[Discuss] work search question

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 6/2/2021 2:23 PM, Eric Chadbourne wrote:
> On June 1, 2021 at 9:51 PM, worley at alum.mit.edu wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Eric Chadbourne <eric.chadbourne at icloud.com>
> 
> Solid standard English?? Who's standard?? Usually I don't use caps or
> double space.? This is about as adult and standard as I can get.? ;-)
> 
> But my point is that looking for work is, to a great extent, a matter of
> presentation, and you want to ask, with every communication, what will
> it look like and what will the person who receives it think of it?
> 
> 
> Too many commas bro.? Hehehe.? Just kidding.? You make a valid point.?
> Thanks!

Coming to this conversation a bit late...

If I had to guess without looking too hard, character sets like UTF-8
are the culprit: someone's MUA used a certain character set, and someone
else's MUA is set to not trust message-specified character sets either
to avoid encoding attacks or because the MUA is just too simple to do
anything other than ASCII.

So the unknown characters from the foreign character set show up as '?'.
 The problem is many MUAs these days will use stylized quotes and such
without the user really being aware.  So those ASCII-only Luddites see a
bunch of '?' in the middle of sentences.  (I mean technically you could
be a ISO-8859-1 Luddite, but that's not fun)

The only real solution if you want to create a page that ensures the
other person sees it as you intend is PDF/A, which is an archival PDF
format that embeds *all* fonts.

But, because of Adobe's infinite wisdom of putting a javascript engine
(with its attendant security nightmares) in their PDF readers, everyone
rightly avoids opening PDFs from strangers.

Which is a long way to say: don't judge a person by how they looked
through your imperfect lens (at least triangulate a bit first).  There's
a lot of technology involved in all these mechanisms, and for a lot of
reasons incompatibilities still crop up.

As a hiring manager I've seen what happens to people's resumes when
they've been through certain processes, and basically any formatting is
stripped out anyway.

Matt