I didn’t know who he was, but read a bunch of his blog entries yesterday. Brilliant guy, and seemingly very well grounded. I liked his analysis of Wikipedia’s contributor base and community structure (or lack thereof).

Aaron Swartz was a kid… he was not ready to take on the world, and the book was thrown at him for some minor electronic mischief, more on principle than on any actual harm or damage done. (Perhaps it was a tactic to “encourage” settlement because our courts are overburdened, but this reality of the way law is applied seems hardly laudable; it is not justice, it’s coercion.)

Imagine the torture and torment he must have felt at the end. There needs to be a larger lesson for us, a lesson about a scary place in which we’ve ended up (the danger lies below the surface, where we’ve pushed anything we consider challenging), and how we need to wake up and gradually change that direction. In our zeal for creating this perfect garden kept free of weeds we’ve saturated the ground with weed killer; we keep out the plants and flowers by which some people or entities feel threatened, but we’re really throwing out our best collective long-term hope. The sensitive voices of intelligence, rationality, principle, and outside-the-box thinking which only results from the box itself sometimes being ignored with respect to thought and action, are trampled by a cold system with particular ends in mind, which are often not ends which serve the common good but rather the system itself, and the predictability of the inside-the-box careers of those with authority.

That said, also, I believe that individuals need to learn another kind of “grounding,” which is how to become more free of the tremendous emotional torment and dissatisfaction which the mind is capable of generating. If we freeze time and look at just one moment… just the physical reality, minus all these complex social concepts and entanglements of thought, then what is there? What leads a person to kill himself? It’s an evaluation of self-worth (ego), a prediction of continued pain and lack of self-worth or respect in an imagined future (ego), a form of confusion which leads to unclear understanding of worth to others, and a lack of the sense of being wanted and of understanding one’s actual value to the world. This is all mind-generated pain.

This should be approached from two sides, although I only have vague ideas: (a) From the top down, by striving to treat people fairly and in seeking to minimize stress by disallowing the law to be used as a threat, and (b) From the bottom up, by teaching people how to stand up for what is real (this present reality) and fight against the imaginary demons of depression and just the general discomfort which their own minds generate, which come from thinking (and taking the judgments, often imagined, of others, and even themselves, personally) as opposed to simply being here and now which contains no such concepts.

But pain is also real, and this is all “easier said than done.” All of us, but smart people especially, tend to get attached to words and concepts, to ideas and principles, and this forms a kind of prison. We can say “don’t take it personally” and but really, can you just decide not to take it personally, to turn off your emotional reactions to something, which is coming from a deep and conditioned place? It takes a lot of self-work over a lot of time… work looking inside oneself (meditation) and out at reality (presence) to lower the security level of that prison of as-is concepts.

Here’s what I think about resumes and about applying for jobs. My opinion may be somewhat speculative, because I was lucky enough to never be a frequent resume-submitter and so I can’t tell you how much of a response my resume, in particular, garnered. Nor did I spend as great a deal of time sprucing it up as I would now, given the opinions I’ve formed of late. But I’ve been on the other side of the table a couple times, reviewing resumes for a position, and I base what I say on that.

The bulk of this entry is based on an e-mail I wrote to a friend, who asked me to critique her resume. I wasn’t too impressed, and simply began stating what was on my mind. She called it a harsh criticism, but I say, good! Hopefully this was constructive, but in any case that should be a push to make things better.

I’m also going to revise this at a later point and write a longer article. As you’ll see, I have some strong opinions on this here topic.

The e-mail:

Hi ______. I’m going to ramble a bit about resumes in general and then tell you what I think about yours. In general:

Here’s what I think. First of all, design is very important. In a sea of resumes which look all the same, something that stands out because it’s well designed and looks different yet still elegant would get people’s attention. At least, it would get mine. I’ve seen many resumes that look like yours, and I find myself looking for little things which no one really ought to care about, but in the absence of other points to make decisions based on (because like I said, most resumes have almost the same content as far as my knowledge is concerned) that’s what draws my eye. I look for:

• Grammatical correctness: consistent and correct use of tenses and punctuation.
• Appearance: fonts, font sizes, and so on.
• Amount of content. Number of job history positions and my overall impression of the skill involved in each one.

Contrary to what many might think, when you say less about each position you’ve held it often conveys more. If you bullet-point a bunch of rather menial tasks you did at each position, it says that you consider these menial skills important and not just incidental. The less you say about each position, the more intelligent and ambitious you seem, because you aren’t concerned with the basics. For example, of course everyone knows Word and Excel, so there’s no point in stating that. But can you “develop complex reports” in Excel? (Even that doesn’t say too much, though.) Can you build PivotTables? (Aha, specifics– now we’re talking.) Do you know how to use array functions and edit (not just record) macros? To repeat, everyone knows how to use Excel but I want to know if you’ve figured out how to use the more advanced features it provides.

…It’s the tone rather than the concise description of a position you held, because why would I care, with regards to the position I’m hiring you for, exactly what you did? You’re going to be doing something at least slightly and possibly considerably different now, so why do the specifics of your past positions matter?

Basically, were I looking to fill a position, I would be looking for someone intelligent, adaptable, and pleasant to work with.

This may be just me, but I’m big on grammar and consider good communication skills and writing skills important and therefore indicators of education level and intelligence (again, in the absence of other indicators). So, I find that I judge others based on grammar usage in their resumes. Typos aren’t excusable, because you have plenty of time to put this particular document together and proofread it repeatedly and have others proofread it, ad infinitum. It should be representative of the best you can achieve given all the time in the world, or at least nearly so.

Places to which you apply get a sea of resumes looking all alike. Don’t underestimate how little yours will stand out, and how easy it is for someone reviewing it to put it on the “discard” pile for the pettiest of reasons. They have to.

All that said, here’s what I say about yours. Little points, but were I scanning through resumes for a position, I would consider each one somewhat important and each one would add to my overall impression:

• You need something between your phone number and e-mail address.
• The whole top row is shifted too far to the right.
• You have some sentences ending in periods and some not.
• The dates after the entries in the “education” section are not a range, so they seem to mean something different from the dates below in the same column, for which there is a range. That’s a little inconsistent.
• The Tahoma font does not have a “natural” italic version. Windows creates a “fake” italic version by slanting the letters. This looks bad. Verdana is the same thing as Tahoma with more spacing between the letters, and it does have a real italic version.
• You need to list more skills than just Word, Excel, STATA, and the other two acronyms. (I don’t know what those are.) STATA is good as are the other two, but like I said a couple times, everyone knows Word and Excel (and Powerpoint). What else are you good at? I think you read a lot, maybe there’s a way to incorporate a mention of that. You’re outgoing, easy to work with, and have somewhat of a “tell it like it is” personality. Those are much harder points to incorporate, though, but if you find a way to subtly show them I think that’s worth a lot.

To sum this up: When I, as an employer, have a stack of fifty resumes to look through to fill one position, I look for excuses to eliminate each resume. A small mistake, inconsistency, or typo can be such an excuse. I have no choice but to eliminate resumes for the pettiest of reasons. On the other hand, something unique and interesting about a resume can lead me to put it in a pile of its own. Normally it’s hard to be unique and interesting, but one way to achieve that in a paper document is through the use of elegant and professional design. Colors would be especially helpful in this regard, and I don’t care what is traditionally done. Color printers are ubiquitous, and if black and white is the tradition, I will give you all the more credit for being willing to throw away that dogma.

Here is an article I found a while back which I almost entirely agree with. The author is looking for a programmer, but his points are just as valid when applied to any field: Joel on Software on Resumes.