[windowshopping]

Two initial thoughts:

1. This author's writing is extremely, uncommonly good. Good enough to write a book and have it sell. "Competing with the past of the economy," "residual behaviour of a world that treated labour as sacred," "immigration without immigrants" -- there are many elegant turns of phrase here. This is a very skilled writer.

2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.

[chis]

I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.

Totally agree that this guy could write books though.

On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.

[tionate]

It mentions DeepMind but also says Research Ready, which is the program funded by DeepMind but run by unis for disadvantaged students.

That said I have no idea how competitive this program is.

[solaire_oa]

You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless).

Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).

Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.

[lisbbb]

I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.

[alyxya]

I tend to think resume advice is overrated. There's so much variability in how companies screen them, who reads it, what they care about, and how they get read. People tend to give advice based on their idea of what a good resume should be like, but it's very difficult to properly measure how good some advice is. Saying "I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay." feels unnecessary when you're overly judgmental on your preferences.

My overall impression of the resume is that it's fine, but I expect a ton of other candidates to have similar looking resumes. If I were to give advice, either create and demo a really interesting project and show it to someone who would find it interesting (maybe they've done related projects themselves), or find new communities and different groups of people that you share common interests with. It's hard to stand out with just a resume alone, and changing formatting and rewriting words don't change the underlying content.

https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf

[devnullbrain]

As a candidate, it can be confusing to read application advice. You'll often see people say that they look for x-y-z when hiring, which conflicts with when you saw someone say they look for a-b-c the week before. How can both be true?

Because both are true, for what they look for. But what's considered standard or desirable differs massively from one market to another - region, industry, role. It even differs at the most granular levels: companies, departments, interviewers. At some point, the difference in what is desired is just differences in culture fit. Applications aren't an exam and you shouldn't expect to 'pass' them all any more than you should expect to 'pass' every date.

If you are a hiring manager, you know what it takes to get hired at one company. That's less than what someone knows if they go out and get two job offers. So, do us a favour, don't muddy the water.

[khannn]

I've had an interviewer give me resume advice that I implement, then the next interviewer tells me to undo what they said. Thinking about undoing the AI enhancements on mine after I saw a lot of people at a previous team using AI resumes including one that had verifiable lies.

[calepayson]

> 1. This author’s writing is extremely, uncommonly good.

> 2. His resume is designed poorly… This is the world of TikTok and Instagram reels

Imo this is exactly the problem. We’ve constructed a system where brilliance doesn’t shine through. The idea that someone as thoughtful as OP needs to tiktokify their resume to even have a chance at getting hired is ridiculous.

I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?

[windowshopping]

Well, I think there's a middle ground between "tiktokifying" and "having your CV look like an essay." Brevity is the soul of wit, after all. These summaries of projects/positions are just very long. In this context, I feel they're too long. 1-2 sentences each should be sufficient, not extended paragraphs.

Many other commenters here disagree, though, so....clearly it's subjective!

[gedy]

In my limited world view and 35 year career, the big shift I see (which I view is a problem) is that companies seem to lean way more on young HR types to recruit and filter than in the past. I can’t speak for everyone, but to me it seems it used to be a lot more common for the skilled hiring manager to be responsible for looking for new hires.

[carrychains]

I'm 47. It has always been like this with resumes.

[brendoelfrendo]

When I graduated from college in 2013, the common advice was to keep your resume to one printed page. Because people realized that job applications were all online and people rarely handled physical resumes anymore, that advice started to shift to "you can go onto a second page, if it is warranted." (My personal opinion at the time was that if an employer wasn't willing to expend a staple on my resume, then they probably won't worth working for).

I'm of the opinion that a two page resume is fine. Three pages would probably be fine if you needed to elaborate on something really niche like research, but at that point we're getting into CV territory (note that in the US, resume and CV are not the same and a CV is used primarily in academic or scientific settings; a CV is supposed to be exhaustive; a resume is not).

Funny that we're having this conversation here, though, because based on this particular example: the author's resume is fine. It needs punching up, and he should probably turn some of those paragraphs into bulleted lists, but I don't think it's too long.

[socalgal2]

No idea about small companies but FAANG companies get > 1 million resume submission a year. You need to take that into account, the recruiters and other people in the chain do not have time to read your essay.

[Den_VR]

The way it used to work was you’d know somebody that’d know somebody and they’d vouch for you. But these days… it’s the same.

[carlosjobim]

> I’m young, so I have no clue, but surely the job market didn’t always work like this?

No it didn't. Established (older) people saw it as their duty to help the younger generation become a part of the team. Today's older generation have nothing but hate and resentment against the young, and nobody considers themselves as having even the slightest duty towards younger generations. Maybe for their own family members, but usually not even that.

[augment_me]

I agree but then the reality is that we are here now, so it's no longer ridiculous. So if you are that brilliant, you understand that there is no point of fighting the current, so to make your life easier and to get the job where you can feel fulfillment, you might have to adjust your CV to fit the reality. That is a part of the intelligence you need to adapt and has always been.

[AznHisoka]

Something something lemon market…

[soupfordummies]

Buddy, the amount of people these days with MASTER’S degrees that can’t even communicate via 2-3 (short) paragraph email exchanges… yep, it can be rough out there.

[ivape]

Why do you think any of that has to do with being a good programmer?

[bern4444]

He calls it a CV and given the education background is British it's more inline with what a CV is meant to represent - a deeper dive into your background and experience - compared to a resume which is a condensed 1 page summary.

In the US we often use the term interchangeably but internationally they are quite different.

[windowshopping]

True, but I don't see a separate resume on the site. Correct me if I missed it but my understanding is that he is using that CV as a resume.

[soerxpso]

> 2

I see people say this literally every time someone complaining about lack of interviews posts their resume. We shouldn't have a system where every job seeker is supposed to be more of a resume formatting expert than the average HR rep. The fact that someone looking to hire is going to see an okay resume of a highly qualified candidate and say, "LOL too long; didn't read" is the most glaring symptom of what he's talking about.

[llbbdd]

It's not the formatting, it's the content. A resume that tells me what I need to know without a bunch of extra fluff vs an essay tells me about the author's priorities and it'll be a deciding factor when you have hundreds of applications to go through.

[x0x0]

People should deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it were.

As it is, open job reqs get hammered. A hiring manager needs to rapidly discard 95% or more of resumes to get down to a manageable number to directly review. The last time I had an open job req I closed it at 500 applications that came in between Thursday afternoon when I opened it and Tuesday morning when I closed it.

[pizlonator]

> His resume is designed poorly.

Yeah.

OP - shorten it! Make it easy for hiring managers to quickly glimpse what are your key skills. Is it Python? PyTorch? Tensorflow? C++? When I'm flipping through resumes to decide who to screen, I'm looking for keywords. You're not giving me keywords so I'm going to be annoyed by your resume, and that might give you a weaker shot than you'd otherwise have.

[alyxya]

There's a skills section that lists keywords. Personally, keywords mean relatively little to me, because I don't think of people's skill sets as being static, and anyone can learn anything.

[ttoinou]

He is driven by project based learning, which to me helps me a lot understand his CV right from the beginning

[boznz]

His CV is fine, better than most of the CV's I've seen recently which are just tech-wank-word bingo.

[zamalek]

That's what you need to get through ATS. Resumes are for HR. Unless specifically asked (or e.g. directly emailing someone around here) save the fireworks for the interview.

[atonse]

I had a similar thought. “I was never this articulate as a fresh grad”

I don’t know enough about the job market apart from anecdotes.

But I also know there are a lot of shortages in the trades.

So SOME job markets are slow for sure. But others are still desperate.

[darkwater]

> 2. His resume is designed poorly. Have a look. I'm not surprised his job search has been unsuccessful when his resume looks like an essay. OP, you gotta cut that text down by like 70% and put more highlights. This is the world of tiktok and instagram reels.

I disagree. He just needs some nicer-looking template and that would be a perfectly valid CV [1]. Perhaps reducing a bit some paragraph, but not by 70% at all (nor 50 or 40).

[1] https://urlahmed.com/assets/documents/am-cv.pdf

[sehansen]

Yeah, just increasing the font size of the section headers 4 pts and the lines with the job titles 2 pts would do wonders. Maybe also put the locations in italic and decrease the line spacing around the location lines.

But even with the current resume I'd still call this guy in for an interview if I were hiring for an ML position.

[mvdtnz]

His writing is good but he's speaking with such authority for someone with virtually no experience. Dismissing the explanations from those of us who have been around the block several times because he believes he has some special insight.

I mean he might fill some Gladwellian niche of being confidently wrong on topics he has only a basic understanding of I guess.

It might pay for him to listen for a bit.

[spookie]

Oh, I'm sure the person in question has heard this many times, coming in to the job market. Chicken and an egg problem, it is.

[watwut]

Ad 2.): I finished college in a good economy and got a job with less then perfect resume. When we have been hiring in good economy, again, we hired people with bad resumes. We gave them a chance cause we needed people and everyone was hiring. They seemed ok during interview and turned out to be good employees.

My point is, this nitpicking about whether CV is too long or tiktok like is just result of a bed economy and companies having 20 applicants for one position. And if this guy perfectly hits random set of signals to get hired, it is just that someone else will be unemployed.

When you have 30 grands on 3 positions, the overall employment situation wont be solved by them writing better CV. That is just the game of musical chairs we are playing to get jobs.

[terminalshort]

It's not the world of tiktok. Resumes have always needed to be like that.

[burnt-resistor]

In the US-centric perspective: Most forms of higher-education leave out fundamental job skills graduates need to be successful in the business world. Résumé writing, project management, time management, and team leadership should be covered.

Moreover In terms of compulsory education like K-12, it should also include public service and life-work skills like customer service modeling behavior, personal financial management, civics, and media critical thinking skills because Common Core and NCLBA succeeded only at creating greater mass ignorance.

[DiscourseFan]

The last thing we need is to teach people how to do things as they are already done, instead of giving them something that can be used to generate something new. And management skills can’t be taught anyway.

[never_inline]

To be honest, I dont think recruiters read the CV anyway.

[devnullbrain]

That's a really standard CV

[barrenko]

With this in mind, I'd like to propose an alternative to OP. E.g. he may be extremely unlucky in the following 7 months in his job hunt, and tech is not what it used to be.

If the uses these 7 months to focus on his writing on the other hand... We'll need people with a soul and technical chops to cover this apocalypse (using it in the original sense of the word).

[dbspin]

As a writer myself... This comment is somewhat ironic, given that the 'job market' for writers is effectively non existent. Journalism has been whittled down to nothing. Quality fiction isn't read any more - and the remaining outlets are ideologically gatekept. Non fiction, outside of a few celebrity authors, or highly specialised topics, does not sell. The traditional unglamorous but well remunerated writing gigs - technical writing, specialist journals etc, have been GPT'd out of existence. A few legacy and celebrity authors are fine. Others are able to make a living through platforms like Substack - but these are primarily folks who managed to build a large following in traditional media or pre-oligarch twitter. Recommending a young person spend 7 months on their writing is to recommend they lose the guts of a year of their young life on a dead end.

[nhaehnle]

I agree on the first point. I clicked through to the previous blog entry which I also found to be really good.

[martindbp]

I almost get an existential crisis from the fact that this was written by someone in their early 20s

[kelipso]

The resume design is incredibly poor. It’s a 90% likely instant reject from me just from the resume. It looks like a resume from someone who does not know what they are doing. How hard is it to copy a resume template from google, seriously…

[sevenseacat]

I don't believe for a second that an intern did all of that stuff.

[ghostpepper]

Agreed; uncommonly good writing, especially for someone with a CS degree.

[aryonoco]

20 odd years ago when I went to do a CS degree, I discovered that the university had these beautiful buildings called “libraries” and they were filled with all sorts of amazing books! I ended up splitting my time roughly evenly between learning C, SQL and Java and devouring every 19th century English literature book I could get my hands on.

I can’t claim to write as well, but weirdos like us do exist.

[lisbbb]

It a bit too long to get the main points across. Also, a wall of text is becoming something people ignore, no matter how important it is. Make a video, bring these ideas to life.

[ghaff]

No one hiring is watching a video made by a recent grad.

[PeterStuer]

I'd prefer an editor went over this post and condenced this by at least 50%, and then demanded factual references be added.

[adammarples]

I see the problem, he went to UWE. You were not told to do that! You were told to go to Bristol!

[fxtentacle]

Yeah, that CV could also use some colors, spacing, and typography to visually highlight key facts.

[anonymous_343]

It's a good enough resume. But half as many words would make it better.

[hansvm]

> his resume is designed poorly ... too long

The only readily available link I saw was to his CV, and it was shorter than a lot of resumes. It's wordier per line item than a normal CV, but it's not bad. Assuming it passes a sanity check for AI slop and role fit, as a hiring manager I wouldn't personally mind the length.

Are other people throwing that sort of thing into the circular filing bin?

[dubeye]

It seems suspiciously over punctuated to my eyes.

[anovikov]

This. The guy should forget about the bullshit jobs he could get in the CS field and just do that same thing full time.

He could be the next Cory Doctorow. He actually writes better.

[ludicrousdispla]

a good first step would be just formatting it to a standard page size

[cush]

Sorry but if people aren’t hiring new grads then that new grad resume isn’t getting read. All the formatting in the world can’t fix the situation.