DHH recently made a point that is very close to my heart - that all your CVs are full of shit.
Every time I meet someone who thinks their CV is read carefully and taken seriously, I die a little inside.
This isn’t their fault. We’ve built an entire industry around the fiction that these documents matter – resume consultants, keyword optimizers, formatting guides, action verb dictionaries. The infrastructure of self-deception runs deep. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: after reading a few dozen CVs, every recruiter develops what I call “CV blindness.”
It’s a peculiar form of semantic satiation. You know how if you repeat a word enough times, it loses all meaning? That’s what happens when you read your fiftieth claim of “architecting scalable solutions” in a single afternoon. The words dissolve into meaningless patterns. The achievements blur together into an undifferentiated mass of corporate speak.
All CVs look the same. They have to – we’ve industrialized their production. The same templates downloaded from the same websites. The same LinkedIn articles teaching the same “power words.” The same desperate keyword stuffing to game the same ATS algorithms. We’ve created a perfect system for producing identical documents that say nothing.
And yet, candidates still believe in the CV’s power. They agonize over bullet points, debating whether they “spearheaded” or “orchestrated” that project. They calculate the precise percentage by which they improved some metric. They craft elaborate descriptions of routine work, transforming “I fixed bugs” into “Enhanced system reliability through proactive issue identification and resolution, resulting in 34% reduction in customer-reported defects.”
Meanwhile, I’m sitting here with 200 CVs for a senior engineering role, searching desperately for something – anything – that suggests a real human being who does real work. Some spark. Some sign of life. Some evidence that this person exists beyond the carefully curated fiction of their professional summary.
You know what that spark looks like? It’s never in the CV. It’s in the GitHub profile showing actual code. The blog post explaining a gnarly problem they solved. The conference talk about a spectacular failure. The open-source contribution that reveals how they collaborate. The side project built to scratch their own itch.
These artifacts tell me what your CV never can: that you give a damn. That you build things when no one’s watching. That you think about problems deeply enough to write about them. That you’re part of a community, not just hunting for a job.
The future of hiring isn’t better CVs – it’s the death of CVs altogether. We’re moving toward a world where your work speaks for itself. Where your digital footprint reveals more truth than any document ever could. Where the very idea of summarizing your professional worth in two pages of formatted text seems as quaint as a fax machine.
So please, stop polishing that CV. Stop asking me if you should use Calibri or Arial. Stop calculating whether you have enough action verbs per paragraph. Instead, go build something. Write about it. Share it. Engage with others who are building.
Because while you’re optimizing your CV for keywords, someone else is shipping code that I can actually read. And guess who I’m going to call?
The CV is dead. Long live the work.