offered me Drafting and Design classes. I'm still able to teach Business Math classes I guess.

Conclusion: No resumes for colleges.



I'm with you on that, I still do that to this day.



I completely agree. When we have to work with other departments at the college, sheesh. We call them "circular thinkers" because they go round and round without actually *doing* anything. We are problem solvers, that's literally my job: I stand up in front of a lot of folks, present problems, and then solve them. I do this nearly a hundred times each day. Give me a problem, I will solve it. And sometimes we are a bit weird, but you know what? We solve the problems, they don't. They can't be normies without us inventing/creating/giving them tools to be normies.



That's good to know, but it's harder to find smaller firms. They have a harder time finding us, we have a harder time finding them. If I went to look for a job outside of the college, I wouldn't know where to start besides bit companies unfortunately.

Thank you Garth for starting this topic up. It's something that I've been wondering about for a while. Besides the small arguments about two spaces or one, I'd like to see others show the *where* and *how* of job searching/applying so people like me could actually get those jobs. [ Not that I'm thinking of leaving the college, but it's good to have backup plans, that don't always involve teaching. ]

Thank you everyone! Good discussion!

Chad

Good reading!

I don’t have much to add. I worked in one company for my entire career. Part of my job was designing atomic bomb components (seriously). Wrote one resume in my entire life. Boring!

I bet there are very many different trajectories for a working life. I only had about five or six employers, I think (retired now) although there were some changes of ownership. What served me well several times was having people on the inside who knew me and knew what I could do - I don't think I necessarily came across very well on paper or perhaps even in interview. And I think the question being asked was "will this person be useful" as opposed to "will this person fit precisely into this defined role." If I'd got into the sort of place which asked the second question, I probably wouldn't have done well. Indeed, a couple of times I was hired into something where I didn't do well, but was able to move into a role where I did better. Having flexible and imaginative management goes a long long way - if only it were always possible to find that.

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Aargh, mea maxima culpa: I mis-attributed a comment from BDD to you, Garth. My apologies.

Neil

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

_________________
x86?  We ain't got no x86.  We don't NEED no stinking x86!

Yes, in my first "real" job (after doing some teaching) I just walked into the office of Acorn Far East in Hong Kong, and more-or-less said "I'm an coder with eight years experience of Acorn systems", and started paid employment the next week.

A couple of weeks ago I was back-and-forthing with an employment agency about the details in my CV, and in frustration I just sent them my aide memoir list of work experience, which is just four pages of:
going back to 1990, with *no* *other* *details*, and he said "that's much better". ! So what on earth are all those Job Centres advisors doing?

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JGH - http://mdfs.net