Robert: My thoughts on this. I have not done a whole lot of interviewing/screening candidates, but I've done some. I found myself never wanting to read the resume at all. Resume does not have to compile, it does not have to execute. Somebody good with a word processor and resume language is not necessarily good with code, in fact often quite the opposite - certain talents just have a hard time getting along in the same person sometimes. I wanted to see the code, I wanted to see what kind of problem solver they were. I did not care if they learned it in school, at a job, at home, or if an angel from heaven revealed it to them. So here is what I did.
When somebody applied, without reading the resume at all I would e-mail him an open book programming challenge and see what came out of him. I wanted to see his language of choice for particular problems, how he dealt with situations when he lacked some specific skills, his technical creativity, and a quality that I would describe as compactness of thinking. If people in charge of our government finances possessed that quality we would experience probably at least a 70% decrease in taxes across the board. When the response came back, and it was worth reading, I would then read the resume and try to correlate it with his response to get some context but my recommendation for hire was still primarily based on his actual problem solving. My thinking is that a good looking resume is important for a strong UI position(HTML/JavaScript/CSS/Graphic design). For a back end/systems guy, if you see a good looking one that is too good, I would be suspicious. The analogy is that if I am trying to pick a potential world-class marathoner from a group of guys based on how fast they ran 100 meters, I would focus on the range from 11.3 to 12.7. Somebody who runs 10.7 likely lacks the slow twitch fibers to be able to run 5:00 pace for 26 miles no matter the training. Somebody who runs 13.5 is likely not lacking in slow twitch fibers, but he probably has enough structural/biomechanical defects that would prevent him from ever making 5:00 pace sufficiently comfortable. For this type of purpose you want something in the middle. But if you are looking for a sprinter, the faster of course the better. -- Sasha Pachev Fast Running Blog. http://fastrunningblog.com Run. Blog. Improve. Repeat. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
