Consider instead of a resume, handing your interviewer a Duckstack. This is Duckstacking.
Can’t afford this week’s Duckstack? We’ll put it on your tab. Your Duckstack tab. In your browser. Come on, everyone’s got one, its always open, you’ve been burning thousands of hours of electricity to keep it open, that’s a ton of money down the drain.
We appreciate that.
DUCKSTACK JOBS
Are you a job? We’ll hire you!1
Here is how to start a business. First, plant filing cabinets in the ground. Wear your best suit. Cut down your local forest and turn the wood into paper- filing cabinets are hungry, and will require a lot of food. Continue until you’ve got around 3 or 4 full filled filing cabinets in the ground, this is about the right number for a startup. Once you have these filing cabinet obelisks in your yard, you should make some campfires, to keep them warm. You now have what they in the ‘biz2 a “growing business”. With this in mind, you must beware to keep your business safe from predators. There are other businessmen around much fatter than you, in your very neighborhood, in your trees, waiting to poach your precious capital. You must stay vigilant, protecting your crop, until you are a fat businessman yourself, hiding in other people’s trees, ready to poach their precious capital.
We at The Duckstack3 want you to have a job, a life, a family, kids, self fulfillment, a premium tier free Duckstack subscription, at least one pecan pie (permanent), and to overthrow evil from power. To do that, you’ll need a job. However, it is possible you do not know how to get one! I have written this guide for just such a person. You. Grab your helmet and your most stylish set of sunglasses, sit down, buckle up, get your dowsing rods ready, and prepare yourself for a crash course4 in, “adulting”
PREP WORK
Ritually cleanse yourself. You must be of a clean heart and a strait mind and a fire resume5 to get a job.
When I look at most of my friends who want jobs, and incidentally also most of my friends who want college degrees, I notice a rather glaring error: They do not know what type of a job they want. It is like the man who is hungry but nothing sounds good, he putters around just sort of wanting food but the few things he can think of don’t sound tasty enough to be worthy of such magnificent hunger! A tragic state. The most effective cure for this is to take your nose to a food court and just wander around. You have to know what you want to do because if you want to make money you will need to invest enough time to gain competence or some equivalent currency6 to exchange for it7. “But I don’t even really know what having a job is like!” Well you’ve gotta buy it before you can eat it, school should have taught you focused research but it didn’t, so I am gonna have to. Here we go.
You need to identify an industry to break into. Try looking around Linkedin’s jobs pages, and people in real life, and things you enjoy and do naturally, and think of jobs which could involve those skills. A friend or three can really help brainstorm here. But just picking won’t by itself get you a job, you have to both be able to do it and sell that you can. I can help with the latter, but you’ll have to put in grit for the former.
Start by just looking at Linkedin profiles and resumes of people who have the jobs you want, and observe how they write. You shouldn’t copy 1:1, but do take note of how they present things and what details they feel are significant to put up front. Explore and take note of anything interesting or which catches your eye. There’s no risk to just messaging them and just ask them: “What things should I do to get a job like yours? What sort of skills are important?” Your main priority here is to pick up as much jargon as possible. Ask them what a day in their worklife looks like. Offer to buy them lunch in exchange for career advice. This is always a win-win: you’ll get to talk to someone interesting, and they get food. If you make a big enough survey, you will get a feel for the field, even without working in it, enabling you to tailor your resume8.
Pause Play Pause Play Pause Play: Résumé
Put a big red lipstick kiss on the corner, it never fails9
Now it is time to prepare for your email interview meaning them reading your resume (actually you should be doing everything simultaneously10). There are three steps to this: The profile, the resume, and the insane hoops every employer makes you jump through before they’ll even look at your resume. There’s no way to predict that last part, you never know whether the price you pay to get your resume to HR will be a confession of every girl you crushed on in high school, a pint of your blood, or whether they’ll make you take a two hour IQ test even though being asked to do this is technically illegal. Ideally, you are sorting your job search by company size to avoid that kind of a time sink, but there is also a risk profile here because the amount of people willing to take a two hour illegal IQ test is low enough that you will probably not have a lot of competition for the position. Generally speaking though, you’ll have the best luck at a startup which is willing to pay what you’re worth (very little) while you get the experience necessary to no longer be faking it (but faking it earnestly!).
You should never lie on your resume, but you shouldn’t be telling potential employers about things they don’t care about. Having a fast food job is fine for a starter resume, but the only thing you’re showing here is your ability to keep a job. Don’t overdescribe it, and only emphasize skills that transfer into the job you want- “it was technical work” “it was methodical work” “It was boring work but I can be cheerful in adversity”. This is where your research comes in handy. You should now be able to change statements like “I know C#” to “I’ve done backend and frontend C# architecture in an AGILE/SCRUM environment” and then list a bunch of projects. “But I’ve never had a job before” please stop interrupting
If you haven’t done this type of work before, and you can’t figure out how to make your previous jobs look like they’re transferrable into what you want, then you should be building what Job Fishermen™11 call a “Portfolio”. There are three ways to do this: Tutorials, personal projects, and projects for open source communities (which near-universally have long backlogs of bugs and minor feature requests the main devs won’t get to). Anything to make it seem like you’re “the type of guy who does this type of thing.”
See, you are dealing with HR people here. You need to understand their motives to know how they will read your resume— For them, hiring someone who can’t do the job sucks. You go through all the legal paperwork to hire them, you do the entire months long training cycle for the position, you pay them a ton of money, and then you have to fire the person on run on flat tires indefinitely until you can hire someone and do all of this again to clean up the first guy’s mess. Your target, as a super jobseeking missile, is to convince them you are not a risky hire as quickly as humanly possible- microseconds is best, so that they don’t fire their anti jobseeker chaff emails and instead let you unload firey destruction upon your target (their bank account). This is the point of the resume, the profile, everything. They aren’t looking for someone who they won’t have to train, they’re looking for someone who doesn’t suck. Here’s some broad guidelines:
Streamline your resume. Do you know why twitter is more popular than facebook for meme screenshots? Because they fit in meme screenshots. Through this entire process, you can assume they are trying to sift through hundreds of not even mildly qualified applicant losers who send the same resume to 1000 unrelated jobs a day. Every hiring layer will appreciate you not making them waste their time with a novel.
Non job experience is only relevant as much as you can make it relevant to what you’re applying for. If you’re delivering packages, only say your boss likes you. If you’re doing data entry, talk about meeting work needs in a “technical and quality oriented environment”
With that said, you want to be minimalist about using what I would call “bugcorp language”. You see, corporate HRspeak evolved so that people could signal “professionalism”, or the art of “not being a huge pain for your coworkers to interact with”. It does not signal competence. Since this type of language is algorithmic and formulaic, you are encouraging the company you apply for to evaluate you on strictly computer terms. In other words, minmaxing of the job listing requirements vs your paltry qualifications. You don’t want this! You want it to be readable and eye catching, and the way to do this is to speak simply and to the point12. As before, saving them time is a courtesy.
You want to make your profile and resume memorable, in a good way. You can sometimes get results with high risk joke/bombastic style resumes, but I wouldn’t unless you’re already very secure and can wait. You don’t want to be faceless, you want them to remember something about you. I put that I wear heelys on my resume. When recruiters think of me, in addition to “he passed the screening/interview”, they will remember: “Heelys guy”. This puts you forward in the queue for consideration for a position. Don’t be too crazy or high volume with this, but the faster you can transition your job application from “item” to “human”, the better results you will get. I have heard most HR screenings (at large companies) do not read much further than the first paragraph of people’s resumes.
Linkedin does a good job of letting people scan and honestly discern the relevant career information, but most places will also ask you for a resume. This is an opportunity to reiterate your Linkedin profile in brief (in case it wasn’t looked at) while also showing off your written communication skills. In other words, make sure people proofread the thing for flow and interest because if you misspell words you are not getting any technical job lol.
These are the stats the employer is making combat rolls against, in order: Technical skills, track record, style. So this is what your resume should have. At the top, list your raw stats: “APA formatting. Peer review. Python. C#. Frontend development. Full stack. Analysis. AGILE. SQL. Amazon AWS setup and maintenance. Successfully sold 100000 copies of a viral twitter post. Standup comedy. Blendr. Grindr. Whatever. Obviously only put things up there that are relevant to the jobs you’re applying for— remember what kind of things people with the job you want put in theirs.
Then, list your work experience, so that they know you can hold a job for more than 2 months at a time. If you can’t hold a job for more than 2 months at a time, write that down under the “portfolio building homework” section of your Duckstack notes. If you have something else you’ve been consistent at, such as leading a music discussion group daily or something, put that somewhere so they know you can at least keep a schedule.
Then, put a section labeled something like (depending on the contents) “personality” or just “personal” where you list some tasteful but interesting things like “I love data warehousing” and “I can hold my breath for ten minutes straight and live”. If you can find hobbies or projects relevant to your desired job’s skillset, and put them here. Something to remember you by. Pack as many flattering things in as you can but do not let your resume go over one page, and keep each point punctual. You are entry level.
Belt-fed Résumé Gun
Refresh jobs listings like you refresh social media, desperate for another fix.
You may, like many job seekers, be under the delusion that you have a dream job, and this tragic impulse may lead you to submit applications only to jobs you feel really good about, but really you should be absolutely leveling the landscape with resume gunfire. Let no jobs hide in trenches or bunkers- if you are a fit, force that knowledge down their puny throats. Employers know that they are not going to find a dream candidate. You do not need to meet all of a job’s qualifications to apply. You only need to be able to actually do it.
You will hear a lot of talk about ”networking”, which is great but you just need a job. Reaching out to people with the jobs you want and giving them good experiences with you wanting to learn about the field is good enough for networking! But networking is a floodplain, and you never know when if ever some bread will fall from that table. Instead, continue consistently sending out many resumes daily. I have heard its usually something like 100 applications to 20 interviews to 1 job offer, for most people. Since you don’t know who (or what) is on the other side of any given job application screening, you must consider this a numbers game.
You need to consider that there is no shortcut to high pay but actual honest career experience and investment. Your play in trying to enter a field is to take something cheap, but real. Your other route for this would be contract work, which also requires a fair degree of networking, salesmanship, and boldness, but odds are if you were enough of a self starter for that, you wouldn’t be here. Contract work is always an option later, once you have actually like, had a job.
INTERVIEWING
You’re a lucky winner! Except you ticket is off by one number. Sorry!
Most tech companies will first call you for a 15 minute “phone screening” where HR asks you to read them your resume. This is to ensure you’re 1) real, and 2) actually have some mild knowledge about what you say you know. If you pass the phone interview, you’ll get an email saying its time for the “next steps13”. At this point, you should go ballistic to cover everything you’re worried you lied about by exaggerating slightly.
First, pull up the company’s job application. If there is anything you do not know, learn it before the interview. You don’t need to be an expert, but you need to be able to say “that does this” or say “I tinkered around with that, I used that to build this”. About 50% of any given job listing’s requirements are totally lies, and about 30% of it is essential, and until the interview you have no way to know what bullet points are which. Be prepared to offer at least a little on each.
Then, you should research the company. You should come up with at least two questions you can ask about the job (actual, intelligent questions) that will keep the interview from being one sided. If you pull weight in making the interview process easier, you can convince the company you’ll make their lives easier as well, if they hire you. What are the company values? What is the company’s culture regarding political neutrality? What do your interviewers like about working there? These are all ones I have used, and you should come up with some of your own.
On interview day, make yourself pretty and be 5 to 10 minutes early, to keep it from being weird but to also be considerate. Take a couple copies of your resume to your interview, in a little stupid binder that looks professional. The idea is you can hand copies of it to the interviewers, but in all likelihood they already printed copies out themselves, so you can now use it as a cheat sheet. This reminds yourself of talking points to cover, and areas to make yourself shine.
If its a virtual interview, open notepad on your computer, and take notes on the personal details or jokes people make during the interview, for your followup thank you notes later. The best salesmen do this with their contacts, because they want to make sure each of their contacts feels seen and treated like a person. This may feel fake but it is actually very considerate considering the logistics of how many people they would be trying to keep track of otherwise. Most people would not even try.
A quick dress rehearsal, you are going to be nervous but try to put on a few emotions: confidence, professionalism, and seeing yourself as coming into the interview as a near-equal to the interviewers. You want to try to have a good time, while keeping answers sharp. Most people would rather be doing their jobs than interviewing you, unless you are very entertaining, so they will appreciate your consideration here. Your main selling point is that you are passionate. If nothing else, you want them to get the sense that you are excited about this type of work. That enjoyment for type of work bubbles out of you like a fountain.
You can anticipate some common interview questions. “What is your biggest weakness” and “what is a time you made a mistake?” are very common. Classical wisdom says to answer obliquely by answering with a strength like “I work too hard” or some nonsense, but I do not think you should do this. I think you should say a medium tier weakness and then proceed to give a very concrete strategy for overcoming the weakness, with multiple bullet points. This shows both honesty and initiative.
Now, interviewing is a skill, and you are probably going to suck because you have not practiced this kind of a skill. I knew a guy would apply everywhere, taking hundreds of interviews, with no intention whatsoever of actually taking the job. Just getting experience with interview processes. If you’re worried your resume isn’t strong enough to get you many interviews, you should do mock practices with a friend, and practice just making conversation with people you do not know. Picture yourself as trying to ram your head into a brick wall. You are not doing this for the results, you are here for the PAIN, you are trying to build a callous. You are trying to build up to being able to play a full one hour job interview performance, without pain points, without your guitar strings biting into your fingers and distracting you from playing the right notes.
Praying
Are you under a curse? Remember, this kind goeth not out but by prayer and fasting.
After the interview, you should write, no later than 24 hours but preferably immediately, thank you messages to everyone you interviewed with. This is a neutral and unobtrusive way to make sure your positive traits were remembered. Say you enjoyed the interview and the team seems great and you look forward to hearing their decision and hope that it is you. Then, forget about it because if they decide on someone else they won’t let you know for 3-5 months.
Next, set about keeping the laws of God14. Ask him for help, pay tithing, keep the sabbath day holy, and ask friends and family of faith to pray for you. Sometimes, you just need to switch up what tools you’re use for the nail. There’s a lot of people out there who want to help you. We’re rooting for you. Now get to work.
SOCKS - A REVIEW
Scout socks they never get dirty the longer you wear them the stronger they get, some-day I think I might wash them but something inside me keeps saying not yet, not yet, not yet. But something outside me (my wife) is NOT saying this
While serving a mission in Mississippi, there were a couple sets of elders in the assigned area who were assigned as “Spanish speaking elders”. This was, presumably, because they spoke Spanish. One taught me a Spanish phrase which I have now forgotten, which will be really tragic if I ever get in a situation where its critically relevant. But the English translation was “My foot sweaters are holding a lot of water.” And they really were. I could sense it15.
Socks are a contraption you stick on your foot. This has three main purposes:
Warmth
Making shoes work easier, sort of like a flywheel in your car’s transmission system
sliding around on hardwood floors
Let us examine how well socks perform each of these.
First, socks come in different thicknesses for different warmth needs. This is convenient, but if it is very cold, you could be caught wearing a thinner set of socks, which would put them as tragically inadequate. I would say socks accomplish this objective sporadically, at random, and they are not dependable for this purpose. Instead I would recommend: fire
Secondly, if you wear shoes barefoot, your shoes will stink. Socks absolutely work to prevent this, working overtime inbetween, with their dark arts, and witchcraft, to stave the miasma away. I would say socks accomplish this purpose far better than any other market solution. Because of this, I would recommend everyone purchase at least one dedicated pair of “shoe socks”.
Third, socks work great for sliding around on floors, though sometimes if the floor is dirty or sticky this will not work as well. But that’s hardly the sock’s fault, now is it?
In conclusion, socks earn a 2/3 rating, or 66.6666%. That’s hardly a passing grade, now is it? Do better, socks.
HISTORY
A firework is a little sky-flower, it blooms and dies so quickly. Because you didn’t give it any water.
This week, we seem to have concluded the final chapter of our literal war with a raccoon. As any tactician knows, gorilla warfare is very tough to deal with, since they are so big. But Guerrilla warfare is even worse, because you know, you just know, that in a fair fight, you would whoop them so bad. But in a dishonest fight, they can play their strengths with none of their weaknesses! But now, I have done it. I closed the door while they were outside so they can’t come in anymore. That’s what they get when they tangle with a genius tactician like yours truly.
Also this week, and after many hours of deliberation, we put some posts in the ground for the chickens, so I hope they’re happy.
For the toddlers part, he had just woke up, and was sleepily muttering to himself. “There’s a tape, no, there’s a tape, a tangle” and it was only after about five minutes of this I realized he was actually muttering “what’s that shape, a triangle” at random things in the room. He also played with some superheroes, And kept saying “time to fly!” Except he can’t pronounce the letter f so he’s just going around saying “time to die!” over and over and over again
DISCOSTORY
That’s “disco history”, but of course history itself is “Hi’s story” so you can be forgiven for thinking I am going to tell you a story about disco.
The Duckstack makes no money, we are a non-income-generating service, we are ambassadors of the null, we bank at the void itself, in other words the pay is trash
the business biz
its just me lol
I go into job interviews, I hand them my resume. It is on fire. Works every time. “Works for what?” That’s classified.
“I’m buying money!”
Have you tailored your resume, anon? All the cool kids are doing it
“At what?” shut up
Jobseeking is less of a cycle and more of a manic episode
very official term I think
unlike this post lol
Imagine a hideously long spiral staircase, and every step is one job interview.
D&C 130:20 There is a law, irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundations of this world, upon which all blessings are predicated—
21 And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law upon which it is predicated.
This is because I have upgraded my sense of touch to touch 2.0. That is why I was able to perceive so well that my socks were wet, whereas other, lesser men would have second guessed themselves.