tl;dr
Guy landed his first developer full time job at 30 and thinks he has valuable experience to share. Follows up some cliches of SF tech bubble recruitment tips.
Being able to send files in an appropriate format is a communication skill, a basic skill for any employment, and .docx is almost never appropriate.
You're going to be dinged for a Word doc by some people, some of the time. You created a % chance that your job application got thrown away for something easily remedied. At least take one second to convert to a more generally-viewable PDF.
Besides which, the article is talking about code. Why would anyone cut and paste code into a Word doc at all? A waste of time for everyone involved.
.docx is often very appropriate; it's one of the most widely used formats out there and is readable by pretty much any word processor out there.
Agreed that it's probably not the best choice for sending code, but the author's point wasn't that it's a terrible format, just that it's a terrible format for code reviews. PDF is equally awful for the reasons the author describes (lack of syntax coloring, inability to run the code, etc.)
Though IMO the author should just be explicit about what he wants; playing mind games with people is never a good idea, and it just self-selects for people who have used GitHub professionally. Choice of SCM system is almost never up to an individual developer anyway, are you going to ding someone with otherwise great credentials because their company uses Mercurial? It takes all of an hour to learn how to use GitHub anyway.
Anyway, I echo the comments I've seen elsewhere that a guy who got his first "adult job" at 30 then hired some people less than a year later is probably not the best person to take career advice from. This guy makes a lot of novice mistakes in his interviewing practices; so take this as a perspective on how some companies do hiring and not a definitive guide of the right way to do things.
> Though IMO the author should just be explicit about what he wants; playing mind games with people is never a good idea, and it just self-selects for people who have used GitHub professionally.
I was thinking this exactly. Perhaps the interviewee should have asked what format - but I would argue just be professional and don't try to trip them or play mind games. Put your expectations up front in simple writing (just say "submit in github gist").
There are so many formats and mediums - if you allow the interviewee to guess what you are expecting they will most likely guess wrong.
I know he wasn't referring specifically to CVs and resumes, but one problem with using .docx for those is that it won't look the same on all computers. For example, if you format something in Word on Windows, it may look slightly different when pulled up on a mac or vice versa. So you spend 30 minutes getting your resume to fit on one page, only for someone to open up your Word file on the other OS and the resume spills over by one line onto the next page. PDF is much safer to use if you need to make sure that it looks the same no matter who is opening the file.
And some obvious cultural differences between UK and US (ie: "budget 2 months to find another job". Which made me scratch my head... my experience lately has been 1-2 weeks, if that. And I'm not in a prime market either...)
1-2 weeks? I don't believe it. Maybe in SV, where young developers are constantly being kidnapped off the street and forced at gunpoint to code for $200k+ and free lattes in swanky offices with foosball tables (or so I've been led to believe).
My shortest job hunt took about a month, but I was a cheap junior dev then. These days, I'm constantly getting pinged by recruiters, but I know better than to take that as evidence that finding a new job would be easy.
My last job hunt took almost 6 months (ok, I was being a bit selective). Hell, finding someone that didn't balk when I told them my current salary (and I was looking for a job in a fairly low COL area) took at least a month (and I'm too old to care about foosball tables and free lattes).
And now my current job has been eroding pay/benefits and layering on useless processes and other BS. I can feel that itch coming on... better budget a year to be safe.
I am in the Bay Area and I would not budget anything less than 3 months start-to-finish for a job hunt. Companies are flaky, they don't get back to you, many have job postings but are just fishing (not serious about hiring). Most don't talk comp until late in the process so you could go down a rabbit hole with a company and find out their salary expectations are way out of line with yours. You could easily burn through months.
This has been my experience as well. Once I get the itch, I'll start looking, doing interviews and being pretty selective in where and who I want to work for.
I think if you're not in a good place to begin with, you'll take something sooner and inevitably find yourself somewhere you don't want to be.
General job market advice is to budget (financially) 6 months to find another job.
If you work in a high-demand sector, if you are experienced, if you're not bothered by the ethics of who you work for or about the conditions, and you are lucky, it might take you less time. Good. You saved yourself some budgeted time and you should be happy about this.
There are plenty of jobs where you won't even get through the door in 1-2 weeks. Many companies have hiring cycles that don't allow that level of flexibility.