Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Bad Conotation can hurt your job!

Sometime ago I was going to apply for an interesting job position at some hi-tech company. I was too lazy to rethink about what I put long time ago in my resume. I just updated for the latest/ position I was working on only.

After I submitted my resume, a friend of mine working at that company were complaining with a word (that I put long time ago and stayed there for such long time): Hacking. One manager was even so allergic with the word and caused I never got called for even interview.

According to Wikipedia, a 'hacker' word is defined as a person who is dedicated to software programming and who builds elegant, beautiful programs and systems. From google, I found mostly positive meaning about this word. In general, "Hacking" means to break a code (as part of testing its stabilitiy, reliability and security), as well as to fix software in a quick way. The word itself originates from the top university in the world, especially in computer science, MIT. At the time, these experts popularized the word among themself and then through BBS (no web or email at that time). According to PcMagazina, the word has been interwined and mistakenly equalized with word "Cracker" (usually bad persons who try to get a free software or other illegal activities) mostly by computer illiterate persons (media). These "true" hackers then answered back with a new terminology "White-hat hackers". So a true hacker usually is a white-hat hacker.

Regardless of wrong interpretation of this word by these ignorant people (sadly, some of them even software managers!), I learned my lesson. Never make your resume more than 3-4 pages (eventhough you have such a long and various experience). Be careful with our resume, otherwise you will have to pay the consequences.

4 comments:

  1. wah bedol desa ke tlab, nih?

    manager di hi-tech mana yg alergi sama kata 'hacker' teh? perusahaan gua bukan?

    resume mah SATU halaman aja, oom. boleh dua kalo phd. gitu katanya...

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  2. Kalau menurut kata "Om" Bill Gates di website Office (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/TC060915191033.aspx?pid=CT101448941033), template resume saja sudah SATU halaman.

    He...he.., kecuali emang kalau resumenya emang isinya 'template' doang, bolehlah satu halaman. :-)

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  3. Pak Aldrin,

    The following site might be useful :-)

    http://www.quintcareers.com/resume_length.html

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  4. ANother reason to 'cram' more info into resume is that nowadays many job recruiters use search-engine (not necessarily Google:-) to search certain keywords.

    If you have the experience and match what they need, you get more chance to be called.

    That was at least my experience :-)

    ReplyDelete