[pnathan]

I recently reviewed a large number of resumes from CS majors from a wide variety of universities. They were collected through career fairs sort of things.

Nearly all of them were crap. There was a constant and persistent inability to demonstrate what they had to offer my company. There was a massive focus on class projects and a complete "meh" in terms of work history.

Now, some of these people might have been excellent hires. But they could not demonstrate their aptitude. The people I did contact did have a differentiating factor: it was that they did something... almost anything... out of the ordinary in their life and put it on their resume.

People I contacted included a YC company intern, someone who liked Haskell, and someone who had gone from total programming novice to real-time operating system coder in 4 years.

Danger signs included gaps in employment (why does $applicant's resume stop in 2008?), inability to spell correctly, and lack of knowledge of the tech world.

It's not hard to apply Sturgeon's law and lift yourself out of the drek that I saw. If you want help resume building, feel free to email me. I can help you tune your resume to demonstrate your awesome (at least to another CS geek! :-) I can't say anything about what other fields look for ).

[stonemetal]

Danger signs included gaps in employment

For the uninitiated why is this a danger sign?

[pnathan]

It means that... something happened.

Did they get fired? Did they get a pile of money and go roll around on a beach somewhere? Did they have to take care of family? There can be insanely great reasons... just as easily... insanely bad reasons.

It's an unknown, which adds pure risk. For someone to be out of work for years indicates some sort of ... something. I can't tell with just a gap if that is a problem or just someone living life in a non-career fashion for a while.

I don't personally really view time under a year as significant, as that can simply be time spent in finding a new job. This might particularly be true for someone who doesn't have a faddish skillset.

So in my view, if you took off for a few years, allude to why you did so, along with an explanation of how you kept your skill current.

Example: "I was an early google employee and cashed out after a while, then travelled the world for a few years. I've kept myself current by working on a compiler for my own language with the latest theoretical contributions... you can find it at github/blah/blah. I'd like to resume work at your fine institution". Or that could be restructured into a a line in the resume: "worked on cutting edge compiler as personal project: Last Few Years. See Github Address".