[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 :).