[gen220]

FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives.

But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging to make hard and fast rules!

[cyberax]

Yeah, I get that.

But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.

I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.

[throwaway2037]

    > social trust

This is an interesting term. (1) Can you define it for me? (2) Can you provide some examples that appear on CVs that project it?

[gen220]

As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.

So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.

That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.

Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.

(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)