[jiggy2011]

I'm interested in what you say about extracurricular activities. I can certainly agree that in most cases they are a waste of space "I like music, movies and videogames".

Surely though there would be some extracurriculars that might impress you? Contributions to a high profile open source projects , doing something that requires good organisation/people skills or just something that might tell you a bit about the person's personality?

What sort of extracurriculars would you consider to be negative?

[mindcrime]

I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same.

I can't see how either of those things is even slightly relevant, at least in isolation. The school someone chooses may reflect a great many factors, and it's entirely possible someone went to Midwest Tennessee State Agricultural and Technical College instead of Harvard, even if they could have been accepted by Harvard. Who knows, maybe they didn't bother applying to Harvard because they thought they couldn't afford it, or the wanted to stay close to home for family reasons, etc.

GPA? Feh... how do you discriminate between the guy with the 3.8 GPA who took Underwater Basket Weaving and other throwaway classes for all his non-major electives, and the guy who took String Theory, Quantum Electrodynamics and Abstract Algebra as electives?

[philwelch]

If you're applying for a dev job and you mention open source, that's not entirely extracurricular the same way playing in a bowling league might be.

[rm999]

Yeah, I should have been clearer, I mean activities that aren't relevant to the job - working on an open source project would be relevant to me. But you are right that some things could be positives, like a leadership position in an honor society.

"Snowboarding" would be neutral, whereas my brother says he considers it a positive (we both enjoy snowboarding/skiing). "President of the campus <insert political party here>" would be a negative for me, regardless of the political affiliation. My brother said he could see it as a positive or a negative, probably depending on the affiliation.

[K2h]

I am in the process of hiring engineers and the last candidate that caught my eye, listed some pretty cool side projects outside of his core area of expertise.

Learning of this made me consider: breadth of knowledge, interdisciplinary team structures, and understanding other aspects to design and review, overall - an interesting nerd/geek.

Going to movies, exercising, travel - those should be left off of resumes coming to me. Building electric cars, embedded firmware design, realtime control - those hobbies get me to notice you - especially when they are outside your discipline.