I worked remotely for two years, and while I enjoyed it at the time, now that I'm back in an office I realize how much better it is.

When I was coding, I was far more effective with people around to discuss things with than sitting in the basement by myself.

I'm the opposite. I can't code for beans in an office.

Fortunately coding is only one small portion of the job, so I can time coding to be done at home.

I get easily distracted by noise. Random people talking, shuffling around papers, someone sneezing, etc.. For some reason these are highly distracting noises to me.

It's not too hard to get a real time/near RT conversation going about a certain topic online. SO questions usually get answered within minutes and there's also IRC. Some of the best programmers I've ever met were IRC regulars.

There's also mumble, mikogo, skype and other free software out there to easily communicate with voice and share your desktop if you plan to work remotely with co-workers.

urgh me too. Drives me nuts. Headphones are a necessity if I'm going to be within earshot of anyone else.

I have ear plugs that I use on occasion. Noise canceling headphones are usually too heavy and bulky.

I usually alternate between programming in total silence or ambient music at a low volume. Stuff like random deep space tracks on Youtube or even rain/thunder storm tracks.

Yeah I'm not a fan of them either. I use a pair of Etymotic er6i

ear buds that provide excellent noise isolation and great sound. Way better than over ear type headphones and a HUGE improvement over lol ipod/generic crappy earbuds.

etymotic forever.

I had for a long time some er4ps that I got on sale for some huge discount. They were great. then when I was traveling home from DC on a trip (before I move out here obviously), I was very sick and left them in my hotel room. Gone forever.

So I replaced them with some hf3s, which had the advantage of my not needing a separate inline headset for my iPhone.

And glider tips. Always.

Gotta plug the Koss Portapro here. Light frame, pillow-like ear cushions, excellent, and I mean excellent sound.



Only $40.77 on Amazon and that comes with a Lifetime warranty. I have used it twice to replace them for general wear and tear over 8 years.

Plus they make you look like you just came off the set of Tron.

Sennheiser HD 280 pro. I can't stand inear stuff but have only tried low level in ear thingies so maybe I should give better ones a shot?

I have a pair of klipsch noise canceling earbuds that are pretty sweet, only $30 or so on amazon. They really drown out anything else when music is playing.

Also using a pair of sennheiser as a gaming headset. They were really expensive, but the sound quality is amazing.

Also, got accepted into a 6 week intensive program that is paid for by local start ups in the Boston area to teach you the skills you need to be useful at a start up. I'm in the software development path which uses rails (I started doing web development using rails in January, so perfect). Pretty excited about it. Sick of sitting on my ass at home, job time.

I'm pretty sure I know the program you're talking about and I know some of the people that got it started. I'd love to hear what you think of the program.

This is a philosophy I have many reservations about and I have relatively little experience in the area, so take this for what it is.

I think tailor-making resumes (ie. 5 resumes for 5 different job-types) is not a good plan.

Tailored resumes have a high tendency to guess wrong. I can't describe how many resumes I received that were "cooked" to reflect what they perceived as my idea of a perfect employee. It's pretty obvious this is happening and this is one great reason to move on to the next one. Job-descriptions often don't describe everything the company does or what it needs and they may well be seeking people with a certain experience but they don't state this explicitly. It's also more glaringly obvious when the resumes assume they know exactly what I want because it is cookie-cutter to every single job that fits their perception of what the job would entail. The industry I used to work in was its own wildebeest, so unless someone had specific industry experience, that person would have no idea that a sales position in the industry would require basic knowledge of Adobe Illustrator or some image editing software such as Gimp or Photoshop that can conceptually translate over.

The above may be different in tech firms, but I think that they may say they want one thing but perhaps there are other things they don't reveal because that other tech is covered for the moment, but that doesn't mean that they don't want to hire other people that are familiar with that other tech, or maybe they culturally like ex-Java programmers over ex-C# programmers, etc etc etc.

The guy that was last hired at the ex-company went to school for graphic design, so he had the requisite experience. Despite this, he downplayed that experience on his resume. He was somewhat lucky that I noticed the education field or he may not have ever received a phone call. After he was hired, no one knew that he had this experience, which shows how much information is lost when you attempt to tailor-make resumes.

I suspect in most cases "tailoring the resume" is just a wasted effort. It's not like somebody looking for Java skills is going to be turned off by someone that has .NET skills. And the more things a person knows - generally the better.

Tailoring the cover letter however is super beneficial. In fact one of the worst things you can do is submit a totally generic cover letter to a job posting that requests a cover letter.

Network the **** out of this. Get to know all the people that take the class some will eventually land decent jobs and could remember you etc.

Interesting points.

My thinking was more in the interest of being concise as opposed to "cooking" it.

I guess it doesn't take up much space to list my most fluent languages and tool, but for example, I've got skills with lots of different gis tools/applications and apis... but they hardly seem relevant for most positions.

Definitely this. Anybody that's anybody in the Boston tech start-up scene (which is quite strong) is watching this program - and a bunch of them are actively involved with running it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but noise cancelling earphones only work on airplanes, they specifically drown out the frequency of the airplane engine buzz.

I was told that they don't really work in offices if you want to drown out people noise.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise-c...ing_headphones

I think this is pretty interesting too.

Toward the end of my search I was ready to take any position that didn't require a ridiculous commute (relocation wasn't an option) and I thought I could deal with without killing someone/myself.

I definitely purposed my resumes and tailored a few.

I'm curious to know what your thoughts are on including work history or skills that are completely irrelevant to the position or industry.

If you're looking at a resume for a development position, are you more likely or less likely to look at one that included experience with sales, customer service, advertising/marketing, business ownership in an unrelated field etc.?

I had a pair of Bose active cancelling headphones and they totally worked to drown out other people.

Well the basic concept is better against a steady tone, sure. But the concept of active canceling should work against any sound.

The point is that 90% of what of resumes are tailored and I am saying that you don't know what I am looking for, so it does you no good to exclude things or tailor your resume to your usually incorrect notion of my needs.

I think you should be able to trust the person that sifts the resumes. Frankly, it is insulting to his or her intelligence when you tailor make resume. Tailored resumes are almost always obvious too and I don't think they are helpful any party involved. As for "relevant" skills, as I said my perspective is borne from sifting in an industry that was quite strange, so there was exactly zero chance an outsider could successfully tailor a resume.

I'll defer the development-specific questions, but I think that the general idea melds over pretty well. For example, if you applied to a start-up where your job description may vary, how would you tailor a resume? How would you know that the 5 years experience of Perl isn't going to be helpful the company openly advertising C++? How ambiguous is the term "developer" anyways? Maybe it would be helpful for you to have domain knowledge in some other field. Of course, if you are going to apply to Java grind-houses, then you'd want to tailor the resume, but I'm assuming that this isn't the goal here.

It sounds like there are some pretty vague job descriptions being used if people trying to tailor their resume to the job description are so awful. Having waded through 5 page resumes for a tier 1 tech support position I could have used some tailoring.

I just can't imagine many scenarios where I'd have a lot to tailor. If you're inexperienced (like a new graduate) you don't have a whole lot of material to start with. And if you're experienced you need to explain what you've actually been doing. I can't see many places where your work experience changes a lot based on the job description - at least not where it makes a huge difference.

I guess you can change up your "skills" section but I think thats only good for getting past automated filters anyway.

Edit: Although thinking about it I did have two different resumes that I used in school. One was for web/application development jobs and one was for more low level non-customer facing jobs.

If the position is a QA position I can see highlighting your testing experience over requirements gathering and modeling experience, particularly if your previous titles aren't a match to the job you are applying for.