How detailed should the "experience" section of my resume be?

Question

I'm looking over resumes to hire a developer. On the resume it says - "I have 23 years of experience", but in the "experience" section it only lists about 15 years worth of work. Is it customary for programmers to cut short their experience section and not list everything, or is the current raised state of my left eyebrow completely justified?

Answer 1

If the experience is listed in reverse date order, they may have just left out the earliest (least relevant) experience in order to keep the resume shorter. Typically, I would just make it briefer. If there are date ranges missing, it could be that they felt that that particular experience was less relevant than others. You might want to ask about it, but I don't know that by itself it should raise any red flags.

Answer 2

It depends on what the claim is. On my resume, I start to remove some of the older and less relevant sections of the Experience section as I have new experiences to replace them.

If I was claiming 10 years of Java experience, I would try to make sure that a reviewer could find it. On the other hand, if I was claiming 25 years of programming experience, I might not include everything I did for 25 years, but if you look at the year I graduated university, added 21-25 years, you should come up with the current year (some people will include their university experience toward the total, others, not).

Answer 3

It may be that they are counting experience from college days and before, e.g. maybe you have a programmer that started at 12 on your hands.

I would personally count that as valid, but of course you can't verify it directly. It is normally obvious in other ways however, because IMO someone like that will have a greater interest and aptitude than the average bear.

Answer 4

I keep my resume updated with all of my "relevant" experience. I've been in the programming/networking field for over 12 years but some of my experience has fallen by the wayside, such as HP-3000 Unix maintenance, reel to reel tape machine maintenance, Windows 3.1, DOS, Windows NT 4.0 ... not much of that is relevant.

However some of the "business experience" is still relevant, meaning that I know how to handle crisis situations when a server crashes (backup and recovery). I guess what it points to is that I have the analytical skills and I am keeping my skillset current. Not merely trying to find a job to fit my old skillset and not bothering to learn new technology.

If I were in your shoes I would see if the person's resume involved newer tech and ensure that the candidate is willing to learn new tech to keep up with your organization. I would be leery of someone who's been using the same language all their life and is rooted in a certain mentality in lieu of new development concepts.

Answer 5

You should write specific resumes for every time you apply for a new job, and there only focus on the relevant stuff in regards to the job you apply for...

At least as a general rule of thumb... :)

Answer 6

It's fairly common practice to drop off your COBOL and punch card experience from 1976 if you're applying for a .net job or something similar. The stuff from 20 years ago is almost irrelevant.

Personally, I don't remove anything, I just make a one-sentence blurb for it if it's really old.

Answer 7

I usually cut out some of the earlier work that I did to make room for more recent, more relevant projects I've worked on. Do you really care about the details of what they were doing beyond 15 years ago? Is any of that likely to be relevant today? If it is, ask them in the interview.

Answer 8

I tend to tailor my resumes to the job, which involves cutting out irrelevant, redundant or entry level experience. There's not much need to go into detail about my first assistant webmaster job in 1998, or repeat every QA training consulting gig I've done. Employers have to read a lot of resumes, and their eyes glaze over after the first dozen or so, so I keep it fairly short and targeted with the most important stuff at the top.

Due to most of my experience coming from consulting and Open Source projects, I have a hard time creating a linear history of "work" experience on a resume. So sometimes I have to stretch things a bit to avoid showing "employment gaps" that resume readers seem to abhor so much.

But as Indiana Jones said, "it's not the years, it's the millage". Judging experience based on years isn't terribly useful. You can't grind computer programming. You don't level up by doing the same job over and over again. Ten years spent doing the same job is not as interesting as ten years doing ten different jobs. So I wouldn't look so much as the number of years experience as the number of different jobs and how successful they were at them. Different positions and teams within in the same company is also good. Also outside-of-work experience (hobby projects, Open Source work, user groups, conferences, blogging...) is a strong indication of enthusiasm.

If someone's been doing the same job or writing in the same programming language for more than five years I'd investigate whether its because its interesting and challenging or they're in a rut.

Answer 9

More interesting than resumes is to read applicants blog. Or even better look at the code (s)he has provided for some open source projects. From those you can get better understanding what he really knows and how he thinks.

When you interview someone ask about his favourite project. If he is enthusiast while talking about and starts to talk with his hands and almost cannot sit in his chair. Then you know that is the right person.

Answer 10

Personally I see someone that knows how to be brief and cut unnecessary things from their resume as a good thing.

Answer 11

The resume's purpose is to get you an interview.

For someone with the stated years, I might be concerned if there appear to be significant gaps, but if the skills match what you want, then ask about this in the interview. That's the more proper place for discovery and exploration. :-)

Cheers,

-Richard