Won't this just make consumers hurt at the end? The most reasonable option as a developer is just to mark up the prices by 30% and then say if you want it the normal price, too bad - Apple needs its cut.
Sorry, this is not your type then. I would definitely spend some more time to look into the applicant.
Yes, for pure coders, this is a terrible resume. It looks like she is using the right side of the brain for something left-sided. But, that's the point.
How many coders do you know can show an interest in both design and code (same for designers)? To have an aptitude and interest in both code and design is something very hard to find, and to be able to express the fusion of the two is a challenging process for many who are aching to stretch the boundary set by text heavy, information-only resumes that do not communicate nearly what you want it to. (How much design skill, creativity, and passion can you communicate with just information?)
Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.
For what its worth though, I do think the graphs are a little hard to read but not hard to navigate, especially if I'm looking for a particular skill to hire for. Its easy to see if she has Ruby skills, for instance - but its hard to see the overall picture of what skills she has without spending a lot of time on it.
> Yes, for pure coders, this is a terrible resume. It looks like she is using the right side of the brain for something left-sided.
Urgh... I really hate to go into rant mode because I know what you're trying to say isn't really relevant to this. However, as an incredibly right-brained person who is a good programmer (or so I like to think :-) and has absolutely zero design skill, I'm always a bit annoyed by this. The whole "right-brained people are creative artists, left-brained people are engineers and scientists" is a 3 or 4 decade old view of how the brain works. Yes, the left brain tends to be a bit more textual while the right brain tends to be more visual, but that doesn't mean that right-brained skills aren't useful to coders or that left-brained people don't have design skills. And even if it did, people can still tap into the other side of their brain.
tptacek did an excellent job of explaining it for you already. It sounds a bit like you are thinking of design as "making things pretty", and it's not. It's about communication.
The message this resume is communicating is that the author also feels that design is just about ornamentation, and the only way it could be more obvious is if the diagram were in the shape of a giant duck. I have to assume she doesn't actually believe that, not least since she hasn't asked for us to psychoanalyse her and it's really, really unfair to try to do so based on this completely decontextualised link. But even so, the design seems unsuccessful to me because it's communicating the wrong message.
Design is about communication, but it does not exclude ornamentation. Design can be ornamental (if the purpose of the resume is to highlight some design skill), however it should not reduce the readability of data as this one does.
Having just read "The visual display of quantitative information" I have this to say to the designer of the resume: remove non-data ink. Increase data density and readability. Especially readability.
I understand why it might not be a great resume, but what about the design. The Previous Work tree diagram is sort of neat, in text form the info that it conveys might be even harder to understand.
It's a bad design because it does a bad job framing the contents. It doesn't solve a problem, instead it creates several. It took me several times longer to figure out her resume than it does for a standard one, not to mention that I still came away not knowing several things that I would need to know.
As it stands, all I can say about her is that she has decent mastery of Photoshop but no understanding of good design.
> I would definitely spend some more time to look into the applicant.
So would I.
> Yes, I would never hire her for algorithm optimization, but if she was building a website that doesn't innovate technologically but rather creates social, cultural, aesthetic or other value (which the majority of startups do) - I would take a second look.
She'd also probably be good at doing design / front-end parts of a website while communicating with back-end developers (who might be doing algorithm optimisation).
I expect she'd be good at talking to designers from a coders point of view too.
>Its easy to see if she has Ruby skills, for instance - but its hard to see the overall picture of what skills she has without spending a lot of time on it.
One can take her resume idea even further and create a CV in an interactive form, so it could meet everyones needs.
The issue of thinking in pictures versus words has always interested me. Wiki says[1] 30% of us are explicitly picture thinkers, 25% think in words and the rest combine both methods. Most entrepreneurs (not sure about the ones dealing with start-ups) tend to drift towards the right, because it's usually easier to generalize your idea by visualizing it, rather than coming to a logical conclusion by using words only. Which, I think, would be slower in this case. So, how come are most (if not all?) of the current cv-websites featuring only long walls of text?
Because all of what you said about how we think has nothing to do with the informational density of the two formats. Words trump pictures for complex ideas.
But isn't "maker of beautiful things" what designer/developers are really aspiring to? And in light of that, isn't recognizing the division just as silly as drawing a venn diagram with yourself in the middle?
I'd suspect anyone who calls themselves a designer/developer is probably good at other things to, like writing, designing meaningful infographics, and playing the resume game with subtlety.
Figuring out yourself is probably the best thing that you can do. A lot of people have the thought that their potential is limitless - this is wrong and dangerous if you equate happiness with fulfilling your potential.
What helped me a lot is learning my personality type based on the MBTI model (or any model, they're all pretty similar) - study it and find out your potential compared to other types. This gives you a more accurate scale to view your potential, and a more accurate scale will give you a more well defined measurement of success.
For instance, personality typing predicts varying degrees of hard-workingness based on nothing else but your disposition. A lot of people can't accept this even though life itself seems to indicate it and have wrong expectations for themselves. This is very unhealthy if you put all your hopes here and can't manage to fulfill it.
I already wrote my thoughts on this here: therubyway.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/how-to-view-yourself/
I used to play with scratch to test it out. I really like it - it is a real programming language, but the big difference is that the blocks tell you all the options you can do while a text editor only shows you white space. The blocks also enforce syntax (prevent spelling/usage errors) and allow you to witness the execution of the program step-by-step (see how your program runs).
I think most of the mental barriers and frustrations of learning a new programming language is not knowing what you can do with it, not knowing the right syntax, or not knowing what the program is doing during execution - the block interface removes most of these problems while still preserving a programmer's mindset. Hopefully this will convince some of the 'hardcore' programmers that it is a legitimate language, even if developing with it is a bit slower than typing.
I haven't played with it for a while - they were planning to add function blocks, but I don't know if they did.
Also - lots of kids actually have played with scratch. If you look at the website, there are 1.1 million projects and 150,000 members. So - this next generation is really poised to make this platform their own. Maybe it will be their TI-83?
The git or mercurial teams should build a Google Wave robot that comes with the software. Not because I want them to, but because its a killer feature. :)
Also for syntax highlighting - take a look at codemirror. I've used it before and have been very satisfied with its performance and functionality.
I had a similar idea, but create the whole IDE on wave. Several advantages:
1) Programmable - you can add in functionality to the IDE much more easily by adding gadgets or even robots.
2) It gets rid of the concept of 'local copy' altogether, and makes your development project accessible from anywhere by anyone. It also means that you only have to set up one test environment rather than everyone's local environment.
3) You can have as many test servers or production servers as you want. One robot to manage multiple servers at once. This robot is essentially a remote command line connected to serveral test/production servers. This makes cheap servers (100$ wall servers anyone?) useful.
Try PhoneGap or Titanium Mobile. Both of them use Javascript, HTML, and CSS to build apps that can be run on both phones and have access to the native controls.
This observed pattern can be described by personality typing. I like to think of it as 2 classifications of how our brain explores - depth-based vs breadth-based search. Problem solving vs random walk. Directed vs discovered. Convergent vs divergent, etc. Essentially, one type enjoys digger deeper (defined by getting closer towards a goal) into a topic, while another enjoys expanding outward (exploring a topic, no goal required).
The majority of people enjoy doing one type of thinking and hate doing the other, which causes this culture difference. Depending on the class of problems that a field has to tackle, the community may be dominant in one or the other. Mathematics is a field in which a random walk style of exploration can yield fascinating results, while an engineering field is much more likely to benefit from a focused approach. Usually, the type of thinking that yields more results becomes dominant in the community and gets the right to snub the other.
The difference and contention, I think, arises purely out of the dislike of doing the type of thinking that you're not naturally inclined to. This dislike is rooted in unfamiliarity and a strong sense of worth that parallels our inclinations. The contention is rarely settled by arguments of logic, efficiency or practicality - it is not that people don't believe in logic, but rather because the arguments don't address the core issue. The core issue is our natural inclinations, which at its roots, are innate or at least solidly ingrained in us by the end of childhood.
