7 ms·

I don't think there is a single thing right with his resume. Let's take the first line of his overview: Software developer since the 1970s. First of all, any

by 300bps 13y ago

I don't think there is a single thing right with his resume. Let's take the first line of his overview: Software developer since the 1970s. First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. Try teaching a Cobol programmer OOP and you'll find that they learn it slower than someone without that procedural coding experience. Second of all, the first line of your resume should not be to announce what protected class(es) you are in. Your resume shouldn't have "senior citizen" on it anymore than it should have your race, creed, religion or any other irrelevant facts on it. Linux work started with the first kernel releases and continued through Slackware So what? I used Slackware extensively in 1996 but the experience is meaningless. If I had that on my resume now it would tell anyone reading it that I'm probably resting on my laurels and probably have for decades. Experience includes: Agile, Assembly, Back-End, BSD, C, CSS, Debian, FOSS, GIMP, HTTP, Java, Linux, Mathematics, Mint, MySQL, Octave (similar to Matlab), Open Source, Parser, Perl, PHP5, Python, Recruiting, Regex, Shell, SQLite3, Support, TCP/IP, Ubuntu, UNIX, Tcl/Tk, Teaching, Training, Transcoding, VPS, Writing, XML, XSLT I've seen dozens of resumes that list dozens of technologies like this. Not even so much as a bold font weight to say the things they are masters of as opposed to "experience with". Early in my management career I hired a developer that had TCP/IP programming listed as a skill on her resume. After hiring her, I gave her the IP address of the server to do some TCP/IP programming. She asked, "What is IP address?" As someone who is in their 40s, my advice to to someone without a job later in life is to drop all the extraneous things and focus on what you've done lately. Lose the moniker "old coder". Lose any technologies older than a decade from your resume. Lose any references to "35 years of experience with...". Take off your hobbies. Take off your reasons for leaving your past employment. There are too many other fixes needed to go into.

ccozan 13y ago
also, quite important to the style: leave that 1st person "I" away. Every time when I read a resume like this I see a much overrated person, full of him/herself, former glory seeking new validation, etc. A big sign DON'T HIRE. Hints: make it simple, objective, no complex sentence structures, just information to the job and assignment. Use nice fonts and do not clutter the information, structure it with max 2 headings.
- route66 13y ago
  So you see how difficult it is to please armchair psychologists: leaving out the first person pronoun from sentences is also considered bad style by some (with the suggested pseudo objectivity). Others conclude even that the person has no self esteem etc etc. A resume is about the person presenting him/herself, isn't it?
  - jnbiche 13y ago
    I personally leave out "I", but yes, I have seen HR professionals suggest that you leave it in for the reasons you just stated (lack of self-confidence). This is why it's important for hiring companies to have an open mind, for both their sake and the candidate's. Yes, a resume should be well-written, to the point, and free of errors, but realizing that everyone has their own idiosyncrasies will go a long way.
- OldCoder 13y ago
  Agree with rewording the narrative part but not sure yet of the best way to handle some parts.
  - loup-vaillant 13y ago
    An advice I have been given is, "don't break expectations". I'm not talking about the content, which can easily have good surprises. I'm talking about the form. There, conformity is probably king. This means things like being a young white male with short hair. Breaking conventions in your résumé can elicit positive reactions, or catch someone's attention. But it will often elicit such a strong negative reaction that your reader even look at the content. This thread alone contains examples of this. For instance, saying "I" in the resume is breaking a convention. Nobody will reject you for not writing "I". But some will reject you for being cocky or narcissistic, or whatever. Same for your recommendation citation. It is not expected in the résumé, it is expected in a separate reference. (Edit: that last one may be an obviously good surprise, though.) Try making a boring, conventional résumé. It should give you a second point of reference, and may help you out of a local maximum.
muruke 13y ago
Had to reply, could not agree more. People may hate it but there is an art to writing a resume and it's focus, just like a company needs to focus, so do you to get a job.
- OldCoder 13y ago
  It's a fact of life that resumes are crucial and that structure makes a difference. But I've noticed that people often disagree about approaches. This particular resume is based on a template that people in a channel liked. I've received a number of compliments IRL regarding both the layout and the content. The only thing that people IRL seem to agree should go is the part about reasons for leaving. The resume does need a new release. For example, I should start to fill in the years after 2009. But it isn't the resume that's the primary issue here. It's the fact that the market has shifted away from generalists, combined with mistakes that I've made.
  - jader201 13y ago
    FWIW, I've heard multiple recruiters and managers/directors compliment me on my resume style [1]. It's a bit more narrative and a bit less focused on bulleting out skills. This seems to attract more progressive forward thinkers (if you're into those sorts of companies). At the same time, it does highlight my skills at the top of each area of experience, so some developers reading my resume may skim over the narrative part, focusing on the listed skills. So it works for them too. It's also quite honest in a few areas that may turn off some people, but to me, it turns off the right people (those I don't want to work for). [1] Check it out in my profile if you're interested.
    - collyw 13y ago
      That sounds about right. In my experience most recruiters are only capable of matching two words, with very little understanding of what the words actually mean. They have no idea that RDBMS / Oracle/ SQL are synonymous to a degree.
  - rwallace 13y ago
OldCoder 13y ago
The interest is appreciated. However, we have different perspectives. My 'C' experience dates back to 1976 and is probably still relevant. FWIW I never did much COBOL though my firm did have a COBOL-Lint. I don't think that your 20 years of Linux experience, or mine, is "meaningless". Not if the experience has been continuous. And, in my case, I've not only used Linux almost daily since before Slackware existed, I've developed my own distro, I maintain copies of nearly 2,000 packages, and many of my copies have patches of my own design. Regarding the "masters of" issue, I may not have made the "generalist" point in the post clear enough. I'm only a "master of" a few things. But I'm very good at getting back up to speed on the things that I've had "experience with". This is what a generalist does. I agree with the "Take off your reasons" point. I'm going to keep most of the rest. The difficulties that I'm facing are partly due to my own foolish mistakes. But they aren't about the fact that I've listed hobbies on my resume or that I have a nick that implies age. I'm not going to pretend to be a twenty-something specialist. It isn't what I am. I'm a highly experienced generalist. In this context, the decades that you feel that I ought to hide are relevant.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  You sound like a "T-shaped" guy: Broad knowledge and skills, with actual expertise of a few areas. Some companies, such as Valve, actually seek that. Have you sought them out? (I'm guessing that you have, but who knows…)
  - OldCoder 13y ago
    T-shaped is a good term. Thanks, I'll remember it. I'm only now learning the ropes as far as some things go. I haven't sought out firms of that type yet and advice would be appreciated.
  - ballard 13y ago
    ZURB and IDEO too http://zurb.com/article/11/the-t-in-team http://zurb.com/article/11/the-t-in-team
- ecopoesis 13y ago
  You are not a highly skilled generalist. That implies you are a master of everything. You are not because no one is. Being a master of a few things with experience with many things makes you a useful specialist. The proverbial T shaped person. This is a good thing. Highlight the things you are actually very good at, put the rest as experience. It looks like you've written a lot of Perl, so you're highlight that. Highlight Linux package management. Despite what you think, these are specializations.
IgorPartola 13y ago
Are you saying that in 30 years all experience you have accumulated up to now will be completely irrelevant? It all depends on how continuous and recent your "current" expertise is. Someone 10 years retired suddenly looking for a job will do worse. Someone who had been actively honing their skills for 30-40 years is going to be the rockstar everyone wants and cannot find. Think about it this way: would you rather have a fresh out of school or a veteran mechanic work on your car?
- 300bps 13y ago
  Are you saying that in 30 years all experience you have accumulated up to now will be completely irrelevant? 30 years ago I was coding in BASIC and 6502 Assembly on my Commodore 64. That's also around the time I got my first modem - a Mitey Mo 300 bps modem on my Commodore 64. It was before the Hayes Compatible days of modems so you had to POKE and PEEK registers to control it or get data from it. To answer your question, that experience is totally irrelevant. Drop the me of 30 years ago into the technology environment of today and I would be completely lost. I've been in IT professionally since I was 17 years old. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to let go of the past. Almost every major mistake I've made in my career was caused by me wanting to stay in the comfort zone of already known technologies. My years of installing Novell Netware 2.15 off 360k floppies just aren't relevant to the MVC web coding I do today. I was a Certified Netware Engineer (CNE) in 1990. It was the hottest technical certification on the planet back then. Should I put that on my resume today? Of course not, it's totally irrelevant. The years I spent with Borland Turbo-C, Borland C++, Turbo-PASCAL, etc. just aren't relevant either. In fact, my opinion is that knowing those languages made it harder to learn newer languages. One could argue that listing 100 languages shows the skill to learn new languages but nothing shows that better than being an expert at a modern language. There's no better thing for an old coder than to really master a modern language and framework and to present that succinctly on their resume. Think about it this way: would you rather have a fresh out of school or a veteran mechanic work on your car? This is actually a good analogy, but says the opposite of what you think it does. If I had an old out of date car, I'd want the veteran mechanic to work on it. If I had a modern car run by computer chips, I'd want the guy fresh out of school.
looser 13y ago
I advise you to also: "Take off the bureaucratic hats". If a developer has source code/projects available, why only look at his resume? Look at what he's DONE, and take your judgment from there.
collyw 13y ago
"Try teaching a Cobol programmer OOP and you'll find that they learn it slower than someone without that procedural coding experience." Have you any evidence to back this up, as it sound like rubbish to me. I learned Java as my first language, and basically used it as a procedural language, until the OOP parts started to make sense. I don't see how knowing COBOL will make you slower at learning an OOP language.
- chii 13y ago
  > I don't see how knowing COBOL will make you slower at learning an OOP language. what a lot of employers don't want to do is to pay somebody to learn on the job. It sucks, because such an employer is a good one, but to people who don't care, and is in need of a job getting done, they just see it as extra cost and lost productivity. Why hire somebody smart who can learn fast (and thus can adapt to new roles as they come), when you can pay someone with the _exact_ experience at solving your current problem!
  - chipotle_coyote 13y ago
    Of course, this is probably a major contributing factor to companies having trouble hiring programmers. Finding someone with the exact experience of your current problem is actually pretty difficult.
    - collyw 13y ago
      Its kind of stupid really. In my past maintenance programming jobs, I would say it took 6 months to get up to speed. I would put less than two months of that down to new languages. Most of it is getting to know the code that is already written (and usually poorly documented) and some of it is gaining domain knowledge.
mgkimsal 13y ago
"any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental" "but the experience is meaningless" Taking that approach, almost all experiences are 'meaningless' in the context of "i need someone to do these exact steps XYZ". But, as someone who was programming (hobby) in the 80s, I think there's some value here (and of course I don't think it's purely defensive and me-focused, but maybe it is). You mentioned elsewhere "Drop the me of 30 years ago into the technology environment of today and I would be completely lost." Perhaps, but many people today are completely lost too. The "you" of 30 years ago had characteristics - curiosity, problem-solving, etc - that informed the experiences. Over time, perseverance was demonstrated with an accumulation of related experiences. The specific experiences of programming in 1985 are not relevant to most problems of today, but a demonstrated history of successful logical thinking applied to a variety of computers/data/projects is not irrelevant nor meaningless. EDIT: Rereading the second half of your post, I agree with you on the second half - drop hobbies, drop older tech references, etc - lose the extraneous stuff in general from general purpose resumes. Lose date references in general, I think (graduation dates, etc). Focus on things that are relevant to modern work practices/tools. Perhaps you were meaning all that older stuff is meaningless in terms of a resume? I agree. It's the sort of stuff that might come out in an interview or two, depending on who you're talking with. Telling a 24 year old about doing C64 assembly programming does no good, and wastes time - that is essentially meaningless in terms of general tech job hunting. There are rooms for these nuggets, but you need to be selective.
- 300bps 13y ago
  The "you" of 30 years ago had characteristics - curiosity, problem-solving, etc - that informed the experiences. As I said in that other comment, I see the basis of your argument. Having learned many languages over a 30 year time frame shows you probably are a hard worker that keeps their skills up to date. You know what shows that with almost no doubt though? When you submit a resume to an employer in 2014 and you show a mastery of commonly used 2014 technologies. That literally is the only thing that matters to most employers. So yeah, if one (not speaking of OP) does not have experience with modern languages or frameworks for whatever reason, you can make an argument that your previous experience might hint that you possess desirable traits. But unless you're looking for maintenance job on some old Cobol or C code, there's nothing betting than keeping your skills up to date continuously which proves you have those desirable traits.
cheery 13y ago
"First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental." How do you dare to say such bullshit? The stuff you use today has been built over several iterations of that experience. Understanding things they understood in 70s is still relevant.
aviraldg 13y ago
>> Lose any technologies older than a decade from your resume. Lose any references to "35 years of experience with...". Take off your hobbies. Take off your reasons for leaving your past employment. There are too many other fixes needed to go into. And in that process lose any traits that might command a premium? Do senior developers not deserve to be compensated according to their experience?
- DanBC 13y ago
  You tailor your CV to the job. The CV is to get you the interview. The interview is to get you the job. The pay negotiations happen later.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
  Any job is a premium over "jack shit."
rayiner 13y ago
> First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. "Hmm, this Brian Kernighan fellow is going in the reject pile, since he worked with this 'UNIX' and this 'C' in the 1970's, and clearly his experience is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. And this Vint Cerf character... we don't want to hire someone who didn't grow up using the internet!" This sort of thinking is toxic to the industry, and prevents software development from becoming a proper engineering field. It prevents the development of institutional knowledge and stagnates forward progress. It's why the industry keeps rehashing the same memes in new fashions. It's why everyone thinks the latest JS shit is cutting edge, when it's just a warmed over re-skinning of fundamentally 1980's technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
  Why's Brian Kernighan's resume going in the slush pile with everybody else's.
- crag 13y ago
  Every generation thinks their ideas are new. When in reality it's all the same thing, just recycled. Sure computers are smaller, faster, and cheaper - but fundamentally, the systems today are the same as the systems in 1985. We have 4th generation languages today that are really just front-ends to c; created to make it easier for the masses to write code. Which is a good thing, cause I'm 50, and I remember the days working in the cold, dark basement walled off from the rest of the company. I find it funny listening to the "youngsters" talking about the great new thing of today; be it agile, the cloud, or whatever. But I remember I was saying the same type of bs when I was 25.
ojbyrne 13y ago
I've been working at a large dotcom lately and one thing I've noticed is how much enterprise Java code starts to resemble Cobol after enough time. "Separation of Concerns" starts to look like Cobol's "Divisions," excessive amounts of boilerplate, etc.
- ballard 13y ago
  Comments that add no value while the hard stuff isn't documented: knowledge hoarding. Over-engineered, massive codebases: job security.
Clanan 13y ago
300, can you recommend a preferred way of listing technologies on a resume? I've struggled with how to show what I'm proficient at, versus what I'm only familiar with. Mainly because I don't want to be the only resume admitting only slight knowledge of tech x,y,z whereas everyone else is "experienced with" them.
- eru 13y ago
  Then drop the `slight knowledge of' bits. Resumes are not judged by number of bullet points. Just like with any writing, a big part of success is to cut, cut, cut.

by 300bps 13y ago

ccozan 13y ago

also, quite important to the style: leave that 1st person "I" away. Every time when I read a resume like this I see a much overrated person, full of him/herself, former glory seeking new validation, etc. A big sign DON'T HIRE. Hints: make it simple, objective, no complex sentence structures, just information to the job and assignment. Use nice fonts and do not clutter the information, structure it with max 2 headings.

route66 13y ago
So you see how difficult it is to please armchair psychologists: leaving out the first person pronoun from sentences is also considered bad style by some (with the suggested pseudo objectivity). Others conclude even that the person has no self esteem etc etc. A resume is about the person presenting him/herself, isn't it?
- jnbiche 13y ago
  I personally leave out "I", but yes, I have seen HR professionals suggest that you leave it in for the reasons you just stated (lack of self-confidence). This is why it's important for hiring companies to have an open mind, for both their sake and the candidate's. Yes, a resume should be well-written, to the point, and free of errors, but realizing that everyone has their own idiosyncrasies will go a long way.
OldCoder 13y ago
Agree with rewording the narrative part but not sure yet of the best way to handle some parts.
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  An advice I have been given is, "don't break expectations". I'm not talking about the content, which can easily have good surprises. I'm talking about the form. There, conformity is probably king. This means things like being a young white male with short hair. Breaking conventions in your résumé can elicit positive reactions, or catch someone's attention. But it will often elicit such a strong negative reaction that your reader even look at the content. This thread alone contains examples of this. For instance, saying "I" in the resume is breaking a convention. Nobody will reject you for not writing "I". But some will reject you for being cocky or narcissistic, or whatever. Same for your recommendation citation. It is not expected in the résumé, it is expected in a separate reference. (Edit: that last one may be an obviously good surprise, though.) Try making a boring, conventional résumé. It should give you a second point of reference, and may help you out of a local maximum.

muruke 13y ago

Had to reply, could not agree more. People may hate it but there is an art to writing a resume and it's focus, just like a company needs to focus, so do you to get a job.

OldCoder 13y ago
It's a fact of life that resumes are crucial and that structure makes a difference. But I've noticed that people often disagree about approaches. This particular resume is based on a template that people in a channel liked. I've received a number of compliments IRL regarding both the layout and the content. The only thing that people IRL seem to agree should go is the part about reasons for leaving. The resume does need a new release. For example, I should start to fill in the years after 2009. But it isn't the resume that's the primary issue here. It's the fact that the market has shifted away from generalists, combined with mistakes that I've made.
- jader201 13y ago
  FWIW, I've heard multiple recruiters and managers/directors compliment me on my resume style [1]. It's a bit more narrative and a bit less focused on bulleting out skills. This seems to attract more progressive forward thinkers (if you're into those sorts of companies). At the same time, it does highlight my skills at the top of each area of experience, so some developers reading my resume may skim over the narrative part, focusing on the listed skills. So it works for them too. It's also quite honest in a few areas that may turn off some people, but to me, it turns off the right people (those I don't want to work for). [1] Check it out in my profile if you're interested.
  - collyw 13y ago
    That sounds about right. In my experience most recruiters are only capable of matching two words, with very little understanding of what the words actually mean. They have no idea that RDBMS / Oracle/ SQL are synonymous to a degree.
- rwallace 13y ago

OldCoder 13y ago

The interest is appreciated. However, we have different perspectives. My 'C' experience dates back to 1976 and is probably still relevant. FWIW I never did much COBOL though my firm did have a COBOL-Lint. I don't think that your 20 years of Linux experience, or mine, is "meaningless". Not if the experience has been continuous. And, in my case, I've not only used Linux almost daily since before Slackware existed, I've developed my own distro, I maintain copies of nearly 2,000 packages, and many of my copies have patches of my own design. Regarding the "masters of" issue, I may not have made the "generalist" point in the post clear enough. I'm only a "master of" a few things. But I'm very good at getting back up to speed on the things that I've had "experience with". This is what a generalist does. I agree with the "Take off your reasons" point. I'm going to keep most of the rest. The difficulties that I'm facing are partly due to my own foolish mistakes. But they aren't about the fact that I've listed hobbies on my resume or that I have a nick that implies age. I'm not going to pretend to be a twenty-something specialist. It isn't what I am. I'm a highly experienced generalist. In this context, the decades that you feel that I ought to hide are relevant.

loup-vaillant 13y ago
You sound like a "T-shaped" guy: Broad knowledge and skills, with actual expertise of a few areas. Some companies, such as Valve, actually seek that. Have you sought them out? (I'm guessing that you have, but who knows…)
- OldCoder 13y ago
  T-shaped is a good term. Thanks, I'll remember it. I'm only now learning the ropes as far as some things go. I haven't sought out firms of that type yet and advice would be appreciated.
- ballard 13y ago
  ZURB and IDEO too http://zurb.com/article/11/the-t-in-team http://zurb.com/article/11/the-t-in-team
ecopoesis 13y ago
You are not a highly skilled generalist. That implies you are a master of everything. You are not because no one is. Being a master of a few things with experience with many things makes you a useful specialist. The proverbial T shaped person. This is a good thing. Highlight the things you are actually very good at, put the rest as experience. It looks like you've written a lot of Perl, so you're highlight that. Highlight Linux package management. Despite what you think, these are specializations.

IgorPartola 13y ago

Are you saying that in 30 years all experience you have accumulated up to now will be completely irrelevant? It all depends on how continuous and recent your "current" expertise is. Someone 10 years retired suddenly looking for a job will do worse. Someone who had been actively honing their skills for 30-40 years is going to be the rockstar everyone wants and cannot find. Think about it this way: would you rather have a fresh out of school or a veteran mechanic work on your car?

300bps 13y ago
Are you saying that in 30 years all experience you have accumulated up to now will be completely irrelevant? 30 years ago I was coding in BASIC and 6502 Assembly on my Commodore 64. That's also around the time I got my first modem - a Mitey Mo 300 bps modem on my Commodore 64. It was before the Hayes Compatible days of modems so you had to POKE and PEEK registers to control it or get data from it. To answer your question, that experience is totally irrelevant. Drop the me of 30 years ago into the technology environment of today and I would be completely lost. I've been in IT professionally since I was 17 years old. The hardest lesson I had to learn was to let go of the past. Almost every major mistake I've made in my career was caused by me wanting to stay in the comfort zone of already known technologies. My years of installing Novell Netware 2.15 off 360k floppies just aren't relevant to the MVC web coding I do today. I was a Certified Netware Engineer (CNE) in 1990. It was the hottest technical certification on the planet back then. Should I put that on my resume today? Of course not, it's totally irrelevant. The years I spent with Borland Turbo-C, Borland C++, Turbo-PASCAL, etc. just aren't relevant either. In fact, my opinion is that knowing those languages made it harder to learn newer languages. One could argue that listing 100 languages shows the skill to learn new languages but nothing shows that better than being an expert at a modern language. There's no better thing for an old coder than to really master a modern language and framework and to present that succinctly on their resume. Think about it this way: would you rather have a fresh out of school or a veteran mechanic work on your car? This is actually a good analogy, but says the opposite of what you think it does. If I had an old out of date car, I'd want the veteran mechanic to work on it. If I had a modern car run by computer chips, I'd want the guy fresh out of school.

looser 13y ago

I advise you to also: "Take off the bureaucratic hats". If a developer has source code/projects available, why only look at his resume? Look at what he's DONE, and take your judgment from there.

collyw 13y ago

"Try teaching a Cobol programmer OOP and you'll find that they learn it slower than someone without that procedural coding experience." Have you any evidence to back this up, as it sound like rubbish to me. I learned Java as my first language, and basically used it as a procedural language, until the OOP parts started to make sense. I don't see how knowing COBOL will make you slower at learning an OOP language.

chii 13y ago
> I don't see how knowing COBOL will make you slower at learning an OOP language. what a lot of employers don't want to do is to pay somebody to learn on the job. It sucks, because such an employer is a good one, but to people who don't care, and is in need of a job getting done, they just see it as extra cost and lost productivity. Why hire somebody smart who can learn fast (and thus can adapt to new roles as they come), when you can pay someone with the _exact_ experience at solving your current problem!
- chipotle_coyote 13y ago
  Of course, this is probably a major contributing factor to companies having trouble hiring programmers. Finding someone with the exact experience of your current problem is actually pretty difficult.
  - collyw 13y ago
    Its kind of stupid really. In my past maintenance programming jobs, I would say it took 6 months to get up to speed. I would put less than two months of that down to new languages. Most of it is getting to know the code that is already written (and usually poorly documented) and some of it is gaining domain knowledge.

mgkimsal 13y ago

"any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental" "but the experience is meaningless" Taking that approach, almost all experiences are 'meaningless' in the context of "i need someone to do these exact steps XYZ". But, as someone who was programming (hobby) in the 80s, I think there's some value here (and of course I don't think it's purely defensive and me-focused, but maybe it is). You mentioned elsewhere "Drop the me of 30 years ago into the technology environment of today and I would be completely lost." Perhaps, but many people today are completely lost too. The "you" of 30 years ago had characteristics - curiosity, problem-solving, etc - that informed the experiences. Over time, perseverance was demonstrated with an accumulation of related experiences. The specific experiences of programming in 1985 are not relevant to most problems of today, but a demonstrated history of successful logical thinking applied to a variety of computers/data/projects is not irrelevant nor meaningless. EDIT: Rereading the second half of your post, I agree with you on the second half - drop hobbies, drop older tech references, etc - lose the extraneous stuff in general from general purpose resumes. Lose date references in general, I think (graduation dates, etc). Focus on things that are relevant to modern work practices/tools. Perhaps you were meaning all that older stuff is meaningless in terms of a resume? I agree. It's the sort of stuff that might come out in an interview or two, depending on who you're talking with. Telling a 24 year old about doing C64 assembly programming does no good, and wastes time - that is essentially meaningless in terms of general tech job hunting. There are rooms for these nuggets, but you need to be selective.

300bps 13y ago
The "you" of 30 years ago had characteristics - curiosity, problem-solving, etc - that informed the experiences. As I said in that other comment, I see the basis of your argument. Having learned many languages over a 30 year time frame shows you probably are a hard worker that keeps their skills up to date. You know what shows that with almost no doubt though? When you submit a resume to an employer in 2014 and you show a mastery of commonly used 2014 technologies. That literally is the only thing that matters to most employers. So yeah, if one (not speaking of OP) does not have experience with modern languages or frameworks for whatever reason, you can make an argument that your previous experience might hint that you possess desirable traits. But unless you're looking for maintenance job on some old Cobol or C code, there's nothing betting than keeping your skills up to date continuously which proves you have those desirable traits.

cheery 13y ago

"First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental." How do you dare to say such bullshit? The stuff you use today has been built over several iterations of that experience. Understanding things they understood in 70s is still relevant.

aviraldg 13y ago

>> Lose any technologies older than a decade from your resume. Lose any references to "35 years of experience with...". Take off your hobbies. Take off your reasons for leaving your past employment. There are too many other fixes needed to go into. And in that process lose any traits that might command a premium? Do senior developers not deserve to be compensated according to their experience?

DanBC 13y ago
You tailor your CV to the job. The CV is to get you the interview. The interview is to get you the job. The pay negotiations happen later.
GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
Any job is a premium over "jack shit."

rayiner 13y ago

> First of all, any development experience from the 70s is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. "Hmm, this Brian Kernighan fellow is going in the reject pile, since he worked with this 'UNIX' and this 'C' in the 1970's, and clearly his experience is at best meaningless and at worst detrimental. And this Vint Cerf character... we don't want to hire someone who didn't grow up using the internet!" This sort of thinking is toxic to the industry, and prevents software development from becoming a proper engineering field. It prevents the development of institutional knowledge and stagnates forward progress. It's why the industry keeps rehashing the same memes in new fashions. It's why everyone thinks the latest JS shit is cutting edge, when it's just a warmed over re-skinning of fundamentally 1980's technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_%28programming_language%29.

GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
Why's Brian Kernighan's resume going in the slush pile with everybody else's.
crag 13y ago
Every generation thinks their ideas are new. When in reality it's all the same thing, just recycled. Sure computers are smaller, faster, and cheaper - but fundamentally, the systems today are the same as the systems in 1985. We have 4th generation languages today that are really just front-ends to c; created to make it easier for the masses to write code. Which is a good thing, cause I'm 50, and I remember the days working in the cold, dark basement walled off from the rest of the company. I find it funny listening to the "youngsters" talking about the great new thing of today; be it agile, the cloud, or whatever. But I remember I was saying the same type of bs when I was 25.

ojbyrne 13y ago

I've been working at a large dotcom lately and one thing I've noticed is how much enterprise Java code starts to resemble Cobol after enough time. "Separation of Concerns" starts to look like Cobol's "Divisions," excessive amounts of boilerplate, etc.

ballard 13y ago
Comments that add no value while the hard stuff isn't documented: knowledge hoarding. Over-engineered, massive codebases: job security.

Clanan 13y ago

300, can you recommend a preferred way of listing technologies on a resume? I've struggled with how to show what I'm proficient at, versus what I'm only familiar with. Mainly because I don't want to be the only resume admitting only slight knowledge of tech x,y,z whereas everyone else is "experienced with" them.

eru 13y ago
Then drop the `slight knowledge of' bits. Resumes are not judged by number of bullet points. Just like with any writing, a big part of success is to cut, cut, cut.