It's not like it was poorly written. It was very thorough and had no grammar mistakes. It was just a few pages long and in plain text which used the power of white space to break things up and make it skimmable.

Supposedly it should have only been 1 page long even though the job application asked for a bunch of information outside the scope of a typical resume.

def stick to the one page rule. personally, i think the skill of boiling things down is vastly more important than thoroughness in an employee. as a manager, it tells you communication will be efficient, and that the person knows how to make decisions rather than lists of options. the eager, thorough option maker is effectively useless as a delegatee. i highly doubt you are that person from what i know of you, but an overly long resume can signal that.

Agreed, anias is formerly LowKey, probably the most ignored poster on the site and overall horrible garbage poster. I have noticed he is mostly on decent behavior in this thread, and is definitely making an effort to not be nearly as bad on this account, but take anything he says with a grain of salt.

He misses the mark very regularly.

I feel like the 1 page resume has effectively become the 2 page resume.

I haven't seen a single page resume in a while now, and while I think it is important to be brief, I feel like no one follows the 1 page resume anymore.

We had someone apply last week who graduated undergrad 2 years ago and is in a masters program and even that candidate has a 2 page resume, granted they are probably the best example of being able to cut it down to 1.

We were always told to do 2 pages in school and I personally feel like its the right length for a lot of people.

The WORST is resumes that are like 8 pages long. I haven't seen very many the last couple of years, but we use to get a lot from from overseas candidates that were absolutely mind-numbingly horrible.

That is all I used to see when I was doing professional services. A candidate would have a resume with 1 page dedicated to a single 6 month contract. Every single technology the project touched would be included, even if the candidate never, or basically never touched a certain technology.

The problem was the good people were doing the exact same thing.

Ok thanks. I'll slim it down to 2. In my defense most of the last page was dedicated to specific things they asked for in the application, would you guys consider attaching that as a separate document or include it in the resume?

Stuff like "tell me why you want this job..." or "show me any projects that you think are interesting".

Cover letter, imo.

Not necessary, but worth it often.

Depending on the questions and the format they asked them, I'd agree either cover letter or a separate page that lists the questions and your answers.

Also, you mentioned that you sent your resume in plain text. Was this specifically asked for, or is it something you decided on your own?

I would love to have that crap to put in a cover letter, I hate them. I want to put "just give me the damn job" but was told that would be frowned upon...

I decided that on my own. I deal with non-technical people all the time so I figured the least painful format would be plain text with a lot of white space.

I guess a nicely formatted PDF is standard?

Also depends on what they require in the CV. In my area they usually explicitly require HS degrees (and up) to be included. Which means I have to put in US-HS, German HS and military (well did civil work cause peace and all) before I even get to my university degree. Pretty ridiculous.
[and yes that means once I get my PhD I'll still be asked to include my HS degree from the US from when I was 16.5 years old]

Huh? Are there resumes without a cover letter? Never seen one.

PDF is 100% standard. I suggest getting a decent Latex template, playing with it a bit and putting it in version control. You can have branches for academics/technology or even it/management etc.
Oh yeah and if you apply at an opinionated company it's a good idea to check the metadata. We trashcanned all PDFs that were generated from Word or could be identified as originating form a Windows machine for example ("strong commitment to FLOSS values" was listed in all our job listings)

Word and PDF are the only acceptable formats, unless specified otherwise.

Word is preferable if the intended recipient is a random corporate person and likely non-technical.

Cover letters are only necessary if you're responding to random job postings. If you have any kind of connection whatsoever, even a contingency recruiter, cover letters are not necessary.

Has anyone here done >toy stuff with JavaScript backends? I always end up researching way too long and getting sucked into all kinds of sidepaths and not getting any work done so I'd like a quick sanity check before I'm hopefully off and coding (ERP style system). My current thought is node/express or are there more sane options (io.js=node for my intends and purposes...i also vaguely remember express moving to some company)

I'm mostly looking for good documentation, non-bloat and sane performance.

Edit: I'm locked in on React for the frontend

Maybe sails?

I'm the node guy at our company where we've converted 1/3 of our monster site to node. Shoot away if you have any questions. Most node apps either use express or hapi as the request/response engine.

And of course there's always my framework on top of express which I think makes it tremendously easier for non-node-experts to spin up web pages and JSON components. And also you get me as a free consultant.

This sounds as dumb as the IQ tests.

That seems very unfair to the IQ tests.

Sometimes FLOSS sucks:

http://guide2office.com/1270/how-to-...ice-neooffice/

Libre Office is just awful and, at some point, holding on to FLOSS ideas become self-detrimental. I'd bet dollars to donuts that 5 experts in Excel could crush the productivity of 10 experts in Calc. I consider myself an open-source person, and generally refuse to use Windows for programming, but I use it for documents any day of the week.

So what if you used a Windows to create a PDF? (I use Libre Office on Windows to create my PDFs).

In software engineering I don't think you need a 2 page resume until at the 10+ year experience level. There just isn't enough relevant stuff you can put that won't fit on 1 page. I see some 5 page resumes from lots of Java EE type guys.. They are invariably terrible even when we interview them.

Anyone got ideas on how to design an app? I have awful design skills. I got most of the app functionality down but it just doesn't look or feel pretty.

Has anyone else given up on posting questions on stackoverflow? Anytime I ask something even remotely complex, I get a bunch of responses that don't even answer the question I asked and my question gets downvoted.

The last question I asked was asking why a callback was executed before the animations had finished in jQuery. I realized that I hadn't passed in a duration to the animation which meant that, once a certain threshold was passed, the callback would execute before the animation was finished. That threshold ended up being 60ms.

You need to hire a designer. Most programmers aren't that great at design. If your budget doesn't allow hiring a designer, you should try to keep things very clean and maybe google around for groups of colors that work together.