Atlas · Details
Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume
AI Notes
By 2007 Steve had been reviewing programmer resumes from inside Amazon and Google for the better part of a decade, and it shows. The post opens with stage-setting — personal opinions, not Google's; experienced screeners will disagree on details — and then gets to it: programmer resumes are uniformly awful, and there's no excuse. Ten concrete things to stop doing. Do not list HTML under programming languages. Do not list every Windows API you've ever used. Do not list courses from junior high. Do not pad. Do not lie about scope. Do not invent job titles. Do not write a one-line summary section that's the same one-line summary every programmer writes. Do not substitute "objective" statements for the work you did. Every mistake is the product of a resume-culture industry telling working programmers to do the wrong thing.
Related listings
-
2008
Get that job at Google
Six months later — the much more famous companion piece, written from the same hiring funnel. Ten Tips is the resume; Get That Job is the interview that follows.
-
2005
Five Essential Phone Screen Questions
The earliest of Steve's interview-process posts. Read in order — Phone Screens (2005), Ten Tips (2007), Get That Job (2008) — they walk a candidate from resume through phone screen through onsite.
-
2006
The Truth About Interviewing
Steve's other 2006 interview-from-the-screener-side essay — the philosophy companion to the Ten Tips checklist.
Where it was argued
- Hacker News Sep 2007