[geeks] RHCE advice

[Michael Parson]

On Thu, Jul 27, 2006 at 11:47:36AM -0400, Francois Dion wrote:
> On 7/25/06, velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>wrote:
>> On 7/24/06, Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at verizon.net>wrote:
>>>> From: Michael Parson <mparson at bl.org>
>>>> Date: 2006/07/24 Mon PM 01:46:06 CDT
>>>> To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>>>> Subject: Re: [geeks] RHCE advice
>>>
>>> <snip>
>>>
>>>> I don't send my resumes to gigs requiring a degree in the field,
>>>> it's bad enough that they want my resume in Microsoft Word format.
>>>> But that's another rant, for another thread, on another day. =)
>>>
>>> You know, if you make a plain text file and end the filename with
>>> .doc, it will most likely "count" as a Word format file, and load
>>> properly (though it will be in the default font for the PC -
>>> obviously)...
>>
>> I've gotten in the habit of telling folks that I don't have M$
>> Office, and that I can either send them pdf, plain text, rtf, or a
>> doc file that I have no idea about how it will appear.  Sadly they
>> most often go for the doc.
>
> Isn't that crazy? What is really silly is when you are talking to a
> Unix shop and they want a doc. Huh?? I would get on Sun salesguys all
> the time when they would send me a document in MS Office (powerpoint,
> doc, excel). Or when they'd show up with a laptop running Windows.

Had two Sun guys show up yesterday to replace the controller module in
one of our 3510 arrays.  One of them had an OLD laptop (he said he's
had it for 15 years), dunno what it was running, he said it had died
on him at the last job he had that morning, screen went out, he was
bummed.  The other guy had a Fujitsu Lifebook running Solaris, dunno
what version, but he was running CDE as his desktop.

>> I've only folks that have wanted the plain text or pdf versions are
>> direct recruiters/managers.  The head hunters want to be able to cut
>> and paste your resume into their company's template.  Frankly, many
>> do a crap job of it, as I've seen the results in manager's hands when
>> I get to the face-to-face.
>
> I had a resume that a recruiter send me on which I lost over 1 hour
> to just read the thing. What they do: they copy and pasted the resume
> in their template, and beside looking extremely ugly and alignment
> problems left and right, their template uses something that makes half
> the document unreadable under Star Office or Open Office. Even word
> 97 wouldn't open it so I had to hunt down a machine with Office XP to
> view the whole resume.

This is why I have catdoc and antiword installed on my NetBSD box, so I
can at least extract the text fairly cleanly out of these sorts of chop
jobs.

-- 
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org