> trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there.

This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job.

IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.

I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012.

No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.

When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product.

I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.

The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.

But no one to a first approximation is going to do it. Statistics show that on average, people only look at your resume for 6 seconds.

And I’m not asking questions about what you did 30 years ago. If I ask you the standard question as an interviewer “tell me about yourself”. I expect you to succinctly walk me through the parts of your career that are relevant to the job.

I am then going to ask behavioral questions to assess whether you have the traits I need, the “tell me about a time when…” questions to see if you can work at the needed level of scope and ambiguity.

I then ask them what they were most proud of to work on a dig into their technology choices and tradeoffs

I generally disagree with the CV point but the "6 seconds" anecdote doesn't ring true to me except for obviously unfit applicants. I have definitely spent less than 10 seconds looking at a resume but it's because I immediately rejected the applicant - for example, the role is a solid mid-level or senior role and the applicant just graduated college and has no relevant experience or open source projects.

I want to be interested in your resume. If I'm interviewing you, you can be absolutely sure I've spent at least 20-30 minutes reading over your resume, looking up your past companies/schools, getting a sense of what you've done and pulled out a few relevant or interesting things to ask about.

I think the "6 seconds" thing is mostly HR drones who are barely qualified to write the resumes they're reading, let alone judge them, and are simply sorting into "yes" and "no" piles.

Do you think that most managers spend 30 minutes reading over a resume and do everything else they have to do?

I can guarantee you that none of my managers spent more than 5 minutes looking over my resume and 4 of my six lady jobs have been strategic early hires, 1 was at BigTech where one person in my loop was my eventual manager and my current one was for one of I think 25 highest level IC positions at my current company of 600-700 people.

I am not buying the oft-quoted statistics in HR/Recruiting which like most popular adages is mostly made up from a few anecdotes and widely disseminated which people then accept because "everybody says so". The key is to hook in the reader from the summary/qualifications on the first page.

The "tell me about yourself" question is one of the worst to ask and i never do this. It is so open ended that people start rambling. Instead get them to focus (this also calms their nerves) by asking about notable jobs picked from their resume "what did you do as ... at ..." and dig more as needed. Do this for a couple more jobs if available and you will get to see how confident the candidate is, how he communicates, the depth of his knowledge and his modes of thinking. From here, you generalize to what the job actually needs and give the candidate some idea of the job and its environment and ask how he hopes to fit in and contribute. This makes things clear to both interviewer and interviewee.

I also do not place much weight on personality/psychology tests/questions. People generally cannot be truthful in their answers to questions like "how do you deal with conflict with your co-worker?" etc. Here i trust to "gut feeling" based on non-verbal impressions, verbal communication and pointed questions (challenge the candidate by taking a contrarian stance and see how he responds).

Finally, i make sure that the interviewee at the very outset understands that though i am the interviewer it does not mean that i am more knowledgeable than him in his areas of expertise. This works great by boosting his confidence which then leads to a more natural interaction.

Recruiting/HR is a complex art where you have to consider various factors to build a picture of a person (suited to a role) from factual data and psychology. IMO a good way is to start with an understanding of Self-Determination Theory of Edward Deci and Richard Ryan - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory For a nice overview, see the book Why we do What we do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward Deci.

The fact is that every open req especially for remote positions get hundreds of resumes within the first hour, who is going to read that? An 8 page resume goes straight to the trash. Part of a job of a “senior” is good communication skills and knowing your audience. An eight page resume shows laziness since they didn’t take the time to make it shorter and no one is going to listen to or read anything 8 pages especially as a manager who just wants to know what is going on a high level.

I ask the tell me about yourself question partially to assess their communication skills and getting to the point.

Do you think people who are conducting an interview loop at large companies are going to go through an 8 page resume? Yes I’ve been on both sides of a BigTech interview loop and have gone through the interview training process there.

Even at smaller companies when building a team and I’ve had 80% of the say so about who gets hired, I still needed evidence to take the CxO/director and couldn’t go by “gut feel”.

And when dealing with customers (I work in consulting now) or “the business” you have to have a strategy to deal with interdepartmental conflicts, different stakeholders have different priorities, some people don’t want to change etc. I’m not talking about a conflict with another coworker arguing about which design pattern to use.

You have missed the point of the long CV. It is not that the recipient has to read everything. As mentioned, the first couple of pages is the resume. However the details are there to provide more info. as needed. Contrary to what you think i have had very good response to such a layout. Often times they see a company/project/technology there (even if old) which rings a bell with them and which they are then eager to discuss. That is the point; Give them all the info. in which you are strong so that they can make a better informed decision. The same is what i look for when i am the interviewer; a few bullet points on a 2-page resume which basically tell me nothing is useless.

Incidentally, Jeff Bezos does something similar with his 6-page memo (plus annexes) for meetings; Same idea different domain; More details help better decision-making.

"Gut Feel" is absolutely needed to give your input on Team Fit, Conflict Management and similar other intangible Human factors. Some companies are doing Myers-Briggs etc. but i give them lower weightage (because they can be gamed by practice) over subjective feelings.

A report on a interviewee should include objective assessments (knowledge, experience etc. and your inferences based on them) and subjective assessments (temperament, maturity etc.)

I worked at AWS for three years (Professional Services). Using Amazon as an example of a good corporate culture and how companies should behave is not the argument you think it is.

But I see a few scenarios.

You have a strong network and the resume is a formality. In that case it’s easy enough to tailor your resume for the job. I don’t need to put that I wrote FORTRAN and C on VAX and Stratus mainframes in the mid 90s. There is no need for an 8 page resume. The year before last I had two offers for strategic positions based on my network.

The second case you are targeting a company where you know you have a competitive advantage, again in that case, you only need to have a resume that focuses on what gives you a competitive advantage. In my case, now I focus on strategic cloud consulting positions that focus on app development. In that case, I only need to focus on my job at a startup in 2018, talk in broad strokes about my time at AWS (working there automatically gets call backs by the way), and when the day comes, when I leave my current job as a “staff architect”.

The worse case is if you are spamming your resume far and wide and you are looking for any generic job. I look at an 8 page resume and then I have to take the time to see what is this person trying to communicate - it goes in the trash and I move on. I have hundreds of other resumes that I can get through quickly.

Of course if the company is reaching out to me, it’s even easier to tailor my resume for the job requirements. I have my “career document” to pull from either way that is as long as needed.

But even then I’m not going back even to the low level work I did in 2012 for Windows CE devices.

I am not talking about general Amazon corporate culture so your caveat makes no sense. I am talking about the practice of one specific technique which leads to better decision-making and which has also been validated by other people adopting it. Here is Jeff's own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg

I consider 2-page resumes no better than a powerpoint presentation (i.e. almost useless) and furthermore when i see people tailor it to what they think i should know i consider it maybe trying to hide something. This is because by omitting companies they take away a vector for me to check references and more. Note that this is different from highlighting relevant experience/knowledge.

Your scenarios are nothing new from what you have already mentioned earlier; And spamming is not what i am talking about. That is a policy decision made by each person based on his circumstances.

You and most folks are simply parroting current practices in HR/Recruiting which are broken and need to be rethought from the ground up. To repeat once more, all details matter at some level in recruiting. As they say "measure twice and cut once" and "slow is smooth and smooth is fast".

Well, since most people at least in the US don’t do 8 page resumes and yet they get hired everyday and most managers aren’t asking for 8 page resumes and aren’t complaining about two page resumes, you ever thought you might be the outlier?

On the other hand, do you pay top of market? Would anyone be clamoring to expand their resume to eight pages because you prefer it?

Well, did you ever realize that you have a "bee in your bonnet" regarding the number 8 which is not the point of my example resume? It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels) with nothing omitted. The rationale has already been pointed out viz. a) Different job fit than applied for job b) background reference checking c) indicators of self-motivation/adaptability/breadth of thought etc. all of which are very relevant.

As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken. So being a outlier in this case is good. Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter. When i do send in my CV, recruiters invariably call me back which then helps me to prime them with specific relevant experiences listed in the CV which they then forward to the actual interviewers. It allows one to stand out from the crowd.

Finally, most 2-page resumes look all the same with keywords/boiler-plate sentences/paragraphs with nothing giving me any additional insight into the person. The self-imposed page limit causes them to self censor their words/sentences unnecessarily leading to loss of info. For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.

Well, seeing that my success rate over 25 years (not counting my first job the i got via a return offer from a internship) is also 100% across looking for a job 9 times as far as send my email to a recruiter -> get an interview with only two pages at most, I think I’m doing pretty good.

Admittedly before 2020, those were local recruiters with local jobs.

> It could be any number smaller/larger as long as it gives all the details (at varying levels)

Let’s say I was looking for a job next year. I wouldn’t want to use my one hour I have with an interviewer to talk about anything I did before 2016. I’m looking for high level staff roles at small to medium companies. I want the entire conversation to be about signaling that I have competencies with leading a project from initial discovery with stakeholders to implementation and getting it done on time, on budget and meets requirements.

I also want to signal that while my breadth in my chosen domain is wide and I’m going to highlight projects that show that breadth, I’m not a paper tiger who can’t do hands on keyboard software development or “cloud engineering”. I can demonstrate that easily in 2 pages by leaving off anything before 2016.

Within those 10 years I can demonstrate a steady growth from being a barely competent lead developer, to being an architect at a startup, to consulting and working on projects with increasing “scope”, “impact”, and “ambiguity”.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

> As i already mentioned, the current HR way of doing Recruiting is broken.

Even if recruiting is broken , it’s a “gravity problem. Just because you may not like gravity, if you jump out of 50 story building, you will die. While I’ve avoided the leetCode grind, I’ve played the “how to be successful at system design and behavioral interviews” game with aplomb. You adapt to the reality

>So being an outlier in this case is good.

Or you can just be an outlier by having a skill set and experience that sets you apart from the crowd in whatever niche you decided to pursue.

> Also in a paradoxical way, this breaks the ice and becomes a conversation starter.

The last thing I want to do is discuss how cool it was programming in Fortran in the 90s. I once had an interviewer ask me a “trick question” about C in 2014 for a C# development position. Even at the time I was six years removed from any C programming. I answered it and got the job. But that was a distraction from the narrative I was trying to convey. My single focus at an interview is to demonstrate that I have both the soft and hard skills that make me fit for the role.

> For example; compare "Expertise in C++ programming" vs. "Expertise in C++ in Multi-paradigm designs with focus on performant code". A few additional words but orders of magnitude information.

Not really, the latter sounds like the fluffy “I work well with people”. I communicate my expertise on my resume by telling how I used my knowledge to achieve an outcome.

“By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.”

This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.

I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process.

One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects.

The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.

Honestly I don't want to read narrative prose which is as likely to be a lie as anything else on the resume/CV. A half page might be fine if you've got a dozen CVs to look at for an ultra-specific role. If you just need a half-decent Golang developer and have 80 resumes that pass the initial screen? I'm not reading 40 pages of fluff, and if I'm not going to read all of its it's unfair to read any of it.

If you are tailoring your resume to the job, it is incredibly easy to fit everything you need into 2 full pages. If your job descriptions have a bunch of unrelated stuff it tells me you're spamming this exact resume out to anyone who will read it which is already a big negative signal (though not fatal). I'm hiring individual contributors, not Executive VPs, so the qualifications we're actually looking for can easily fit on .75-1 page. If you're going for COO of a publicly traded company maybe the CV route makes sense, but truthfully if that's what you're going for the CV itself is pretty unimportant, and you're still probably just paying someone else to craft it for you.

I just don't see the benefit in someone with 10-15 YOE in mostly expired tech writing pages and pages about stuff they did a long time ago.

I already pointed out in my other comments that the first couple of pages is the resume but the details are given to consult as needed. This is how it should be since more details help one make better decisions. The current Recruiting/HR practices are broken which nobody seems to question. Human Resource is very important in this highly competitive economy where a single employee can change the entire future of the company, and yet people are using keyword searches, bullet point explanations and snap judgements for recruiting. Add in the fact that there is almost no training given to new employees nowadays which means it is even more important to recruit the right person.

You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making. For example, lets say somebody did backend Java five years ago but are doing frontend React now and want to change back. Unless i see it in their CV and ask about it i will not get to know that their heart is set on backend work even though they are interviewing for the frontend job. I can then decide to steer them to what they want thus benefiting the company greatly. A person who gets what they want is a happy, productive and loyal employee.

A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations (a 2-page resume is a powerpoint presentation in my book) for important meetings but insisting on a 6-page memo (with any needed annexes) containing all the details. Hear in his own words - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYb5pBVBXEg

> You need all the signals you can get to properly evaluate somebody. This means all experience/technologies etc. are relevant at some level for decision making.

So you want my experience writing FORTRAN for mainframes in the 90s? My experience with C which I haven’t touched in a decade? VB6? Perl?

> A similar idea in a different domain is Jeff Bezos' banning all powerpoint presentations

Well first there is a huge difference between what Amazon says in public and what actually happens (like the Bullshit leadership principles especially the one about being the best employer). I can tell you from personal experience from actually working at Amazon that there were a lot of PowerPoint slides in internal meetings and especially when dealing with customers. I did my share of them.

Second, instead of using an analogy, we can actually talk about resumes at Amazon and how the hiring process works. No one ever submits 8 page resumes, nor does anyone in the hiring loop bemoan the fact that we only got 2 page resumes. I was on both sides of the hiring process there.

Never did they mention a word in the “Make Great Hiring Decisions” training program that they really like candidates to give them 8 page resumes.

Do you really want to keep bringing Amazon up as an example to someone who actually worked there?