Keep your Resume Reasonable

The other day, I was in a Twitter discussion interviewing people for technical positions. This reminded me of one of my favorite things to do in interviews… reading the list of qualifications/skills and asking questions about its contents. If you put it on the resume, I assume you know something about it and are willing to discuss. I used it mostly as a way to gauge their depth/breadth of experience, but sometimes it told me more than I expected.

One of the things that was interesting was when I got a resume with a skill list with basically every version of every technology imaginable. For example, consider this fake (though too realistic for some, perhaps,) example:

SQL Server 1.0, 4.21, 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, 2000, 2005, 2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019, 2022. Oracle 6, 7, 8, 8i, 9i, 9i Release2, 10g, 10g Release 2, 11g, 11g Release 2, 12c, 12c Release 2, 18c, 19c, 21c. PostgreSQL 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15; Acius 4th Dimension 1, 2

I can reasonably believe that someone has really used every release of one product. I developed my first system on SQL Server 1.0 and progressed to alter it to run on 4.21 and did the same for every single one of the SQL Server releases over the years. In the text of my resume, I do mention this fact because I feel like it shows that I have a depth of experience that is pretty rare (and I don't care if it shows my age a little!) But the more varied skills you put down, like every version of multiple RDBMSs says to me either: this is going to be a cool story I want to hear, or perhaps will tell me something about the interviewee. Either way, it is a topic that will come up over the course of an hour interview.

In my examples skills list, I put that last one in because it just happened to be the first database system I worked with professionally. 4^th Dimension hasn't been called Acius since 1989, (something I didn't know until I checked around for this editorial) but a form of it still seems to be around. So, when a resume like this was presented to me in an interview a few years ago with this name (true story), I wanted to see if we shared a common bond, so I asked: "Acius 4th Dimension, tell me about that?" Then came the answer I did not expect: "I don't know. Why do you ask?"

I haven't been in a more awkward position since a few years before this product was released when I was in high school. I had learned something about the candidate, precisely that they hadn't actually read their own resume. I legitimately had to say words to this effect: "Because it is on your resume." Awkward.

Attention to detail was one of my manager's big things they were looking for. If the person being interviewed seemed to have good programming skills, we could work with that. But sloppiness on your resume or during an interview that one should have prepared for, well this sort of thing this would likely infect our code base before the person left us for greener pastures.

So, my simple advice. You've no doubt heard to: "Keep your resume up to date," which should include clarifying what you might consider working on. If you put it down as a skill, you should be able to answer reasonably specific questions about it. Even SQL Server 4.21. (Or in other words, take off almost all obsolete technology.)

This advice goes for LinkedIn as well. While it can be helpful to include everything you have done over your career, do it in a way that makes it clear what you would want to work on, today.

Louis Davidson (@drsql)

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