Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/09/ten-tips-for-slightly-less-awful-resume.html

Today's scientific question is: why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful? And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is.

If you've spent more than approximately seventeen kiloseconds as an industry programmer, you've had to review bad tech resumes. It's just part of the job. Programmer resumes ultimately have to be gauged by programmers — it takes one to know one. So it winds up being a kind of karmic revenge on you for bad resumes that you've written. C'mon, you know you've done it. You even knew it was bad when you were writing it. Admit it! You listed HTML under programming languages, didn't you? Argh!

So why are tech resumes so bad? You know what I mean. You see the craziest stuff on resumes. Like the candidate who proudly lists every Windows API call she's ever used. Or the candidate who lists every course he took starting from junior high school. Or the one who lists college extension courses he took while doing time for armed robbery.