Specifics, Specifics, Specifics

From DICE News, January 9, 2009...

Joel Spolsky, founder of Fog Creek Software, has some good advice for software developers at the Joel on Software blog.

Here’s a tip from someone who has read thousands of resumes. When you’re applying to a startup, or a software company with less than, say, 100 employees, you may want to highlight the Banging Out Code parts of your experience, while deemphasizing the Middle Management parts of your experience.

When a startup CTO sees a resume that says things like:

• Responsible for $30m line of business
• Architected new ERP platform
• Managed team of 25 developers
• Optimized business processes

they think, “Spare me, that’s all we need, somebody running around trying to manage and optimize and architect when we just need someone who isn’t afraid to write code.”

Here’s the stuff CTOs at startups want to see on a resume:

• Single-handedly developed robust 100,000 LOC threadsafe C++ service
• Contributes to OpenBSD file system in spare time
• Wrote almost 75% of the Python code running IsIt2009Yet.Com
  
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