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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

Clyde's portfolio will have "built a custom cms from scratch" and then in my interview I'll ask why from scratch instead of using a framework and something like Pinax or one of the Rails CMS packages.

Bob will have "built custom cms on Rails/Django/CakePHP" I'll ask why him the same questions as I asked Clyde along with why he didn't use Drupal or Wordpress or ...

Alice's portfolio will have more in it that just "set up WP site". In fact it probably won't have that in it at all but it might come up during the interview: "Oh, the marketing site? Yeah, I just fired up a wordpress instance, themed it, got backups working and passed it over to IT and got back to my day job."

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And then ask, "what was your day job, because I don't need a wordpress themer."

I guess what I'm saying is that if your resume consists of setting up Wordpress sites, then you better like setting up wordpress sites because that's where your experience is.

Your missing my point entirely. This is what the resumes look like.

Clyde: Spent 6 months writing a custom CMS in Perl in support of Project X.

Bob: Spent 2 months writing a custom CMS in Rails to support Project X. 4 months writing feature A and B for Cool Project X while continuing to support the CMS.

Alice: Spent 6 months writing feature A, B, C and D for Project X.

If I was looking for a developer for Project Y, who looks better?

Except in this example the CMS /is/ Project X, not part of supporting Project X

And you gave zero requirements for what you need in Project Y

So I have no idea and no way of knowing who looks better. Maybe Project Y just needs a CMS to go with it. Maybe Project Y needs an extremely custom web application with niche needs.

I think you just barely touched on the lunacy of even debating who has the better resume. You need to actually talk to them and understand what their real experiences are. Besides how do we not know that Alice is actually a major contributor to WordPress or optimizes compression algorithms on the side for fun.

Then in that case, Alice will have features A, B, C, and D of Project Z. She won't have wasted time developing a system that didn't need to be developed in the first place.

I guess all this rests on the assumption that Alice did something relevant in all that time she saved. If features A, B, C and D. Basically you seem to assume that each or some of those are relevant software development work and not just more WordPress deployments.

I guess the point is use pre-packaged tools when possible. But somebody has to write new software, so you better get some experience in doing that if you want to be a software developer.

This argument has taken the original scenario completely out of context. You could as easily twist this and say.

Alice was part of a small team in a Space Tourism start-up. Once their marketing site was online she got back to the rocket science.

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