Re: Tie Po Zin Re Zu Maize (and how U dress)

[John Stamps <stampsj -at- REMEDY -dot- COM>]

Hi Ralph --

> Having typos in your resume is like appearing for an interview
> wearing a torn and dirty tee-shirt (blouse), scruffy jeans, unkept
> hair, and a bad case of halitosis (bad breath).  Beside that, it just ain't
> cool!!!

It kinda depends on the suck-up points you want to score and how you want to be
perceived as a potential candidate.

If the T-shirt had a really cool logo from a project you busted your derriere
on, that in itself may be a GREAT reason to wear it to an interview. It'd be a
great intro to what books you wrote on the project, your team skills, how hard
you worked, etc. In addition, you immediately identify yourself with 90% of the
technical writers out here in the Silicon Valley. Writers out here who know
their worth & are confident of themselves might well deliberately decide to
show up in an interview wearing such a T-shirt & Levis. Sans the halitosis --
we do have some standards.

If a company out here did NOT hire me because I wasn't wearing a tie, I would
NOT want to work for that company. OTOH, I do understand such interview attire
would probably be suicidal outside the narrow confines of the Silicon Valley.
There is a difference between confidence AND arrogance & disrespect.

This also may be A Guy Thing.

It's something of a joke here when you see someone in a suit roaming the halls
because you immediately know it's someone interviewing. I even heard the
comment the other day from a fellow writer, "Hey, who's the suit?"

But other than that, I agree with you 100% -- a typo in a resume is an
UNFORGIVEABLE sin. Here when we're blowing through dozens if not hundreds of
resumes, we're looking for ANY reason we can find to winnow out candidates. A
typo is certainly reason enough to be excluded, without some other mitigating
circumstance in your favor, e.g. you're the CEO's brother-in-law or some such.

Quite honestly though, how anyone gets hired at a way cool company is A Great
Mystery and surely evidence of God's grace & sense of humor.

A little wacko local color in The Valley,
John


--
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St John The Exorcist of UNIX/NT Daemons
aka John Stamps                                         Remedy Corporation
Senior Technical Writer                                 415-254-5309
                                                        Fax:415-903-9001

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