Mulan—Protests and moving out

05-31-20 For some context — this call comes in the context of countless protests currently happening, as a violent reaction to the murder of George Floyd. There is a prevailing sense that things have gone too far, and the only viable option is take things into our own hands, and protest/riot until there are concrete changes, like there were in 1968 with the Civil Rights Act (202006011455). What is interesting that just like how in 1968 202006011502, there was a sort of tipping point and the sense that the country was going to go in a novel, distinct direction, I’m getting sense that something like that is going to happen now as well.

Anyway, in the midst of all of this, Mulan had a conversation with her mom, on 202005301336 5-29-30. The conversation centered around Mulan explaining to her mother what exactly was going on with the protests, and she understood them in the context of police being racist towards everyone. The conversation then steered into experiences that they’d had themselves and heard relating to racism towards Asian-Americans. This was very heartening to Mulan, because although she was aware that when her mom is scared, she still says stuff like black people are dangerous and have no culture”, the conversation that she just had meant that her mom understands the impact of racism, and how badly it can scare and affect a community.

Fast forward to yesterday. Mulan had been not in the best mood for the two days previously, but she’d managed to put it together, without really exploding. I guess she’d reached her tipping point, and sent a bunch of stuff to her mom (instagram posts, etc) that she also sent me: 202006011540.

In reaction, her mom just exploded. Said some disgusting, heinous shit, including

  • R u so proud of her for being like this? Why doesn’t she just go marry a black person and run off why doesn’t she care about her family’s safety instead of coddling black people”
  • Tell her to do stuff a 21 year old should do, not to follow black people bc everything in the world that’s bad is by them”
  • she keeps calling my dad the spawn of black ppl and like
  • Why don’t u join them and let a black person shoot u to death if u love them so much”
  • how dare u bring talk about black people in our house our house is healthy no need for that shit”
  • She also said that she got Mulan her internship, so what right does she have to talk

Even these thoughts are justifiable in a sense — you can say that she wouldn’t say these things normally, and the fact that she’s scared and overwhelmed because of COVID and the riots is the reason why she’s saying them. The thing is though, good people don’t have nearly as much leeway as bad people do when it comes to these kinds of things. At this point, with the things she’s said, the reasons don’t matter - she’s a corrupted, horrible person with whom it’s not worth associating or worrying about. And Mulan won’t be able to get her independence mentally until she isn’t physically dependent on her parents anymore.

We’ll see what happens. But if Mulan decides to separate ties, even a little bit at a time, I’m going to support her every step of the way.


uid: 202006011000 tags: #talks

February 22, 2023

Algorithms to Live By - Book Review

Learned so much, about a bunch of different topics

List of practical algorithms (most of which I gleaned from this book): 202006031201

Outline of notes:

  1. I find that the three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty. — Clark Kerr, President of UC Berkeley, 1958 - 1967

  2. Shoup’s solution involves installing digital parking meters that are capable of adaptive prices that rise with demand (This has now been implemented in downtown San Francisco).

Reason why parking is so hard to find in San Francisco - the policies in place encourage extremely high occupancy rates. (Parking is an optimal stopping problem - every time you’re trying to find parking, you’re deciding between taking a parking that you see, or going a bit closer and pushing your luck.) The adaptive parking policy in San Francisco 202006071540 encourages an 85% occupancy rate, which is 33% better than an occupancy rate of even 90%.

  1. The overall rate at which people found the best possible applicant was pretty good: about 31%, not far from the optimal 37%. Most people acted in a way that was consistent with the Look-Then-Leap rule 202006071543, but they leapt sooner than they should have more than four-fifths of the time.

I think I have a similar problem - I generally leap too soon 202006071544.

  1. multi-armed bandits problem

Always wanted to learn more about this! Now I have the chance. Multi-armed bandits problem 202006071550

  1. For every slot machine we know little or nothing about, there is some guaranteed payout rate which, if offered to us in lieu of that machine, will make us quite content never to pull its handle again. This number, which Gittins called the dynamic allocation index,”, and which the world now knows as the Gittins index—suggests an obvious strategy on the casino floor: always play the arm with the highest index.

Understanding the Gittins index 202006071552

  1. For one, the Gittins index is optimal only under some strong assumptions. It’s based on geometric discounting of future reward, valuing each pull at a constant fraction of the previous one, which is something that a variety of experiments in behavioral economics and psychologists suggest people don’t do. And if there’s a cost to switching among options, the Gittins strategy is no longer optimal either. Perhaps even more importantly, it’s hard to compute the Gittins index on the fly.

Adding this quote to the Gittins index note 202006071552 for some more context

  1. The recommendations given by Upper Confidence Bound algorithms will be similar to those provided by the Gittins index, but they are significantly easier to compute, and they don’t require the assumption fo geometric discounting.

Note about Upper Confidence Bound algorithms 202006071602

  1. The success of Upper Confidence Bound algorithms offer a formal justification for the benefit of the doubt. Following the advice of these algorithms, you should be excited to meet new people and try new things—to assume the best about them, in the absence of evidence to the contrary. In the long run, optimism is the best prevention for regret.

Very excited to hear that there is a formal justification for this! Meeting new people and trying new things 202006071608 is something that I’ve been shifting towards for a while.

  1. What followed the public outcry [to the Tuskeegee syphilis experiment 202006071617 ], and the subsequent congressional hearing, was an initiative to formalize the principles and standards of medical ethics. A commission heat at the pastoral Belmont Conference Center in Maryland resulted in a 1979 document known as the Belmont Report. The Belmont Report lays out a foundation for the ethical practice of medical experiments, so that the Tuskegee experiment—an egregious, unambiguously inappropriate breach of the health proession’s duty to its patients—might never be repeated. But it also notes the difficulty, in many other cases, of determining exactly where the line should be drawn.

Reaction to and impact of the Tuskegee experiment 202006071617

  1. And a growing community of doctors and statisticians think that we’re doing it wrong: that we should be treating the selection of treatments as a multi-armed bandit problem, and trying to get the better treatments to people even while an experiment is in progress.

Read more about Adaptive trials 202006110140

  1. Lawn Tennis Tournaments: The True Method of Assigning Prizes with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method.”

Lol, it’s pretty cool that Lewis Carroll was writing papers about the structure of tennis tournaments.

  1. But in fact it isn’t Bubble Sort that emerges as the single best algorithms in the face of a noisy comparator. The winner of that particular honor is an algorithm called Comparison Counting Sort 202006110147. In this algorithm, each item is compared to a ll the others, generating a tally of how many items it is bigger than. This number can then be used directly as the item’s rank. Since it compares all pairs, Comparison Counting Sort is a quadratic-time algorithm, like Bubble Sort. Thus it’s not a popular choice in traditional computer science applications, but it’s exceptionally fault-tolerant.

Pretty cool how the round-robin format is the most fault-tolerant sorting algorithm. 202006110147

  1. When we think about the factors that make large-scale human societies possible, it’s easy to focus on technologies, agriculture, metals, machinery. But the cultural practice of measuring status with quantifiable metrics might be just as important.

Explored more here: Cardinal rankings are essential for society 202006110153

  1. Linearithmic numbers of fights might work fine for small-scale groups; they do in nature. But in a world where status is established through pairwise comparisons—whether they involve exchanging rhetoric or gunfire—the amount of confrontation quickly spirals out of control as society grows. Operating at industrial scale, with many thousands millions of individuals sharing the same space, requires a leap beyond. A leap from ordinal to cardinal. Much as we bemoan the daily rat race, the act that it’s a race rather than a fight is a key part of what sets us apart from the monkeys, the chickens—and for that matter, the rats.

More explanation for why cardinal numbers are needed in society 202006110153

  1. Deep within the underground Gardner Stacks at the University of California, Berkeley, behind a locked door nd a prominent Staff Only” notice, totally off-limits to patrons, is one of the jewels of the UC library system. Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Elizabeth Bishop, and J.D. Salinger; Anaïs Din, Susan Sontag, Junot Díaz, and Michael Chabon; Annie Proulx, Mark Strand, and Philip K. Dick; William Carlos Williams, Chuck Palahniuk, and Toni Morrison; Denis Johnson, Juliana Spahr, Jorie Graham, and David Sedaris; Sylvia Plath, David Mamet, David Foster Wallace, and Neil Gaiman … It isn’t the library’s rare book collection; it’s its cache.

This is just one of several references to UC Berkeley in this book. Pretty cool that there are so many, not just in reference to literature produced, but to buildings like Moffitt and Main Stacks as well.

  1. Rik Belew of UC San Diego, who studies search engines from a cognitive perspective, recommended the use of a valet stand. Though you don’t see too many of them these days, a valet stand is essentially a one-outfit closet, a compound hanger for jacket, tie, and slacks—the perfect piece of hardware for your domestic caching needs. Which just goes to show that computer scientists won’t only save you time; they might also save your marriage.

Pretty cool that valet stands 202006110209 exist. The discussion was in the context of LRU caches, and how they’re applicable to daily scenarios.

  1. I think the most important tangible thing seniors can do is to try to get a handle on the idea that their minds are natural information procession devices,” he writes. Some things that might seem frustrating as we grow older (like remembering names!) are a function of the amount of stuff we have to sift though .. and are not a necessary a sign of a failing mind.” As he puts it, A lot of what is currently called decline is simply learning.” Caching gives us the language to understand what’s happening. We say brain fart” when we should really say cache miss.” The disproportional occasional lags in information are just a reminder of how much we benefit most of the time by having what we need at the front of our minds.

This is a really interesting to think about mental decline while aging


uid: 202005302204 tags: #literature #programming #outline #writeup

February 22, 2023

CS 170 Application

What other responsibilities will you have next semester?

Currently planning 3 techs, 1 breadth and ~7 hours a week of research (and full-time recruiting which hopefully won’t drag too long into the semester).

Why do you want to be a TA for CS 170?

A few reasons. First and probably foremost, I really enjoyed my time as a 170 reader in Fall 2019; in particular, I really liked the culture on course staff, which was academic but playful, rigorous but supportive, and generally filled with hardworking, talented people who were inspiring and from whom I learned a lot about pedagogy, algorithms and many things in between. While most of the faces next semester would probably be new to me, I’m confident that the head TAs would instill that same culture in next semester’s course staff, and I think it would be a fun and very rewarding experience to be part of it. I’d also like to grow as a teacher and mentor, and I think being a 170 TA would be a great way for me to do that. As a reader, when I would talk to a student about a homework or discussion problem, I would often realize five minutes later that there was a much clearer way I could’ve explained the problem, or helped them out in a way that didn’t hint towards the answer as much. After having shadowed Vishnu’s section and taken notes on things like good toy examples for the Ford-Fulkerson algorithm, common misconceptions about multiplicative weights, and pedagogical practices like Smarties” to keep student engaged, I think I’m much better prepared to teach CS170 material in a more focused, concrete way, keeping in mind pedagogy strategy as well as my previous mistakes. More broadly speaking, I’m interested in contributing towards the course in a more meaningful way than I was able to do as a reader. From internal development to discussion metas, project debugging to coding workshops, I think there’s no shortage of work on course staff’s plate for next semester, and I would love to be a more involved part of those decisions and efforts. Finally, I really like CS170! I think it has a pretty steep learning curve, but the payoff (NP-completeness and reductions, my favorite part of the course) makes it worth it. As a first-time TA, I would really enjoy interacting with the material in a new way, and be able to show students through my passion and enthusiasm why 170 is such a rewarding class.

Please write 2-3 sentences for each of the above positions that you are interested in and why you are a good fit for the position. (8 hour TA, 20 Hour Pedagogy TA)

As a former 170 reader, I think the 8-hr TA position would be the best logical fit for me. If anything, I’m interested in potentially being a 20-hour Pedagogy TA (see response below).

Describe a possible area of improvement for a class you have previously been involved with. What changes would you make?

I’ve had a few conversations with Rishi about some of the initiatives he worked on implementing in 170 this semester. For the sake of transparency, I’ll give my thoughts on something that we haven’t discussed.

I think plagiarism/cheating on HWs in 170 is a tricky problem to solve, and there isn’t really a clean way to address the problem on a course staff level (apart from blindingly obvious cases, it’s pretty difficult as a reader to determine when students are cheating off of each other, especially if the same reader doesn’t grade both homeworks). Therefore, I think the the best way to tackle the problem is the root cause (students being lazy/busy/choosing to spend their time on something else), and I have a potential improvement - gold points.

I really liked Prof. Hug’s gold points idea from 61B, and we would probably need his permission to implement something like this. In a nutshell, gold points are similar to extra credit points, but how effective they are is inversely proportional to how well you’re performing on the exams. Potential complications include the fact that 170 exams are curved, which would make the gold point calculation a bit icky (probably relying on z-scores) and difficult to make public. However, there are some reasons why I think this might be worth implementing:

  1. It would help us smooth out homework difficulty - when I was a reader and student, there were a couple weeks in the course when homework were notoriously long/difficult. I don’t have a problem with hard homeworks, but I think it’s slightly unfair to the students to be a given a homework with significantly higher workload than anything they’ve been given in the past, with no warning. Assigning a question or two (or a subpart or two) to be worth gold points would lessen the workload for students who feel comfortable about their position in the class, and allow struggling students to raise their standing in the class. We do already have extra credit points, but they apply only to homework and with max homework scores being capped anyway, arguably have very little impact.
  2. It would ease psychological stress while not making much of a difference in practice - I think a somewhat common concern that I’ve heard about 170 is that the exams are worth quite a lot of your grade, and since we’ve never had a clobber policy (to my knowledge), it’s pretty easy for students to be disheartened after poor performance on an exam. Gold points would be a big psychological boost for struggling students, as they would know that gold points would help them more than most of the population, so make them feel like they have a better shot at digging themselves out of a hole. In practice, however, since we can fine-tune the algorithm/scoring, we would have a lot of control on the impact that gold points would have, and we could ensure that they don’t make a statistically significant difference to the overall grade boundaries (or a minimal one at that).

If CS 170 goes virtual in Fall 2020, what can we do to make the students’ experience better? How can you contribute to that? Please describe any specific skills that might be relevant.

If 170 goes virtual, I think the most useful change on a course staff level would be to try to make discussion sections smaller. I wasn’t at Berkeley for the semester so I’m not sure what Zoom discussions are like, but I can imagine them being significantly less social and personable than regular discussions, with it being easier than ever to zone out and literally go AFK. To address this problem, I propose having a short presentation at the beginning of each discussion led by the TA, and then breaking out into 2-3 discussions rooms, with one room led by the TA and the other rooms by readers.

Obviously this will require significantly more work than currently expected on the readers’ part, but I truly think it’s the best way that students aren’t thrown into 20-30 person Zoom discussion rooms where they’re even more hesitant to speak up than usual (the chat feature is nice, but it’s no substitute for asking a question and getting an immediate, clarifiable response). I think this will require the TA and her group of 1-2 readers to work closely together for a couple hours each week to make sure that they are on the same page, but I think that’s useful in two ways—first, it’ll provide more interactivity between readers and TAs (which is always welcome as a reader), and second, it should ease the burden on brainstorming and planning for the TA as well. Finally, it’ll also be a great transition/preparation for the readers as potential future TAs.

In terms of what I might be able to contribute to this initiative, I was involved with CSM for 3 semesters, including one as coordinator, so I know a lot about designing, organizing, and teaching small group sessions. I would be more than happy to be a part of the organizing/planning committee that might potentially make this change a reality.

We want to find $C(x) = A(x)B(x)$, and since $A$ and $B$ are degree-3 polynomials, we know that $C$ will be a degree-6 polynomial. Therefore, we need the values of $C$ at least 7 points in order to uniquely determine the coefficients of the polynomial. To evaluate $C = AB$ at at least 7 points, we use FFT on $A$ and $B$ with $n=8$, as $8 = 2^{ }$.


uid: 202005172237 tags: #applications

February 22, 2023

Woke up extraordinarily late, and wasn’t able to be productive unfortunately (I only really wasted 3 hours though). Until @mulan showed up, and I realized I had to get my shit in place. I decided to call my mom and try to tell her that I wanted to stay another week, but instead she ended up convincing both me and Mulan to come back home earlier (and funnily enough, Mulan eventually would take the same flight as me LMAO). Mulan called my mom while I was showering, and apparently she was really nice with Mulan like she always is. Mulan really appreciated it.

Went with Mulan to Beaverbank, where we met Quetza and Harini who had got their birthday gift for Mulan in this cute crate-like thing. I saw/hung out with Quetza and Harini a lot over the last couple days, more than I did in probably the rest of the days combined. It still kind of annoys me how they have their own private group that they still insist on using, although they’re hanging out with me a lot over the last couple days, but apparently it’s because Quetza doesn’t like Messenger? And Mulan and Harini haven’t said anything and I’m not really interested in saying much about it at this point.

Quetza was really sad about the whole situation, so we hung out at Beaverbank for a while and tried to not talk about it but we still talked about it. So hard not to, I guess you have to try to find the best way to approach it. Afterwards, we walked with Jennifer and Elaine to the restaurant, where we planned (after much provoking from Quetza because at first I didn’t know what she was talking about) surprise small birthday candles/celebrations for Mulan and Elaine, so that was nice. I also really really liked my food (this spinach risotto ravioli thing I’m not even sure). Harini got kind of fucked over though, she only got 6 pieces of ravioli although I think her dish might have been more expensive than mine.

Afterwards, we walked 20 minutes in the rain to this bar place, Boteco something, right opposite McEwan Hall. It was pretty interesting, I got this drink that’s p much the national drink of Brazil, Caipirinha, and I’m not sure if it wasn’t shaken properly or something else about the way it was prepared or what, but I really didn’t like the drink. To each his own though, and I was able to finish most of it. People (mostly Quetza and Mulan) wanted to stay for the clubbing part of it, and the rest of us didn’t really say anything (or maybe other people were interested as well).

Afterwards, we went to this Irish Pub place, and it was interesting to see this is how the heart of Britain is like, and what people were actually behaving like and getting wild too. It was a little wild but also a little wholesome, and I think I liked the experience overall.


uid: 202003140000 tags: #journal #edinburgh

February 22, 2023

Daniel’s review

BUILD framework:

  1. Builds great teams:
    • Hires and develops a diverse and high-performing team with the skills to establish and achieve strategic objectives.
    • Cultivates the conditions for cohesion, productivity, and high-performance
    • Works skillfully with others to enable aligned results on the critical few priorities.
  2. Unlocks performance:
    • Demonstrates strong commitment to the team’s ongoing development and pays close attention to creating equitable outcomes for all.
    • Proactively creates opportunities to provide coaching and feedback.
    • Finds opportunities for employees to align their skills, strengths, and interests with business needs.
  3. Inspires accountability
    • Follows through on commitments and ensures others do the same; acts with a clear sense of ownership and authorship.
    • Takes personal responsibility for decisions, actions, and failures and the lessons learned.
    • Establishes clear responsibilities, swim lanes, processes, and metrics for monitoring work and measuring results.
  4. Leads inclusively
    • Creates a climate where people of all backgrounds and experiences are respected equally and can contribute at their highest potential.
    • Encourages dissenting viewpoints and productive debate through genuine listening and curiosity.
    • Advocates for active experimentation, making it safe to take risks and try new ideas/solutions.
  5. Drives change
    • Is highly alert to the future, analyzing multiple scenarios to equip the team to address change, tackle challenges, and shape new possibilities.
    • Proactively removes barriers to change and reduces resistance by creating a clear vision of where the team needs to go and how to get there.
    • Keeps laser-like focus on what matters most during change, driving urgency and intensity.

What is your manager doing to create a positive impact on you, the team, and/or the work?

  • Not micromanaging
  • Taking good care of procedural needs
    • oncall rotations
    • doing all the legwork to set up the quarterly planning process. encouraged research and and innovation, a la leads inclusively
  • Stepping in as a safety blanket
    • Staying technically involved with our work
  • Giving space to engineers to take initiative and

Greater Impact

What is one thing your manager could do to have an even bigger impact on you, the team, and/or the work?

Created from: Review Writing February 2023 202302171152


uid: 202302202307 tags: #inbox

February 22, 2023

# What we look for in a resume

source: https://ift.tt/JEGWtSa tags: #literature #resume #recruiting uid: —

The resume evaluation process is pretty much a black box for most candidates. And it is so because few hiring managers have publicly discussed this. I thought I should start the conversation.

Initially, I was confused about the purpose of this list, because:

It’s unconvincing. There’s a big gap between saying that you know something” and being good at it.” It can weaken your resume. For example, if you consider common skills like Jupyter notebook and git your competitive advantage (the only reason to include them in your resume), I would automatically assume that you have no other competitive advantage. Expertise takes time to acquire. I’m skeptical of people who claim to be experts in too many things.

This is talking about the list of random skills. I need to get rid of this from my resume.

Show how you acquired and use that skill in your job

Consider these two candidates who both mention Flink on their resumes. Which one would you want to talk to?

Candidate A has Flink as one of the 30 items on their Technical skills box. Candidate B explained how they used Flink in their last job: worked on a feature computation platform built on top of Apache Flink which processes 100,000 events per second and serves 10 different ML models.”

Share your expertise on public channels such as: StackOverflow answers, open source contributions, papers, blog posts

Here are some examples that convinced me of a candidate’s expertise in certain technology:

MK - I need to do more about this! I have expertise in several areas, but my writing isn’t out there. This is yet another reason why I should be writing. 202302202137

  1. We look for people who get things done

There are two traits we look for to evaluate whether a candidate can get things done: initiatives and persistence. If you have experience that demonstrates these, please do include them in your resume.

Initiatives To get anything done, you need to start it. There are a lot of people who can see a problem, but few who would do something about it. We want people who, when seeing a problem, proactively do something about it without waiting to be told. We look for initiatives a candidate has started before, such as:

A student club, an event, a team, a project at work. A project that you initiate doesn’t have to be about something new. Projects like writing documents or improving existing CI/CD are also extremely valuable. A startup. A founder told me that his best hires are people who have previously founded a company, even if that company didn’t work out. They know the drill.

Persistence Once we’ve started something, we need persistence to drive it to completion. Some signals of persistence that I’ve seen:

Daily contribution to GitHub for one whole year. Being good at anything that requires consistent effort, e.g. a Kaggle master, a chess master, a professional athlete, etc. Having previously joined another early startup before and stuck around.

I have some examples of this! I should highlight them on my resume / profile.

Examples of interesting projects that I’ve seen:

A personal website that looks exactly like MacOS. A CLI tool to autocomplete your bash commands. Matcha-making robot arm.

I have a ton of examples of this. (My old personal website, some of the Zettelkasten scripts I’ve written, some of my Airtable scripts, etc).

People were quick to point out to me: the most common advice for writing resumes is quantify your impact,” e.g. how much money you’ve saved for your company, how much faster you’ve made your program. Due to this advice, many candidates have told me that they need to have metrics on their resumes. Sometimes, when unable to quantify their impact, they settle for what they can quantify.

Unfortunately, not all that are quantifiable are impactful. Showing the number of code reviews you’ve participated in, without any context, doesn’t say anything flattering. It’d be better if you could show how the learnings from all these code reviews are relevant to the role you’re applying for: e.g. how they helped you become a better engineer.

Metrics that we’d love to see I do care about metrics. I especially appreciate metrics that are presented with two components:

How they can be tied to business objectives. Your contribution in achieving that metric. Here are some of the metrics that we’ve found convincing:

Part of a 2-data-scientist team that owns feature engineering for a fraud detection system. Added 200 new features, resulting in a reducing the false positive rate from 20% to 15%, while keeping the false negative the same. Built caching strategy using application-level caching & Redis for 2000 QPS, leading to a decrease in response time by 50%.

Not all impact has metrics Fixing a bug or helping a coworker out is impactful, but hard to measure. It’s a great signal when your work receives awards and recognitions, such as:

An internal company award (e.g. intern of the year, MVP, founder award, winning hackathon) Promotions, e.g. I was impressed with a candidate that went from being a data scientist to a senior MLE to a staff MLE within 4 years. Glowing recommendations from previous teammates and managers. We actually made an offer to a candidate after two of their references talked about how much this candidate helped and mentored them.

I should mention my promo in my resume probably.

Some tips to shorten your resume Find repetition and remove them. For example, do you need to list all 5 of your personal projects, or the top 3 would suffice? Remove irrelevant experience, even if that creates gaps in your resume. Personally, I don’t care about gaps — everyone needs time to recharge and take care of personal matters. Most resumes I’ve seen can have shorter education sections. Remove common skills, e.g. git, notebook, MS Word/Excel. Find a more efficient format, e.g. using multiple columns. Reduce font size, page margin.

If you’re applying to a small startup, say, of less than 20 people, spend some time researching who works at that startup and email them directly. Send your resume as a PDF instead of an editable format like Microsoft Word or Google Docs. The editable format might not render correctly on other people’s computers. If you can get someone who used to supervise you to talk about how great you are, include their quote in your resume. Quotes from friends/family don’t count. Don’t use abbreviations unless you know for sure your audience knows what you’re talking about.

If you’ve contributed to open source projects, include links to the PRs or a public architectural design you’re the most proud of.

If you’ve been working for 2+ years, remove your GPA and coursework. I care more about your work experience.

Resume resources There are many resources on how to write a resume. Here are some of them:

  1. Reddit has a great guide on engineering resumes
  2. Writing a great resume : YC Ultimate Startup Job Guide
  3. Google Recruiters Say Using the X-Y-Z Formula on Your Resume Will Improve Your Odds of Getting Hired at Google
  4. Why Resume Screening Doesn’t Work
  5. Companies Need More Workers. Why Do They Reject Millions of Résumés? - WSJ

February 22, 2023