Verbal Intelligence
Verbal intelligence means deriving implication from word choice. An inexperienced person, in my opinion, says things like “Mechanical Engineering is so good because you can get a job in any industry.” I’ve heard this so many times. It’s completely wrong. The world is so competitive these days that if you don’t specialize in undergrad, you’re at a big disadvantage.
At some point I understood the world well enough, so I never considered a phrase like that again, and I think I was also more open-minded when I was younger because I didn’t know as much, so it was harder to have a strong opinion.
In the meantime these memes keep spreading downward from the older to the younger people. If I was younger and wiser, I should’ve asked people why they believed that to be true. I would probably inevitably realize they were spouting nonsense. But you only hone your senses and perception once you’ve seen enough things or you have someone teach you directly.
There was an older guy in a college lecture who said things such as “in life, you can change your job and situation.”
Inexperienced people also think that in life, if you want to change your career and become something else, you can do it. The caveat is that no person who strives for expertise says this because they know what it takes to reach the peak of any field.
So with regard to a resume, website, and so on, the words you use and the way to characterize the world already defines how you’ll be seen.
The more into a field, the more perception people have, and the more gradations of words they use to describe differences. A good hiring trick might just to have someone draw a vocabulary map of a specific technical area and then to ask them to explain such things while being wary of those who overuse jargon to imitate expertise.
I heard that in the construction industry, all the people use the same terms when there is a problem. “There has been a miscommunication.” The Americans commonly use the phrase ”necessary and proportionate.” The Chinese often use “contradiction.”
Tools and Perception
If you write your resume in LaTeX, that already tells me something about your technical skills.
Design resumes in Figma are a world of their own but don’t get parsed well by ATS. For those, I’d look at font choice, portfolio, spacing, and so on.
If you have a personal website, I’ll look at how features are implemented if it’s styled with remark plugins. Do the inline code blocks have the default backticks on them (`)? How are the Lighthouse scores? What is the content of the posts?
Not perceiving these skills doesn’t rule out the inability of someone, but having these things are a strong signal for ability.
Websites
Just like most websites built with Wix are bad and show low skill, so are most resumes built in Word, but not all websites or Word resumes are bad. But I’ve looked at tons of portfolios on Cofolios and I think there was only one decent Wix portfolio on there, but there was only one Wix portfolio and many so-so Webflow portfolios.
On the other hand, many low-quality politicians, Princeton’s “drag queen story hour,” and other people of similar persuasions often have a poorly designed Wix website.
Use Wappalyzer to check for what tools a website is built with. You want to deconstruct a website (showing CSS outline style so every div has a border of red), portfolio, or person to the fundamentals to see what ideas and skills they’re built with. It’s like looking at the small details and plumbing of a house.
Can design generalize?
I think it’s important to ask yourself where skills generalize. Someone good at backend isn’t necessarily good at laying things out visually, despite the existence of people like Knuth who wrote an entire typesetting system because he wasn’t happy with how textbooks are published.
It’s easy to get tricked by good appearances. I lost money on Desktop Metal but made money on Tesla using the same rationale.
Since Meetup is dying, I’m much more bullish on lu.ma than Partiful simply because the former has good technical design (website loading speed, no flash of unstyled text aka FOUT) and visual design, likely showing a team with higher skill and ability to execute.
My ability to build a website or write code does not generalize to my painting skill or long-distance running. I find both of those boring. But I suspect it will generalize to my understanding of finance, geopolitics, business, mathematics, history and so on because I find those topics interesting, but I might not achieve “true expert” category in any of them.
I think an undervalued part of recruiting will involve figuring out what things people do are correlated with ability. Leetcode selects for high skill, but only a very specific type of person is willing to go through that to a level of high expertise or fundamentally enjoy it. So you end up with low agency people. People like me who create a giant blog for fun are also a specific type of person.
Interviewing is about creating a correspondence between short-term performance and long-term performance for the benefit of the group.
Other Factors
The primary things one can figure out from a resume are:
- The companies someone has worked at (“prestige”)
- A lot of people who work at “top” companies actually do really boring work.
- The design and general “vibe”
- If you print your resume on resume paper versus printer paper, that says something about your perception. If you submit something that sucks, that likely says something about your taste. Even if you’ve done a ton of great internships, submitting a .txt file says that you’re arrogant.
- Portfolio
- Necessary factors such as US Citizen, visa, etc.
Secondary things which can be gamed, esp. for early career:
- Changing the wording around to say “X metric, etc.”
- Changing the wording around to say “hard-working, on-time, etc.”
The higher the proof of work, the less likely it is to be fake. The more you can demonstrate your ability, and produce content, the better. I think there’s only a limited amount of people who are well-known in any specific field. To be among those is not as simple as creating a slapdash portfolio after college to look for a job.
Rather than just listing company logos, real proof and attestations will require direct links to verifiers’ sites.
Stuff to put on resume
Date, location, combinations of italic, bold, plus spacing to indicate semantics/hierarchy/classification structure/ontology, title of position, subtitle if needed.
Portfolio, citizenship/visa, email or phone contact, LinkedIn or other relevant socials.
Summaries are probably okay and tend to convey an element of truth about a person, but long-form content or a call is usually better at this.
Anti-signals
Typos showing lack of understanding of a word’s significance. Effect/affect and other common ones. Immediate toss.
Don’t put your GPA if it’s not above 3.7–3.8 or so. I have high standards, and college isn’t that hard, so if you put a 3.2 GPA it just shows that you accept low standards. My GPA is lower than I’d like due to health reasons but also because some college classes were not meaningful or had an engaged community, and I prioritized what was important to me.
These are not resume-specific: lying and stealing.
Other anti-signals in real life: horoscopes, “manifesting” culture, belief that God will provide rather than your own actions (different from circumstance/luck that seems divine), reddit, commenting your email under a LinkedIn post that says they will give you a list of internships or jobs, misrepresenting yourself.
Personal things I believe are incompetence (or rather, just a sign of being the median person) but are a little extreme for most people:
- Watching movies and/or Netflix
- Too much time laughing/hanging out
- Being dirty and unorganized
Despite listing all of the above and seeming exclusive and selective, I don’t enjoy working with mean people.
It’s not an exhaustive list nor a definitive one. People can develop their skill very quickly.
If you’re low-quality, it’s not worth other people telling you what you did wrong. You’ll just hide your most obvious low-quality indicators and trick other people. It’s useful on an application to ask for people’s LinkedIn just so you can see if they reposted any copium/positivity posts. But you can’t tell them that asking for their LinkedIn is to judge their interactions, otherwise, they’d delete it. Similarly, it’s like a firm giving you multiple options for a meeting, but one of them is 1AM to test your determination.
I also have specific circumstances: no family support, things that will become problems in a few years’ time that require me to speed-run acquisition of material assets, leading little time to the other things in life.
Most college essays are not good, even the good ones
Even examples of successful college essays are no more than a protracted torture to read for me at this age, made of drawn out allegories between some subject and the author’s character, and overuse of words and phrases such as “my eyes scanned,” “I discovered my path,” and so on. There is no real depth of emotion nor simple explanatory power.
They are too descriptive because the descriptions and clauses are an attempted ornamentation of self as a more complex, cogent writer, being led to do so by the formulaic style of high school having seen no other way, rather than the refinement and discernment one should naturally develop. Yet it is an impossible task for someone in a milieu where nobody reads good content to even know of good content.
And should you ask for advice, nobody can actually tell you how to write well or make a good resume. If I see a poorly formatted resume, there would be 15-25 things that need changing, and taking the time to actually explain it all would take hours. Moreover, having received this information is not enough: they likely lack the skill to change it and are apt to forget.
Most people can only see expertise a few steps ahead of them. I remember thinking college math textbooks were impossible to read. I now find the thought of going through a class and not reading them horrific, for I realize independent reading is a backbone of study and dependence on the teacher to summarize things is a horrible habit, one picked up and enabled only because most high schoolers and college students don’t care at all, making anyone who does pay attention stand out.
Now, let’s look at some writing.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday
For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town.
“Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time.”
Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power
A pack formed from a second group may come across the first pack and, unless they fight, they may join forces for temporary purposes. But the separate consciousness of the two quanta will always be preserved.
In such cases the mourners want it forgotten that they were the hunters. The victim they bewail serves to purge them from the blood-guilt of the hunt.
Paul Graham, Why Nerds are Unpopular
And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah
When a city is highly developed and has many inhabitants, the prices of necessary foodstuffs and corresponding items are low, and the prices for luxuries, such as seasonings, fruits, and the things that go with them, are high. When the inhabitants of a city are few and its civilization weak, the opposite is the case.
All other conveniences, such as seasonings, fruits, and whatever else belongs to them, are not matters of general concern. Their procurement does not engage the labor of all the inhabitants of a city or the largest part of them. Then, when a city has a highly developed, abundant civilization and is full of luxuries, there is a very large demand for those conveniences and for having as many of them as a person can expect in view of his situation. This results in a very great shortage of such things. Many will bid for them, but they will be in short supply. They will be needed for many purposes, and prosperous people used to luxuries will pay exorbitant prices for them, because they need them more than others. Thus, as one can see, prices come to be high.
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope
Under commercial capitalism, merchants soon discovered that an increasing flow of goods from a low-price area to a high-price area tended to raise prices in the former and to lower prices in the latter. Every time a shipment of spices came into London, the price of spices there began to fall, while the arrival of buyers and ships in Malacca gave prices there an upward spurt. This trend toward equalization of price levels between two areas because of the double, and reciprocal, movement of goods and money jeopardized profits for merchants, however much it may have satisfied producers and consumers at either end. It did this by reducing the price differential between the two areas and thus reducing the margin within which the merchant could make his profit. It did not take shrewd merchants long to realize that they could maintain this price differential, and thus their profits, if they could restrict the flow of goods, so that an equal volume of money flowed for a reduced volume of goods. In this way, shipments were decreased, costs were reduced, but profits were maintained.
C.S. Lewis (I just found this online, idk the book)
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.