Being a curious fellow about the growth of the Linux market, I occasionally browse job lists looking to see what companies are seeking related to Linux skills. More often than not there are several job listings seeking people with “strong Linux administration” and other skills that are specific to or most often found with Linux and Unix “guru” types. Then at the bottom of the employer’s list of requirements one will often see something like, “Qualified candidates should forward their Word formatted resume …” What?! Word? As in Microsoft Word? Are they looking for Linux experts or not?
When are human resources (HR) people going to realize that most Linux folk are not Microsoft fanatics nor Microsoft serfs? The true Linux guru will most likely be able to use Word just fine, if he has it at all. Sure, he can pull up his resume’ written with LaTeX or OpenOffice.org and Save as Word format. I know this. But is it not showing foul ignorance and grotesque insensitivity on the part of these HR people to insist on Word format? There are so many open and pseudo-open standards to use, why ask for a closed, moving target like Microsoft Word format? It can be seen as, and has been seen as, an insult to the person with hard earned GNU/Linux skills.
What I see when I read these requests for Word format documents is ignorance. Gigantic, pimple on the nose of HR, ignorance. Which I find tragic in this day of a growing Linux job market. HR people, here is a clue for you. With the “free” OpenOffice.org Writer, LaTeX or many other open source document creation tools on a GNU/Linux system the GNU/Linux guru you seek can create a PDF for you. At this point PDF is a well understood, fairly static, document format that has “free” viewers across almost all operating systems. All one need do to get a viewer for this format on the typical HR Microsoft desktop is go to Adobe’s web site and click on the button seen below:
Click it now!
Why not ask for plain ASCII text? That is a file format that will not change at Microsoft’s whim with the next release of Microsoft Word. After all, a resume’ has a fairly standard layout that can easily be duplicated with a plain text document. Any decent word processor, or even Microsoft Word, can open plain text documents.
For all you decision makers that are choosing Microsoft Word I will leave you with these thoughts. Using open standards or relatively unchanging formats for documents helps future proof one’s documents. There is no guarantee that Microsoft’s next release of Microsoft Word will be backward compatible with your documents written with an older version of Microsoft Word. The next release of Microsoft Word will certainly not create documents by default that are backward compatible with an older Microsoft Word. Adopt open standard file formats that are not under the control of a single entity. Then ask your Linux guru candidate for her resume’ in that open format. You will be seen more favorably as a place that “gets it” about GNU/Linux and as a good place to work if you do.
Edit Wed Mar 4 17:13:23 UTC 2009: Make counter visible.
Edit Wed Mar? 4 20:35:53 UTC 2009: Add URL for Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols blog article at ComputerWorld Blogs.
Edit Thu Mar 5 01:11:55 UTC 2009: The gist of this article is “closed file format = bad in the long term, open file format = good in the long term”. The HR illustration is merely an amusing attention grabber.
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Hilarious!! But oh so True!!
Well said. Well said.
At the very least, these HR people should say word/openoffice(.doc) or .pdf format. Instead of calling on just the product name itself.
Like it or not, .doc is the defacto standard (for now), and I’m willing to recognize it for that. That being said, openoffice.org opens and writes to .doc just fine, and it exports to .pdf (an ISO standard format) just fine, so this is not such a bad thing.
But the real kicker is when people start assuming that the “Word” format means that .doc is the same as .docx(OOXML format)… That’s where the problems will start – at least until Openoffice.org and other ODF compatible word processing programs can do as much with OOXML(.docx) as they do with the defacto(.doc).
Wow. Document formats… Such a fun thing to talk about eh? It’s too bad it wasn’t more interesting to more government agencies in the U.S. – it certainly needs to be.
Go Freedom! Go GNU/Linux!!
Shannon VanWagner
Help promote Linux! Surf the web with it!
Silly.
If HR were clued in enough to know not to ask for.doc format, they wouldn’t need to hire IT staff.
They use Office, it’s all they know. I hate MS and HR like all good geeks, but shooting fish in a barrel is boring.
Shannon (comment #1), thank you for your comment. I think it is important to talk about document formats. Intelligent discussion of the problem is healthy and may lead to attitude changes about document formats across all industry, not just in IT.
Captain (comment #2), it is not “silly” to attempt to bring about discussion on document formats. HR is merely one example out of many I could use.
Heck, I’d be tickled if they would accept RTF. But I guess it is way to complicated importing alternative file formats into Word.
Why should HR deviate from the process they use for all their other positions just to cater to the biases (limitations?) of a subset of Linux administrators? Word is what they know, Word is what they use. It doesn’t even occur to them to ask for anything else, nor should it, since everybody–even Linux administrators–can generate Word-compatible documents. Chances are, you could send them a reasonably common alternative (e.g. plain text, or PDF) and they wouldn’t have a problem with it.
Of course, since they have the job to offer, they can ask for whatever format they want. If you want the job bad enough, you’ll find a way.
You can run Word 97 to 2007 on Linux… I get your point butif you do need MS Office on Linux or BSD it’s pretty easy these days.
http://bordeauxgroup.com/
This is similar to job websites that only work in IE. Companies like Boeing who are looking for tech savy college students can’t expect everybody to be using IE.
dveatch (comment #5) and Steve (comment #6), frankly using Microsoft Office (Word) is bad all around. It creates proprietary, closed format files by default. I am working for a sea change across all industry to drop closed, proprietary file formats for open file formats. Not just HR, but all business units that are suffering from Microsoft Office lock-in. The vast majority of business documents could be created with OpenOffice.org and saved in ODF. An open, non-proprietary file format. The less than 1% of Microsoft Office users calling themselves “power users” can keep using that if they just cannot become an OpenOffice.org “power user”.
HR is just one business unit that could benefit from open, non-proprietary file formats.
Tom (comment #7), I am aware of the tools to run Microsoft Windows based applications on GNU/Linux. I am not a fan of those tools. I am a “go cold turkey to get off the Microsoft heroin” person. There are many smart IT folk that can help a business figure out a cost effective way to get off proprietary tools and move to open tools. Word processor Document creation is one of the basics that can be switched relatively easily. We just need enough people to realize it needs to be done across all industry and then have the “guts” to do it. I am merely “picking on HR” because I notice it a lot in these job offerings.