SpunkyMoney

"Of all the brilliant people I know, you would have discarded 100% at resume review stage."

Not really, because no one would tick all the boxes. If they haven't keyword dropped, then you can't apply that filter. if they have a brilliant track history then that pulls up the others that have been missed far greater than if they had keyword dropped.

Unless you're someone like Jon Skeet or Douglas Crockford you can't get away with an average CV. Those people have ticked the other boxes so much (social side, conference speaking, etc) which would greatly outweigh some of the other points which may be all the "junior" has got.

Although, like what that blog posts states, if you were Jon Skeet or Douglas Crockford you would already have ticked several of those things in that blog post ;)

Just because I have some pointers does not mean common sense must go out the window.

So no, the brilliant people you know would not of had their CV discarded at the review stage.

Haha, you're probably right. If i change it now, the link will break and people who have already read it will likely be really annoyed if they stumbled on it with a different name lol

Correct, and we also spell things with an s where you use a z and others such as we spell "color" as "colour". The problem is, if I were to correct it for the UK, the US complain, if I correct it for the US, the UK complain. Since I am from the UK I will definitely make US related mistakes because I have not learnt your English.

Think I have sort of replied to your comment in another comment on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994877

"but they can be useful to screen out some people."

Which is why I wrote that blog post. Just to make sure it stands less of a chance to get screened.

Think i've already replied to this (sort of) here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7994877

No troll. The typos etc are explained here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/29yq47/how_to_r...

Mainly to do with the fact I am from the UK and we spell things differently to people in the US.

That's my blog post! So i'll try justify myself.

"True, but they'll be a damn sight quicker at picking it up than anyone else. And they'll write far better code when they're there."

Tried that with a few developers. Because it was such a change in thinking for them, the same standards didn't apply to javascript as it does for C, they would approach things the way C does instead of the way recommended by javascript etc. They were constantly fighting against their habits which they have had for 10 years. Soon as you add less, bootstrap, require, and so forth. Their learning curve starts becoming much higher and with the hindrance of their old habits. They end up worse and others have to refactor their code! This isn't opinion, it's happened a few times already at work.

"In my CV (highly rated by everyone i've given it to) you won't find a single one of these. Instead, you'll find real descriptions of what i've accomplished, who I worked with (mentoring etc), my methodology (agile, test driven development) and so on."

If you have a CV with the reputation like Jon Skeet, Rasmus Lerdorf or Douglas Crockford. Fair enough. But most people don't :)

"And UML... holy shit, yeah, no."

It's the best way to communicate how code design will be put together when talking to other devs. Instantly things like inheritance being used instead of aggregation, or composition being used when aggregation should be, or methods in the wrong classes. Even our IDE will produce UML which instantly lets devs see when they have placed something in the wrong place, set a method to public instead of private, and so forth.

If you can read the basics of UML it helps tremendously.

"The only way to do it is to use common sense and actually read the CV's you're being sent, then talk to the people you think could do the job to see if they can."

Interviewing someone is expensive. I have my usual job to do as a programmer, interviewing takes me out of action for hours. I have to work out who has the higher chance of being worthwhile interviewing. Which is why I wrote that blog post. Explaining what things I personally, and i'm sure other employers will look for especially when comparing to another developers CV.