throwaway1001's comments

There are several points here where, I think, you share what recruiters think about my resume. I'll comment with my vision of the situation.

> Does his 10 years experience in java directly translate to being a senior/expert person in any other language?

Yes, it does. Given a Python project, I spent half of the first day (literally, half a day) using Google in parallel with coding to find some syntax-specific things out. I.e. how to declare an empty map, how to declare and use a lambda, how to throw/catch an exception, how None is handled, etc. After this half a day, the difference between me and your Python hacker is 5 times less compared to what it was before. Add a week of Python coding and I'll be familiar 90% of most used libraries or a framework you use. My capacity to write a Dijkstra algorithm from scratch, on the other hand, stays with me forever.

Having said that, I understand that if assigned to a Haskell project, for example, I'll have some harder time, of course. Python is just really simple.

With this regards I like Google interviews the most. They take essentially the same approach: choose the language you like to solve our problems, we'll be testsing you for some more serious things anyway.

> Developing Java for 10 years at the same company and the exact same project

Not sure how I made this impression: I worked in 4 companies throughout those 10 years, in very different Java projects.

> I will honestly say that really doesn't make him qualified to be a senior level person on an iphone/android/something/anything development team.

It's too bad you don't have a chance to interview me and compare to your senior iOS guy, really.

Looks good, but:

- Java: 0 results - iOS: 3 very junior positions, only 1 London based - Python: 5 results, 3 of which are very junior + 1 discloses zero info about the opening.

Do you work for Twitter? Can I email you privately (there's no email in your profile)?

Only after a discussion starts (i.e. not in my resume). Salaries are usually not stated for the positions anyway, so this seems like a fair game to me.

Thanks for the advice. Recruiters are a specific pain point. When looking for a bank job, they help a lot because they push candidates ahead and because bank jobs are all alike. During the current job hunt, I encountered recruiters that were trying to place me as an IT person at Heathrow Airport. I don't apply to positions advertised by recruiters any more — descriptions are always misleading and they care very little about what you actually looking for. Do you think it's a wrong thing to do?

Thanks — that's exactly somethig I wanted to reply with.

I've been to all the meetups you mention. Some of the contacts I got there were incredibly useful, but nothing led to an interesting opportunity.

I see you're very integrated in the community, could you maybe mention couple of companies you think are interesting? Maybe they went past my radar.

Being fit into the culture is easily fixable — surely you don't go to Google interview wearing suit. I did the opposite once though.

A/B testing sound like an interesting idea to try, thanks.

As I wrote below, working in a engineering-driven company with product would tick all boxes. This is the goal of a whole quest. What you're saying about passion was reiterated on HN countless times and something to be passionate about is the main thing I lack in a job.

I'm not a US citizen

Yes, I did. More precisely, I applied to Skype in London for a pretty relevant position. No reply.

I can't comment on me refusing startup offer here without revealing too many details so I won't.

Regarding your other points: I think from the description it's clear that I was doing something meaningful after 2002 (Haskell and Python should be at least noticeable).

Regardless of that, during that 10 years I did lots of stuff. I implemented a blazingly fast key-value storage backed by file-based B-tree from scratch. I wrote a concurrent distributed pool. I'm not a J2EE/Spring/whatever guy. Now one thing I hope is that people reading resumes prefer this type of experience to 20 line Node.js hacks.

I don't state my salary but I heard from tech firms something in the vein of "we can't match a City salary". Sure, I'm ready to take a salary cut for an interesting opportunity.

1. I'm 31, this is not stated in my resume, but can easily be concluded from my education info, etc.

2. What can fix this image in your eyes? Github account?

3. Maybe this is the case. When I was searching for a job last time (and landed this job in a bank) I noticed how differently banks and non-banks react to my resume. In short, for banks I have worked in a company they know and did the things they want to do too. For a software companies, I worked in a boring BigCo and did some things they never will deal with. It's all great but it's not clear how to fix this — I wouldn't say there's loads of attractive tech firms in London compared to SV, so if I'll narrow my search to try to find better suited companies, I'll be left with that Twitter opening.

5. Thanks for that!

I'd like to work in a company to which I can contribute in a more meaningful way — not necessary a startup. A company with a real product and respect for engineers blended into their culture (or even better, engineering-driven) would be a dream place.

Thanks for the advice. I think I have less trouble passing the interview (Google — I hope — is the case where false negative has happened) compared to getting there. On the HN I read a lot about smaller companies looking for all-rounders and I try to position myself as such when I apply. The trouble here is that I see very little positions of that sort being advertised. Startups seem to like RoR and Django juniors the most. I guess, networking is the answer here, as you point out.

Finance industry in London is very insulated (i.e. people never leave banks except for other banks because of the huge salary difference banks able to offer), so networking is a hard thing to crack quickly. I'm working on it though, so at least this I do right.

My view is that this person is potentially going to be a business side of the venture, which means that selling oil leaking Hyundais to people around is a great skill to have.

Not sure writing down will help. His own words: "In the bank, when we were preparing slides for an M&A that buyer will clearly won't benefit from, we were honestly describing all the risks, but for each point there we were able to invent 1000 ways to mitigate it if we wanted to".

I guess, he's similarly convincing in writing as well.