[JumpCrisscross]

The article criticises the unquestioning use of bad heuristics. One needs to think very carefully about how accurate the heuristics employed are at describing the unseen (but directly desired) attribute(s) as well as what un-desirable attributes it may be silently signalling.

As someone who worked at an investment bank, I'd go ballistic when managers would turn away candidates because their resumes weren't properly aligned or formatted. The irony was amplified by the fact that we were not a client-facing trading desk. Here the heuristic used (resume formatting) did not correlate with the desired attribute ([trading skills]) but did correlate well with some undesirable attributes (insecure children more concerned with form than function).

[raganwald]

I agree with everything you are all saying.

What I was trying to claim is that there’s a relationship between heuristics and the ham/spam ratio of the documents being classified. When there is very little ham and a lot of spam, my claim is that false negatives are extremely expensive. When the benefit of hiring is very high and the cost of interviewing is low, my claim is that false positives are relatively cheap.

Given these two, my claim is that given current market realities, when hiring programmers for a mission-critical role the best strategy is to go light on spam-filtering heuristics and heavy on direct inspection of the ham content.

But obviously, some heuristics have their place. To a certain extent, everything except “Start work on Monday, there will be three month’s probation” is a heuristic.

And “This article is almost complete useless” is also true, given that it says in many paragraphs using a contrived format what I just said in two paragraphs, it obviously contains a lot of redundancy and extraneous noise!

[loup-vaillant]

That "extraneous noise" actually stresses your point beautifully. While we don't want to generalize from fictional evidence, fictions can be great at making the reader pay attention to your case (and yours certainly is).

Now that I'm a bit more aware of the gazillion ways my resume can be mistakenly filtered, I can (i) work on defeating those filters, and (ii) not take it personally when it still doesn't pass through. I know it sounds obvious, but I didn't get it on a gut level until your story put me in the shoes of the recruiter, and showed me that one can be both reasonably competent, not evil, and still miss many relevant resumes.

[Fatman13]

yar i guess those noise is just to give the picture of a seemingly successful person and make people fall for its crap.

[vinayan3]

I agree. If there was a TLDR; it'd have been nice :).

[timr]

You know what's kind of funny, though? I bet that a not-so-small percentage of people who are nodding their heads up-and-down wildly in response to this essay think nothing of filtering their applicant pool based on github profile.

After all, it's a "coding" metric, right?

[eli_gottlieb]

Ha, I always love seeing a job application that demands a Github profile, with no place for Bitbucket or Google Code (not to mention Sourceforge!).

[alttag]

... or work primarily covered by NDA.

Yes, I've contributed to open source projects, but that was before they migrated to github (or even to their current mailing list).

Still, I've been bitten by this demand.

[wizzard]

A couple of years ago I saw a programming job ad with language along the lines of "don't bother applying if you have a gmail address on your resume." Wonder how that panned out for them.

[drKarl]

They would probably get applicants with a hotmail address...

[boxein]

They probably didn't get anyone who uses a Gmail address as primary, which is what they asked for.

[erikb]

Like in every skill you need to choose your heuristics carefully and like in most jobs, HR and CTOs often aren't the best. That doesn't mean the whole idea is crap.

The thing about formatting I can't answer if you are right or "most HR people" are right. The argument they bring seems as legitimate as yours: People who care about the looks of their result are more disciplined, probably faster (because they get the content and the formatting in the same time frame) and care more about working in that company. Does that sound unreasonable? Which one is right can only be told with data. And because of that I tend to support the HR guys. It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience then you and me.

(So indirectly I also agree that work experience can be a good discriminator concerning future work quality expectations)

[sanderjd]

> It's more likely (of course not 100%) they have more data and experience than you and me.

Having data does not imply usefully analyzing it, and "experience" is nothing more than a plurality of anecdote. Without actually seeing the data, I think your best guess here should be 50/50, rather than the very biased-toward-the-high-end "more likely (of course not 100%)" that you have. Appeal to authority is especially dangerous when you are making decisions that affect your company's bottom line based on peoples' ability to format text.

[liljimmytables]

I confess, after spending a few years as an inexperienced coder applying for anything I could get, that I take a perverse pleasure in updating my shitty resume only occasionally now, and not giving a wet fish about the formatting. (a) because it's cathartic, (b) because I don't need to suck up to assholes any more, and (c) because one of the smartest, most reliable people I ever hired submitted her CV to me entirely in Comic Sans.

[technotony]

<i>insecure children more concerned with form than function)</i>

I thought that was what investment banks wanted to hire?