Interesting Links for 26-10-2011

[andrewducker]

• Tap your Android phone on a Coke machine to buy a cold one.
  (tags: android google coke ecash )
• Ron Howard's Dark Tower series picked up by HBO
  (tags: stephen_king DarkTower TV HBO )
• Pictures of the Northern Lights as far south as Arkansas.
  (tags: Arkansas usa auroraborealis photographs )
• Vint Cerf Answers Questions About IPv6 and More on Slashdot
  (tags: VintCerf ipv6 networking Technology )
• Why do people still put "Excel, Word" on their CVs?
  (tags: culture cv jobs computers )
• Women aren't becoming engineers because of lack of confidence that engineering is right for them.
  (tags: engineering gender women confidence )
• Knowledge is Power. France is Bacon.
  (tags: quotes reddit funny misunderstanding children )
• Joss Whedon on 'Much Ado About Nothing' stealth production
  (tags: shakespeare JossWhedon )
• Architecture in Charts. Funny charts.
  (tags: architecture visualization funny )

Comments

[flick]

Why do people still put "Excel, Word" on their CVs?

Because I tried not doing, and found that all the pimps added them back in when they re-typed my CV to send to their clients? Sad but true.

[nickys]

... and a couple of the jobs I applied for recently listed them as necessary skills.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

My bank card has had NFC capability for about the past 5 years but I've never seen an outlet where I can use it. I think one of my credit cards has the same functionality. Hopefully the technology will take off as it would save a lot of time/hassle for small purchases.

[andrewducker]

The Greggs in Edinburgh support them. But only for payments of £3 or more, which rather misses the point, I feel. I assume that there's a transaction charge.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

There will be a transaction charge. Mine's a Visa Debit card which a retailer the size of Greggs will probably pay something like 20p processing fee per transaction.

[andrewducker]

Aah, looks like there's a transaction fee of between 10p and 50p, depending on the type of account retailers have. I doubt they'll want to eat that on a 62p sausage roll.

(That's a standard Visa transaction fee, Paywave doesn't seem to cost extra.)

[steer.livejournal.com]

There is, believe it or not, a sound reason to put Excel, Word on your CV for some jobs. I know from speaking to people in HR that in jobs which attract large number of applicants operate on a "tickbox" approach to triage applicants. If your CV says you have that skill, you get a tick, if your CV does not explicitly say this you do not. Because they may be dealing with hundreds of applicants for every job then they cannot dig into too much detail. If a skill is essential to the job you may not get a tick even though you obviously have that skill. A real example I was given was someone who did not get an interview because she had not put on her CV "Speaks German" which was essential although she had put on her CV "Lived and worked for four years in Germany."

So if the job specification says "MS Word and Excel essential" put it down because there is a chance that the harrassed HR person who likely is not technically skilled will put you on the pile for "lacks essential qualification" when going through hundreds of applicants.

So the answer to his question Has anyone missed out on an opportunity or lost a job when they forgot to add Microsoft Office? is "yes, almost certainly many people have."

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

If the job spec says it, then, clearly, put it. But I think this is just talking about programming-type jobs, for which MS Office competence is usually taken for granted and/or irrelevant.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I think this is just talking about programming-type jobs, for which MS Office competence is usually taken for granted and/or irrelevant.

Sure, I realise that but you have to also realise that for many organisations the person who writes the ad may not be a technical person (and, indeed, may be working from an outline form for ads from several years ago) and the only person who sees your CV (and puts it on the reject pile) may not be a technical person. So, to you or me, if we see someone has listed Java, Visual Basic, C++ and python we may well take it for granted that they can somehow navigate the complexities of MS Word. The person deciding if the application is rejected may well see Java and Visual Basic only as patterns of letters which need to be matched against "essential" and "desirable" criteria on the application.

I would not be at all surprised if a large number of qualified and competent people have not made it to the shortlist pile where technical people look at the CV by not listing "irrelevant" skills.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Yes, this.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh. God.

[Anecdote]
My CV at the time listed 'Xenix, Solaris2.x, Linux, FreeBSD2&3, NeXTStep' because that was the list of things for which I'd written code and/or adminned.

A Recruiter rang up and went 'So, d'you know unix?'
[/Anecdote]

Feckwits.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Colour me unsurprised. I could also easily imagine a junior administrator in HR putting you on the "reject" pile for not having Unix knowledge an essential skill for the Solaris admin job.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Back when I was actively seeking work in the real world (as opposed to actively avoiding the real world in academia), I kept getting phonecalls from recruiters who assumed that, because I had "SunOS/Solaris" on my CV, I would be a perfect match for a job requiring AS/400 skills.

Thankfully, most red herrings were caught at that point, but I can remember interviewing for a company in Wickford who were quite put out that they'd been sent a fresh CS grad with knowledge of IP networking, when the spec that they'd sent to the recruiters specifically asked for 5+ years X.25 experience.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Oh FHS...

Mind, I told one recruiter that I was interested in 'Anything but the NHS...' (because I'd been doing NHS-related things and didn't fancy wasting any more of my tax money on doomed projects)

You can guess where I was sent off for an interview...

[cyprinella]

I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of recruiters are fuckwits who must get paid only in the number of people they send on to interview. Every single single-job recruiter I dealt with when I was unemployed had no true concept of the job and how I did or didn't fit into it. The temp agencies I worked with were better, but even there it was pretty much sheer luck that I ended up with my current position thanks to them randomly cold calling a company with an ad for the database program I was familiar with. Never ever ever dealing with recruiters again.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

I've been turned down for a job for not having "XSTL" knowledge.

XSLT is something of a specialisation of mine. I can even spell it correctly.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

...only as patterns of letters which need to be matched...

Java != JavaScript

I'm going to forge a special Clueiron with that one on it.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I just did a quick "sanity check" on a jobs website and was able to find well paid senior technical jobs which listed MS Word and MS Excel as essential skills. Yes, really, and not VB programming jobs either. I know it's ridiculous in this day and age but there you go.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Word and Excel often are important skills, but they're rarely demonstrated by those who get the jobs, or those who claimed to have them.

The Why do people still put "Excel, Word" on their CVs? (http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IKnowApps.aspx) link at the top is a good one. I particularly like the idea of clicking on the pilcrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilcrow) of a "Word expert's" CV and looking at how much whitespace they used to lay it out.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Hey, I never knew they were called pilcrow before today. I think my whitespace would likely be terrible as I habitually prepare documents in markup languages (usually LaTeX) where whitespace is not important and I have the old-school typewriter habit of a double space after a full stop.

[woodpijn.livejournal.com]

"Knowledge is Power. France is Bacon."
That's brilliant!

"Why do people still put "Excel, Word" on their CVs?"
I once had an agency, for a supposedly technical job, ask me if I knew how to use Word, and when I said yes, demand why I hadn't put it on my CV then? I concluded they were a bit rubbish.

[skington.livejournal.com]

All recruitment agencies are rubbish, though, so you were probably right.

Also, the reason why agencies want your CV in Word format? So they can add bullshit keywords, and remove your contact details so the company can't contact you directly.

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

I take it then that you're at a disadvantage if you choose to submit your CV in OpenDocument format, or (gods forbid) LaTeX?

[andrewducker]

Depends. If by "disadvantage" you mean "They will have no idea what to do with the file you sent them." then yes.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Well I submitted my CV in a PDF compiled from LaTeX -- submitting raw LaTeX would be rather foolish -- and nobody complained or, as far as I know, was able to tell. It's good because it can easily have "pluggable" sections (e.g. "this one's a bit more engineering, I'll have the 'engineering' middle section and the referees from those departments).

[spacelem.livejournal.com]

Obviously I'm not about to go sending people the raw LaTeX! I wouldn't be very happy if someone replied saying "I can't edit this, please send a Word document" though.

LaTeX is certainly handy for a modular CV, using multiple files, /input and judicious use of %.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

Charge vending machines to your phone? Has that been ordinary in Japan for 5 or for 10 years? I forget.

'Much Ado About Nothing'? pfft See if you can find "Ill Met By Moonlight", the punk version of Midsummer's Night's Dream that Somtow shot in his back yard in L.A.!

[camies.livejournal.com]

At the interview for the job I have now I was asked why I hadn't listed my extensive history of IT support on the application form. I was the go to person for Word and Excel in my last job but one after all - it is now sort of more relevant than having a few years experience in .NET and C# and having a very outdated Novell CNA. I do not have Word on this computer and submit things in .RTF (not .WTF!). Occasionally application forms will be in a version of Word too advanced for anything on this machine, even NeoOffice, to deal with.

W/r/t the architecture piece, yes, and isn't it nice to see anything relating to architects (rather than buildings which aren't the point here, in the way that theoretical maths isn't about numbers of things, just about numbers per se). Even the namaes of architects' pets - I don't know about any ones named after suicidal writers (Sylvia? Dave?) but at once recalled that Tadao Ando's dog is called Le Corbusier, because apparently "he is much loved but kept firmly in his place".