Write a resume that will land you a programming job..PART 3

Watch your formatting

While technical pros’ resumes do not need to be pretty, formatting can make a huge difference in a resume’s readability. If you cannot put three pages of text in front of me in a readable form, do I really want you touching the UI or writing code that someone else might have to maintain?

I recommend that you stick to a larger font size (e.g., 10 - 12 pt.) in a font that reads well onscreen and in print (e.g., Verdana, Arial, Tahoma, Calibri, Helvetica). If you want a slightly fancier font, use it only for section headers. Also, do not mix Serif and Sans Serif fonts — that is just ugly. Do not use “Comic Sans” anywhere, especially in hot pink or baby blue (and yes, unfortunately, this needs to be stated). Keep your margins and space between paragraphs large enough to provide the reader some “breathing room.”

Employment history

I give applicants some slack on employment history. For instance, five year stints are fairly rare in IT, and I give anyone a lot of leeway if their history includes anything that occurred during the dot com boom/bust.

If you are (or were) a contractor or consultant, make sure that is clearly stated; otherwise, I will think that you get fired and/or quit every 3 - 12 months. If you were not a contractor or a consultant, and it looks like you have a hard time staying at a job, I am going to be very cautious. If I see an increasing progression of job titles, “mercenary” pops into my head. Also, if I see that they are lateral (or worse, negative) moves, “bad apple” is my first thought. Of course, sometimes you get hit with a string of employers that go under or get acquired — it happens to the best of us. If that is the case, find a way to convey that information so I don’t think you are unemployable.

Spelling and grammar

It is critical that the spelling and grammar in your resume is flawless. I have seen applicants misspell the name of their state and the name of their school. If grammar and spelling are not your forte, ask someone to look over your resume for you. While I understand that many IT pros are not native English language speakers (or are English language speakers who paid little attention to those subjects in school), you should still ask someone for help. In fact, knowing when to ask for help is a hallmark of the best developers. If I interview you and realize from your speech that you had the sense and humility to ask someone for help on your resume, I am going to be truly impressed. (For examples of what not to do, check out this list of real-life resume blunders.)

Stay out of EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) territory

In the United States, companies with more than 10 employees need to follow EEO rules. These rules state that an employer cannot discriminate against or show preference for an employee based on certain group membership items or personal lifestyle issues, such as gender, age, ethnicity, nation of origin, religion, sexual orientation, and so on. So, do me a favor and try to not expose any EEO-related information to me on the resume. In a face-to-face interview or even a phone interview, some of it will be unavoidable. But I will never solicit that information. Not only do I want to keep my employer and myself out of trouble, but I personally feel that EEO is important. I can understand that many names (or even college attended) are strongly correlated with ethnicity, religion, or nation (or at least general geographic region) of origin, and college graduation or attendance dates give some age clues. Minimize this as much as possible. Please do not tell me about your church, your family situation, your home life, your parents, and so on. It is not that I am not interested — I would probably love to learn these things about you if we hire you — but I do not need or want to know them before that you come on board.

Outside interests, hobbies, achievements, and activities

I like to see these, but only if they are relevant. I really do not need to know about how big of a fan you are of the New York Knicks; but if you wrote a piece of software that can do something nifty with the team’s statistics for fun, I would love to know about it. People who contribute to open source projects get a huge gold star in my book, but only if I feel like they would be comfortable working on proprietary software with proprietary tools, and not bringing anything GPL’ed into my codebase. That is a small caveat there. “Contributed to project XYZ in the areas of ABC and DEF” is enough to whet my appetite. Show me some outside learning too — don’t let me think that you get home at 6;00 and shut off your brain. If this work is not interesting enough for you to read about or experiment with on your own time, why would I think that you will be engaged or even interested in the job we would hire you for?

Gracefully show your inner geek

Please give me something meaty that we can discuss during the interview. So, where it is relevant, try to show me how much of a nerd you are.

For instance, try to mention the hovercraft you made from an inner tube and a lawn mower engine. Make note of the iterative, evolutionary game theory system you coded in Lisp that proves that Nash’s equilibrium is dead wrong. Tell me something about your three chess championship victories. I do not want to know that you memorized UHF or that you have a pocket protectors collection that have logos of now defunct minicomputer vendors.

I know most of this falls under the previous section, but it is relevant. I love to work with programmers who love technology and logic and using their brains. People like that are simply better programmers. Why would I want to hire someone who is intellectually lazy for an intellectually challenging job?

Obscure or nonmainstream technologies

I am not hiring Lisp, Prolog, Erlang, APL, Scheme, Clipper, PowerBuilder, Delphi, Pascal, Perl, Ruby, Python (forgive me for including those four in this list), Fortran, Ada, Algol, PL/1, OCaml, F#, Spec#, Smalltalk, Logo, StarLogo, Haskell, ML, D, Cobra, B, or even COBOL (which is fairly mainstream) developers. If you show these on your resume, I will want to interview you just for the sake of slipping in a few questions about these items. I am serious. As part of my secret geekiness, I am really into obscure and almost obscure languages and technologies. I know that a lot of those items take better-than-industry-average intellect and experience to do; they also provide a set of experiences that gives their practitioners a great angle on problems. While you will never directly use those skills in my shop, you will be using those ways of thinking, and it will give us something to talk about on your first day.

(Aside: A coworker was shocked to learn that I played Half Life. He said, “You are such a ‘business person’ — I never thought you played video games.” I guess I’m camouflaging my secret geekiness too well!)

Good luck

I’ve given away crown jewels here. In my perspective, these tips will help any programmer write a perfect resume and get them an interview.

What do you think gets applicants an interview? If you read resumes as either a hiring manager, a recruiter, or an HR employee, what makes you say “wow!” or “ugh!” when you see it on paper?

source @TechRepublic

Write a resume that will land you a programming job..PART 2

Show me that you are different

Even if my project is a run-of-the-mill Web-based, data driven application (which it is not), I still want to see that you are more than someone with 10 years of experience writing run-of-the-mill Web-based, data driven applications. For example, compare these two items:

BORING!
East Coast Power - Programmer 1999 - 2005

* Wrote VB applications to control machinery. The hardware interface was handled in a COM library that was written by another team. Application was robust and reliable.
* Wrote Web-based tool to track system faults.
* Created Web service to allow partners to consume portions of the database.

WOW!
East Coast Power - Programmer 1999 - 2005

* Wrote VB applications to control nuclear reactor. Real-time control and monitoring of systems handling 10,000 unique data inputs per second.
* Wrote advanced algorithms in C# to detect imminent system failure, which were used within a Web-based application.
* Created Web service in C# to allow partners to access data in a secure, reliable, and responsive manner; typical data set was 1,000,000 rows and concurrency challenges needed to be overcome at the database and application layers.

See the difference? Control machinery does not help me much – you could have been working on the elevator system for all I know. Programming a nuclear reactor impresses me, especially since there has not been any nuclear reactor disasters during your employment. Writing advanced algorithms in C# touches my engineer’s heart; whereas writing a mere Web-based tool is ho hum. And, while writing a Web service is fairly simple, particularly in ASP.Net, it’s not so easy to write one that is “secure, reliable, and responsive” with that size of a data set. It’s also not easy to deal with concurrency issues at two different levels.

I am not saying that it needs to be wordy or full of minute details, but if you are doing work beyond what a summer intern could do, I need to know about it. Every developer has written a Web-based, data driven application. Show me more.

Make sure that your experience highlights your skills

I don’t expect your employment history to include a list of all your skills. But if you are looking for work as a .Net developer, show me that you have done some .Net work. If you do not list that experience, I am going to assume that you have little or no experience with it — even if it is on your skill list. If you have large amounts of experience outside of the workforce, find a way to show that on your resume.

Keep your resume between two to four pages long

I have struggled through seven-page resumes filled with jargon and boring details that made me want to cry. An overly long resume doesn’t necessarily make me rule out a candidate, but why make it hard on me?

On the other hand, a resume that tries to stick to the one page rule is not going to cut it for a technical person unless they are new to the field. In my experience, two to four pages is just right. Also, please use some whitespace, so I do not feel like I am drowning.
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Write a resume that will land you a programming job..PART 1

I usually read 5 - 20 resumes each week. Both my boss and I are extremely busy, so it’s important that a programmer’s resume grab our attention quickly by providing the right mix of necessary information with something that makes that person stand out from the pack.

I’ve been involved with our hiring process for more than six months, so I feel fairly confident that I can distill what it takes for a programming resume to get me to say, “Let’s arrange an interview.” Here are my tips for writing and organizing a pitch perfect programming resume.

Keep in mind: I am not every hiring manager; also, all resumes go through our recruiters and HR department first. Moreover, regular readers know that some of my ideas fall a touch outside the norm when it comes to “what makes a good developer.”

Put your skills front and center

Reading the in-depth details of how you used mainstream skill XYZ to accomplish typical task ABC is not at the top of my agenda. I want to see your skills up front, so I don’t need to go trolling through your resume to see if you meet my minimum needs.

Skip the summary and maybe even the objective

Those summaries are a waste of my time. It is going to say something like “seasoned IT pro with great communication skills” or “proven veteran with 10 years of programming experience.” How do I know this? Because they all say this. Skip it, please.

The objective is a slightly different story; it is useful only if it informs the interviewer about something that the skills and experience does not. The objective’s relevance to me is largely a function of whether you wish to keep doing what you have been doing. If I see you have been programming — particularly at the data access layer and the business object layer — and there is no objective, I am going to assume that you are looking for more of the same with a different employer or location. If you want to do more of that work and put an objective, you are wasting space. If you are looking for a change of pace — like getting more into the presentation layer or heading towards a management track — it’s important to state that in your resume. Otherwise, we may discover during the interview that you are not interested in what we have to offer.

List your education last

Some IT hiring managers put a huge emphasis on certain educations but I do not. I always want you to list your school and your major, but I will only ask you about your education if there is something unusual or intriguing.

For instance, a candidate with a Computer Science degree from MIT or with a PhD in Organic Chemistry will draw my eye because these degrees show a level of high intelligence. On the flipside, an AA in basket weaving or a lack of a degree will not count against you.

In most cases, I am not even curious about your education until I have already made up my mind. This includes certifications — MCSEs and CCNAs do not impress me that much at this point. They matter to some folks, and they do not hurt you in my opinion, but I will only take that certification into account if all else is equal.

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10 signs that you aren’t cut out to be a developer

Programmers make big bucks. Software developers dress casual every day of the week. Anyone can teach themselves to be a programmer. These are just a few of the reasons why people say they want to become a developer. Unfortunately, the job market is littered with people who may have had the raw intelligence or maybe even the knowledge, but not the right attitude or personality to become a good programmer. Here are a few things to consider when deciding whether you should become a software developer.

#1: You’d rather be trained than self-teach

In most development shops, there is rarely any training, even if the company has a training program in place for other employees. At best, the company might reimburse you for a book you buy. Programmers are expected to arrive on their first day with all (or at least most ) of the skills they need. Even worse, the assumption is that programmers are really smart people who are good at problem solving. That assumption leads upper management to believe that good programmers do not need training. Finally, training for developers is extremely expensive. The result? When you change positions, you will need to figure out what is going on yourself, and you will probably need to teach yourself.

#2: You like regular working hours

Software development projects are notorious for being late. Even the projects that are delivered on time always seem to run behind schedule at some point. If you don’t like (or can’t handle) irregular or fluctuating demands on your time by your employer, development is not for you. When crunch time comes, your employer is more concerned with getting the product in the hands of a million-dollar client than with your child’s soccer game or the new TV program you wanted to watch.

#3: You prefer regular raises to job-hopping

The world of development is one of continual erosion of skill value. Unless you are working at a shop that deals with slow-to-change technologies, chances are, your skill set is less valuable every day. The state of the art is changing rapidly, and the skills that are hot today will be ho-hum tomorrow. As a result, it is difficult to sit at the same desk doing the same work every day and expect a raise that exceeds a cost of living increase. You need to keep your skills up to date just to maintain your current value. In addition, if you want to boost your paycheck, you need to expand your skill set significantly and either earn an internal promotion or go to another company.

#4: You do not get along well with others

It’s one thing to be an introverted person or to prefer to work by yourself. It’s another thing to be unable to get along with others, and it can sink you as a developer. Not only that, your manager may well be a nontechnical person (or a technical person who has not worked hands-on in some time), so you need to be able to express yourself to nontechnical people.

#5: You are easily frustrated

Software development is often quite frustrating. Documentation is outdated or wrong, the previous programmer wrote unreadable code, the boss has rules to follow that make no sense… the list is endless. At the end of the day, no one wants to be working next to someone who is always cursing under his or her breath or screaming at the monitor. If you are the kind of person who goes insane spending eight hours to do what appears to be 10 minutes’ worth of work, this is not a career for you.

#6: You are close-minded to others’ ideas

In programming, there are often problems that have only more than one “right” answer. [Update: Corrected by author] If you do not handle criticism well, or do not care to hear the suggestions of others, you might miss something important. For example, a few weeks ago, one of our junior-level people made a suggestion to me. After considering it for a bit, I decided to try it. It turned out that he was right and I was wrong, and his suggestion brought the time to execute a piece of code from multiple days to a few hours. Ignoring this person due to the difference in our experience levels would have been foolish.

#7: You are not a “details person”

Programming is all about the details. If you get lost in a movie more complex than Conan the Barbarian or have a hard time filling out a rebate voucher, you probably won’t do very well in the development world. Sometimes, something as simple as a missing period can mean the difference between random failure and perfect success. If you are the type of person who might not figure out where the missing period is, your career will be limited in range, at best.

#8: You do not take personal pride in your work

Sure, it’s possible to program by the book and do a passable job. The problem is, the book keeps getting rewritten. Software development is not a factory job where you tighten the same bolt all day long, where a touch too much or too little torque makes no difference. It requires independent thought, which in turn requires the people doing the work to take pride in it. Furthermore, it’s easy to do something the wrong way and have it work just well enough to end up in production. That “little error” you turn a blind eye to since it doesn’t seem to cause any problems will cause problems. Programmers who do not treat each project as something to be proud of turn out poor quality work, which in turn makes their careers short-lived.

#9: You prefer to shoot first and ask questions later

Software developers, at least the good ones, spend a lot more time planning what they’re going to type than actually typing. Usually, when coders just open up their code editor and start banging away at the keyboard, most of what they write gets ripped out later. Programmers who ponder, think, consider, and plan write better code in less time with fewer problems. There’s a reason so many programmers barely know how to type properly: The hard part of the job is knowing what to type. People who do not invest the time up front in their zeal to get started with the “real work” are actually skimping on the “real work.” If you are a doer and not a thinker, software development is probably not a good career choice for you.

#10: You do not like the geek type of person

For a bunch of reasons (some legitimate), a lot of people just do not enjoy being around the engineer or techie personality. If you have a hard time with the Dilbert or Weird Al personality type, do not even consider going into programming. Are all developers like that? Of course not. But they comprise a large enough portion of the workforce that you would be miserable in the industry.

courtesy @ TechRepublic

The programming paradigm needs an update

The way I view programming is different than it was a week ago due to various factors. First, I have spent a lot of time lately with my head buried in the .NET documentation, and something in the back of my mind said, “If C# is so much more efficient than VB.NET, why do all of the code samples appear to be the same length and look virtually identical?” Then, I reread an e-mail from someone telling me that XYZ language was awesome because it needed dramatically less source lines of code (SLOC) to do the same thing as more mainstream languages. And, I have still been multithreading the same dumb little piece of code. Finally, I read a post by Mark Miller about Emacs and Lisp.

It is all coming together for me now, the conscious understanding of what I really dislike about programming. I got into programming because I like solving problems, but solving problems is really only a small fraction of the work. The rest of it is giving exact, precise details as to how to perform the tasks that solve the problems. It is like painting the Sistine Chapel by putting a seven-year-old boy on a scaffold and dictating to him every stroke you want him to make. It is ridiculous.

This highlights the real problem in the programming industry: Everything we slap on top of the development process is more garbage on top of a rotting foundation. Let’s take a closer look at what we do here, folks, and examine how much the programming paradigm has (or has not) changed.

Then (i.e., 10 -20 years ago)
A programmer sits down and analyzes the process of the work. Using a stencil and a pencil, he lays out a workflow on graph paper. The programmer sits down, fires up his trusty text editor (if he is lucky, it supports autoindent), and creates one or more text files containing source code. He then compiles the source code (or tries to run it through an interpreter) to check for syntactical correctness. Once it compiles or interprets correctly, he runs it with test cases to verify logical correctness and to check for run-time bugs. Any bugs are logged to a text file; or maybe he has a debugger or crash dump analyzer to find out what went wrong. This continues until the program is considered complete.

Now
A programmer sits down and analyzes the process of the work. Using a flowcharting tool or maybe a UML editor, he lays out a workflow. The programmer sits down, fires up his trusty IDE (if he is lucky, it supports version control), and creates one or more text files containing the source code. Some of this code may be auto-generated, such as data objects based on the database schema or some basic code from the UML. Half of this generated code will need to be discarded unless the project is very basic, but at least it is a start. The IDE will handle the basics of getting a form to display regardless of whether it is a desktop app or a Web app. The programmer then compiles the source code (or tries to run it through an interpreter) to check for syntactical correctness. Once it compiles or interprets correctly, he runs it with test cases to verify logical correctness and to check for run-time bugs. Any bugs are logged to a text file; or maybe he has a debugger or crash dump analyzer to find out what went wrong. This continues until the program is considered complete.

Wow… we’ve traded in vi for Visual Studio and a bunch of print statements for [F11]. At the end of the day, nothing has really changed except for the tools, which are barely keeping pace with the increasing complexity of developing software. We are stuck, and we are stuck badly.

The Lisp advocates like to say, “Lisp would have taken over if only we had better/different hardware!” Now we have the hardware, and Lisp is still not taking over. I assert that we need to go far beyond something like Lisp at this point; we need to get into an entirely new type of language. A great example of this is multithreading.

IT pros usually say two things about bringing multithreading work mainstream: Compilers need to get a lot smarter before this can happen, and we cannot make the compilers smart enough for this to happen well. If this seems like an irresolvable contradiction, it isn’t. The problem is not the compilers — it’s our paradigms.

If you’ve spent a fair amount of time with multithreading, you know that it will never become a commonplace technique until the compiler can handle most of it automatically. The fact is that it’s tricky for most programmers to keep the details of a system where concurrency is an issue — and debugging these systems is a pure terror.

Smarter compilers are the answer, but there is a truth amongst the compiler folks that compilers will never get that smart. Why? Because properly translating a serial operation into a parallel one requires understanding the code’s intentions and not just the step-by-step how to guide that the source code models. I can read your code and (provided it is clear enough) understand probably 80% of your intentions up front and possibly figure out an additional 10% or 15% of your code with time. The other 5% or 10% will be a mystery until I ask you.

Read the comments on this post from Chad Perrin about Python and Ruby; these people are trying to optimize a trivial chunk of code. What is even more interesting is the point Chad makes over and over again in his responses (he posts as apotheon): Maybe the intention of the code was to produce that onscreen counter that is eliminated in most of the optimizations. Or maybe, despite it being slower due to the concatenation of immutable strings, there was a knock off effect of that as well. Who knows? The intentions cannot be made through code without having ridiculously verbose comments in the code or having an exacting product spec available.

Perl appears to understand intentions, but it is a trick. Perl was simply designed to make certain assumptions based on the way most programmers usually think in the absence of logical code. If your intentions do not square with Perl’s assumptions, it either will not run, or it will not run properly. If you do not believe me, try abusing Perl a little with a record format that specifies the tilde as a record separator instead of newline. Perl’s assumptions fly out the window unless you set the record separation string in your code; and, at that point, you are no longer actually using the assumptions — you are giving it precise directions.

I am all for self-documenting code. I like to think that no one reading my code had to struggle to figure out what it does. But aside from design specs and/or pages of inline comments, there is no way for someone reading it to know why I wrote the code that I did. It is like being in the Army. They usually don’t tell you why you need to march down a road, they just tell you to do it.

Programmers are in a bind. Without a way for the compiler to know the design specifications, the compiler cannot truly optimize something as complex as a parallel operation beyond really obvious optimizations. There are no hard and fast rules to making a serial operation parallel; it is a black art that involves a lot of trial and error even for frequent practitioners. In order for the compiler be able to understand those design specifications, it would require an entirely different type of language and compiler. Assertations and other “design by contract” items are not even the tip of the iceberg — they are the seagull sitting on the iceberg in terms of resolving the issue. If the compiler is smart enough to understand the design document, why even bother writing the code? UML-to-code tools generally try to do this, but they do not go far enough. At best, these tools can translate a process into code that literally expresses that process; there is no understanding of intention.

There are a few major schools of programming languages — object oriented, procedural, functional, and imperative — all of which have their strengths and weaknesses. Functional and imperative languages come the closest to what I am talking about. SQL is a great example. You tell it what you want not how to get what you want. The details of the “how” are up to the database engine. As a result, databases are optimized in such a way that they run a lot faster than what 99.9% of programmers could get the same stuff to run (not to mention redundancy, transactions, etc.) despite their rather general purpose nature. Even SQL shows a lot of weakness; while it is an imperative language, it is extremely domain specific. As soon as you want to manipulate that data, you land yourself in the world of procedural code either within a stored procedure or your application.

Most applications (and every library) become a miniature domain specific language (DSL) unto itself — not syntactically (although some, such as regex libraries, reach that status), but in terminology, subject matter, and so on. The problem you are most likely trying to address has absolutely nothing to do with the language you are using and everything to do with a specific, nonprogramming problem.

A great example of the disconnect between code and the problem it addresses is the subject of loops. I bet over 50% of the loops out there go over an entire data collection and do not exit without hitting every single element in the collection. The logic we are implementing is something like “find all of the items in the collection that meet condition XYZ” or “do operation F to all items in the collection.” So why are we working with languages that do not deal with set theory?

Programmers end up implementing the same thing over and over again (i.e., a function or object or whatever in a library that takes that big set as the input) and implementing a filter command that returns a smaller, filtered set, or an “ExecuteOnAll” method that takes a pointer to a function as the argument.

When the language folks try to make it easier on us, the result is stuff like LINQ, the welding of a DSL to a framework or language to compensate for that language or framework’s shortcomings in a particular problem domain.

The only way LINQ could get implemented is if the languages that support it have closures, which are “the thing” in a functional language like Lisp; closures are even important in Perl. But programmers have been working in Java and Java-like languages for the last five - 10 years (depending on how much of an early adopter you were), and a lot of folks missed Perl entirely, either sticking with VB and then the .NET languages or starting with C/C++ (or Pascal) and going to Java and/or .NET. The only exposure most programmers ever had to a truly dynamic language is JavaScript (aka ECMAScript). (By dynamic language, I mean a language that can edit itself or implement or re-implement functionality at run-time. JavaScript, with its support for eval(), has it and so does Perl. In functional languages like Lisp, this is all the language really can do.) In reality, JavaScript is not that bad; in fact, I like it quite a bit. I am just not a huge fan of the environment and object model programmers are used to seeing it in (the browser DOM).

Most of the programmers I have dealt with have little (if any) experience with a dynamic language. The result is that they don’t have the ability to think the way you need to about a dynamic language. These programmers stumble around blind; they intuitively know that they aren’t working to their potential, but they have no idea where to start. (Why else would there be the huge market for code generators and other gadgets to improve productivity by reducing typing?)

I do not believe that Lisp and its ilk are the answer; they are too difficult for most programmers to read through and understand, and the entire code is a back reference to itself. Procedural languages have also proven hard to maintain. Object-oriented languages are the easiest to maintain — at the expense of being insanely verbose, which is another reason for the code generators. Imperative languages are almost always going to be little more than DSLs.
Where do we go from here?

I want to see programmers headed towards intentional languages. I have no idea what they would look like, but the source code would have to be a lot more than the usual text file and would need to be able to express relationships within the data format, like XML or a database do. The programming paradigm needs to be able to quickly reduce any business problem to an algorithm so that the real work can go into writing the algorithm and then, at the last minute, translating the results to the domain’s data structures again. The programming paradigm would look like a mix of a lot of different ideas, but syntax and punctuation would have to be fairly irrelevant.

What are your thoughts about the programming paradigm? What direction do you think it needs to take?