Resume Critique
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
A company doesn't care you consolidated. A company does care that you saved the board money which can then be reinvested or paid back to them. Money is the key.
Yes, money IS the key. Exactly why you don't want to put in easily disputed opinions of value based on abject failure as the comparison.
This is like being a taxi driver and every day claiming that you saved the company $30K by not driving your taxi into a brick wall. Sure, you COULD have driven the taxi into a brick wall and lost all that money. But "not failing" is not how you evaluate your value in IT (or anything.)
It's exactly because money matters that you never put something like this on a CV. And because they can't evaluate the internal decisions from the previous job, and are hiring you to do technical work that is applicable to them and not to the previous company, that you put what matters for THEIR money on the resume.
Remember also, saving $100K to a company with a $100K budget is a huge deal, to one with a billion dollar budget means nothing. All of the details that would make the savings meaningful are left out - which tells a hiring manager that money is not understood. Hence my concern - the last thing you want to do is demonstrate a lack of understanding of money when money is what matters.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
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Hyper-V.
^ that doesn't say much. -
Hyper-V consolidation; prevented a costly replacement of 16 physical servers to one more powerful Hyper-V host saving the company over 120k.
^ says far more impressive stuff. I'd want to bring you in and ask more about that. Not about the one word 'Hyper-V'.
No, the second isn't impressive, it is filler and speculative. It doesn't show that something smart was done, it compares what was done against abject incompetence. Hyper-V may be too little, but the subjective opinion as to value or adding in totally useless details look like desperate filler at best and outright deception or incompetence at worst. I would avoid this.
As a hiring manager what I see in a line like that is a poor understanding of the reasonable value comparisons combined with having worked in an environment where value is difficult to perceive because the bar is set so low.
We'll have to disagree here. One shows a word. The other shows some thought and deeper understanding.
I don't agree, it shows a misunderstanding. You can state that you did a consolidation project. But stating the savings suggests a huge misunderstanding of the project and how to evaluate it.
It really doesn't. If you are unable to show savings made between solutions, and able to show how your solution is better and saves money, then you are missing something critical.
You can't. He didn't compare it to KVM or Xen, it's being compared to "failure." This is my point. It's a false, opinion of value, not actual value. That's why it is SO important not to put it there. Because it shows both a certain level is misunderstanding of IT valuations or at least suggests it. How did Hyper-V save so much money compared to other options that are just as free? It looks like the resume writer is confused or just lying.
It could equally show off hypervisors. That's not the point. The point is why any hypervisor bwas used... Why any consolidation was done.
It's exactly the point. A hypervisor should already have been used, if consolidation was needed, this suggests bad things. Why was consolidation not already done? This isn't "a big improvement" over something good. This is "fixing a major failing." Who created that failing in the first place and why is it there?
The logic here is that your resume should look better if you work for awful companies and bring them closer to baseline competence rather than doing amazing work at amazing companies? That doesn't make sense. And I don't know any hiring manager that would agree that "creating big problems them fixing them minimally" should look better than just doing a good job in the first place.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
A company doesn't care you consolidated. A company does care that you saved the board money which can then be reinvested or paid back to them. Money is the key.
Yes, money IS the key. Exactly why you don't want to put in easily disputed opinions of value based on abject failure as the comparison.
This is like being a taxi driver and every day claiming that you saved the company $30K by not driving your taxi into a brick wall. Sure, you COULD have driven the taxi into a brick wall and lost all that money. But "not failing" is not how you evaluate your value in IT (or anything.)
It's exactly because money matters that you never put something like this on a CV. And because they can't evaluate the internal decisions from the previous job, and are hiring you to do technical work that is applicable to them and not to the previous company, that you put what matters for THEIR money on the resume.
Remember also, saving $100K to a company with a $100K budget is a huge deal, to one with a billion dollar budget means nothing. All of the details that would make the savings meaningful are left out - which tells a hiring manager that money is not understood. Hence my concern - the last thing you want to do is demonstrate a lack of understanding of money when money is what matters.
That taxi example is just silly. Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here. I'm saying by explaining in a brief way what was done and why, is far better than just listing a word. Anybody can send me a page listing various words in IT. I care not for that. I want a short reason of why that word was listed to actually show some depth.
Like I said, we'll have to disagree on this one.
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What we are looking at here is simple, baseline job requirements. Industry best practices. Running a big consolidation project takes effort and creates experience. That's worth showing. Real numbers, facts.
The "savings" are pure opinion and only exist by taking an arbitrary failure state (buying tons of unneeded servers, over buying licenses, not following simple best practices or common sense) and using that failure as a gauge for success. That's completely crazy.
Since it is an arbitrary failure point, why not double it? For example... in this case sixteen servers were consolidated to one saving $150K. But since the failure decision was never made, why not assume that they would be even more foolish and buy thirty two servers and the savings here is $300K? Where do you stop when the comparison is against "irrational failure"?
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
A company doesn't care you consolidated. A company does care that you saved the board money which can then be reinvested or paid back to them. Money is the key.
Yes, money IS the key. Exactly why you don't want to put in easily disputed opinions of value based on abject failure as the comparison.
This is like being a taxi driver and every day claiming that you saved the company $30K by not driving your taxi into a brick wall. Sure, you COULD have driven the taxi into a brick wall and lost all that money. But "not failing" is not how you evaluate your value in IT (or anything.)
It's exactly because money matters that you never put something like this on a CV. And because they can't evaluate the internal decisions from the previous job, and are hiring you to do technical work that is applicable to them and not to the previous company, that you put what matters for THEIR money on the resume.
Remember also, saving $100K to a company with a $100K budget is a huge deal, to one with a billion dollar budget means nothing. All of the details that would make the savings meaningful are left out - which tells a hiring manager that money is not understood. Hence my concern - the last thing you want to do is demonstrate a lack of understanding of money when money is what matters.
That taxi example is just silly.
My point exactly, it's silly exactly like this is.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
A company doesn't care you consolidated. A company does care that you saved the board money which can then be reinvested or paid back to them. Money is the key.
Yes, money IS the key. Exactly why you don't want to put in easily disputed opinions of value based on abject failure as the comparison.
This is like being a taxi driver and every day claiming that you saved the company $30K by not driving your taxi into a brick wall. Sure, you COULD have driven the taxi into a brick wall and lost all that money. But "not failing" is not how you evaluate your value in IT (or anything.)
It's exactly because money matters that you never put something like this on a CV. And because they can't evaluate the internal decisions from the previous job, and are hiring you to do technical work that is applicable to them and not to the previous company, that you put what matters for THEIR money on the resume.
Remember also, saving $100K to a company with a $100K budget is a huge deal, to one with a billion dollar budget means nothing. All of the details that would make the savings meaningful are left out - which tells a hiring manager that money is not understood. Hence my concern - the last thing you want to do is demonstrate a lack of understanding of money when money is what matters.
That taxi example is just silly.
My point exactly, it's silly exactly like this is.
No. The example I gave isn't silly. The Taxi example is. A professional in a Taxi company could say 'Hybrid Cars'. Or they could say 'Hybrud Cars were rolled out to the FL saving X over annual maintenance' - for example. Thats a closer comparison. Not 'driving in to a wall'.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
I want a short reason of why that word was listed to actually show some depth.
Agreed. But avoiding the brick wall isn't a reason, unless you are just being silly. This example doesn't tell me, at all, why Hyper-V was chosen. It just tells me that "filler opinion" is being thrown in to make something that should be baseline is being considered a huge success.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
A company doesn't care you consolidated. A company does care that you saved the board money which can then be reinvested or paid back to them. Money is the key.
Yes, money IS the key. Exactly why you don't want to put in easily disputed opinions of value based on abject failure as the comparison.
This is like being a taxi driver and every day claiming that you saved the company $30K by not driving your taxi into a brick wall. Sure, you COULD have driven the taxi into a brick wall and lost all that money. But "not failing" is not how you evaluate your value in IT (or anything.)
It's exactly because money matters that you never put something like this on a CV. And because they can't evaluate the internal decisions from the previous job, and are hiring you to do technical work that is applicable to them and not to the previous company, that you put what matters for THEIR money on the resume.
Remember also, saving $100K to a company with a $100K budget is a huge deal, to one with a billion dollar budget means nothing. All of the details that would make the savings meaningful are left out - which tells a hiring manager that money is not understood. Hence my concern - the last thing you want to do is demonstrate a lack of understanding of money when money is what matters.
That taxi example is just silly.
My point exactly, it's silly exactly like this is.
No. The example I gave isn't silly. The Taxi example is. A professional in a Taxi company could say 'Hybrid Cars'. Or they could say 'Hybrud Cars were rolled out to the FL saving X over annual maintenance' - for example. Thats a closer comparison. Not 'driving in to a wall'.
Rolling out 16,000% overprovisioning is just like driving into a wall. Abject incompetence. It's exactly the same.
This isn't about improvements over industry baseline.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
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Think what you want, I'm just helping you to understand how hiring managers and business people will view statements like that on a resume.
Imagine if someone claimed to be saving the company $100K per year by ordering plastic Bic pens instead of gold plated ones. Everyone would laugh at them for making up such a silly alternative to show value. That's what is going on here. Its' a false comparison to make something trivial and standard appear like a big success.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.
If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.
If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.
Because, whatever reason for any bad project. Whoever can stop bad solution for far better, should say that. Stopping the bollocks up project and putting something better in place is a success.
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And, like I said, if "abject failure" propositions are being considered, why not add in some even crazier ones - enough to inflate the success number to whatever you want? There is always someone willing to quote you any insanity in the hopes that someone is so clueless as to the think that the more that you spend, the better the deal. Someone will quote thirty, or even one hundred servers. And a few SANs to go with it. And networking gear. And fibre channel switches. And so forth. With that many servers, it would be easy to get quotes showing a savings in the millions. I mean truly trivial.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.
If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.
Because, whatever reason for any bad project. Whoever can stop bad solution for far better, should say that. Stopping the bollocks up project and putting something better in place is a success.
Not success that you want to brag about to someone else. Telling them that the place you worked for was incompetent but that you were at least "less incompetent" is absolutely not what you want to be showing off on your CV. You want people to want to hire you, not want to avoid you.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
And, like I said, if "abject failure" propositions are being considered, why not add in some even crazier ones - enough to inflate the success number to whatever you want? There is always someone willing to quote you any insanity in the hopes that someone is so clueless as to the think that the more that you spend, the better the deal. Someone will quote thirty, or even one hundred servers. And a few SANs to go with it. And networking gear. And fibre channel switches. And so forth. With that many servers, it would be easy to get quotes showing a savings in the millions. I mean truly trivial.
The number is trivial. Of course. I'm saying it's the fact that you prevented the f*** up that's important.
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Again, this is like saying you worked for a taxi company where other drivers were constantly hitting walls but you decided to try not hitting walls. Then putting that as the mark of success.
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@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
And, like I said, if "abject failure" propositions are being considered, why not add in some even crazier ones - enough to inflate the success number to whatever you want? There is always someone willing to quote you any insanity in the hopes that someone is so clueless as to the think that the more that you spend, the better the deal. Someone will quote thirty, or even one hundred servers. And a few SANs to go with it. And networking gear. And fibre channel switches. And so forth. With that many servers, it would be easy to get quotes showing a savings in the millions. I mean truly trivial.
The number is trivial. Of course. I'm saying it's the fact that you prevented the f*** up that's important.
Right, and I'm saying two things....
- Don't put opinion numbers. If you dont' think it is important, why is it getting space on the CV?
- Don't use "abject failure" as a mark of success. That you HAD to prevent a problem like that is not something that you should be mentioning. No amount of mitigating a failure of that magnitude will look impressive - that's the taxi / wall problem.
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@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.
If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.
Because, whatever reason for any bad project. Whoever can stop bad solution for far better, should say that. Stopping the bollocks up project and putting something better in place is a success.
Not success that you want to brag about to someone else. Telling them that the place you worked for was incompetent but that you were at least "less incompetent" is absolutely not what you want to be showing off on your CV. You want people to want to hire you, not want to avoid you.
Why less incompetent? How is that a thing here? This is saying on the CV that you stopped the team from being incompetent... By actually being competent.
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Bottom line... it doesn't look impressive. It looks embarassing.
