The Five Warning Signs in Programmer Resumes

Once upon a time I found myself doing phone screens for some really bad candidates (and I assigned those phone screen to myself, I should add). So, I went through those resumes to look for predictors of poor candidates.

1. No degree or no G.P.A. listed or the degree is from a school you have never heard of (the single best predictor). A friend told me later that not listing your G.P.A. if it's bad is a suggested practice. OK... but now that I know that it won't do you much good anymore...

2. They have a non-CS, non-engineering bachelors, then at most a CS masters from a non-top-twenty school. From my own experience as a Master's student at Georgia Tech, many of these candidates re-trained because they couldn't find jobs in their original profession, and they are often unbelievably bad in programming, algorithms, and complexity analysis. Another indication of this type of candidate is one that chooses not do a Master's thesis but to take classes instead.

3. They list a large block of technology acronyms early in the resume, or they have been consultants for a long time for tech companies (that could have hired them but chose not to), or they have an inexplicably long resume. Beware of someone who has one year of experience but a six-page resume full of technology acronyms. Really short resumes (I've seen 10-line ones) always indicate a great candidate in the ones I've encountered, like Ph.D. students that are dropping out but don't know how to market themselves.

4. Nothing on their resume sounds hard or like they were excited about it, or proud of it. They seem to have no initiative or drive ("I was responsible for X, I was tasked with Y, ...").

5. There are numerous spelling mistakes in the resume or sentences so ungrammatical that you don't know what they are trying to tell you. 1-2 spelling mistakes are OK - you are looking for utterly incomprehensible sentences. (Even as a non-native speaker you'll have to communicate in English at least in writing, e.g. in code comments and documentation.)

All obvious, I guess, in retrospect... what I recommend is to tally up the score and if a resume has more than two of these "warning signs" I would not even go to the phone interview stage...