This is nice advice in a kum-ba-ye circle for someone with little practical experience. Sorry to be so offensive.

Not exactly. It starts around 2012 and sort of continues to today. The focus of the resume is on my accomplishments and my projects. I'm not sure how I feel about the education section. I'm reconsidering that part more than anything, to be honest.

Yes, this is a common mistake.

Hate to break out Cracked as a source, but this article skewers the mythos pretty good: http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-things...t-poor-people/

This is so true. Honestly, my current job has no real clue of my work history. My last employer thought I had a Masters Degree in finance or some baloney like that. The intern guy thought I was some sort of successful guy sitting on a bunch of cash just chilling out.

At the end of the day, no one bothers to check anything and there is nearly zero chance you'll be discovered. You aren't going for law or medicine; it's just a silly job that you probably don't need a college degree for. Heck, even where I work, everyone has a college degree of some sort except for me. Once your hired, that resume goes into the same trash bin as all of the rejects.

I think people who fit the profile I described earlier - i.e. white/asian/upper-middle-upbringing with fancy degrees in quantitative subjects - are also more likely to be impressed by poker accomplishments than average people are because they see it as a complex mathematical game and project their own insulation from stigma onto others. To most others, it's gambling and they are more likely to compare you to uncle bob in some cautionary tale who rode the beginner's luck all the way to bankruptcy and homelessness.

I tried all variations of poker/no poker on my resume while looking for a job a couple of years ago. I didn't get a single interview when I included poker.

At the end of a second round interview, when it was basically over and I felt like I had the job, it somehow came up that I played poker. The guy interviewing me said "Oh (read: eww), you're a poker player." I never heard from them again.

I never lied but I was starting to think that it might be my only hope. Ended up just getting a job with a poker related company.

It's not offensive at all but don't you think it's a little odd that you were talking about how badly you're doing at this job search and you've had no luck finding anything, etc, and I mention trying something else, which would make me more likely to consider you as a candidate and this immediate triggers you to talk about how successful your approach has been?

You should read that article:

The implication here is that if you're neither rich, nor doing something to bring in some money, nor physically disabled, you're likely not right in the head. This doesn't apply to you because you were not unemployed, but it's the correct inference if someone tells you they were unemployed for an entire decade.

What is in your education section? If you can fill that with mostly recent stuff, you can at least mislead the guy sorting the resume into thinking that you're much younger than you are, which may be helpful in disguising the gap. Do you have any formal education from long ago you'd want there (BA/BS+?)

I took that advice from a lot of well-meaning and apparently well-qualified people. That attitude doesn't work.

There is no education. Just me, a bunch of books, pens, and paper.

Don't flat out lie on your resume. Most companies will research you after you've been hired. Just embellish the hell out of stuff that can't be verified. I did a few iOS apps for a guy while I was playing poker for two years. Guess what my resume said I did for those two years.

Do they really research that hard AFTER hiring? Id think itd make more sense and be more cost effective/time effective to do all of that before hand. You dont really want to have to fire someone the first month after hiring right? Doesnt that just look bad?

No, they don't. I've never heard of that for this kind of job. The way it actually works is, someone calls one or two of your references after you've gotten far enough in the interview process, and maybe does some google searching on you and maybe verifies the schools you claimed you graduated from. After that, no one ever looks at you again unless you they suspect you of doing something fraudulent in your current work.

Especially in the software industry I disagree. It's basically a way to get hires, fill the resume with some solid year(s) at a legit company and move on.

To some extend I agree but there's a very big distinction. The stuff he works with is much more "real" than the stuff "we" work with. I'm hypothesising here but with my understanding of how the brain works (the model I agree with the most currently is layed out in "On Intelligence") he gets very direct real world sensory inputs that he can use to predict and pick the right actions for the desired outcomes for a lot of things. We have to use imagined feedback as the input more often.

For dave's situation I disagree. If I understand him correctly he should just play the numbers and apply to as many jobs as possible with the intention of eventually quitting the one he'll eventually get (aka resume filler) to go after said high quality job (and if he luckboxes a quality job from the start that's good as well)

Let's get real here, probably every resume is stretching the truth at least a tad bit. Lots have outright lies in my view. If we're talking about lies where one would be susceptible to being caught well that probably doesn't happen that much.

With all that said I do think honesty is the best policy when discussing your capabilities and experience. I view the hiring process as a two way street. If your new employer has an accurate view of what your capabilities are then I think you are better much better off.

I think for the most part (not all) companies are pretty much inept in their hiring process for developers. When I interview I do ask questions that help me figure out what it would be like to work there. A lot of places I find I'd just as soon not work there thank you very much. The hiring folks say they like to see accomplishments on resumes and more recent experience outweighs older experience by a lot. I would be honest about work history dates.

Yes. It's called your curriculum vitae. Good companies do some due diligence after you've gotten hired to make sure you didn't flat-out lie on your resume. It's a lot easier to do that than to try to vet out every potential candidate – since so few flat out lie. I'm sure all companies don't do this, but the two large corporations I've worked for do.

I think the more standard move is to do it right before the offer is made. So the interview process has finished, the decision to hire someone is made, preliminary background/reference check is done, and offer extended (depending on the industry this can also include additional background/credit checks that need the candidates permission and the offer will make it clear that it can be revoked if any of these come back poorly).

Although I know of at least two stories from very different employers where they had to fire someone in the first week after finding out that they had lied about education and reason for leaving a past job (turned out the one guy had been fired for sexual harassment).

What I learned about Swing last night:

"You can put a JPanel inside of this JPanel using this layout, and put another JPanel inside of that one with this text field, blah blah blah..." for 3 hours, then at the end, "But seriously, just use a WYSIWYG layout manager to do all this, no one codes this **** by hand." - almost verbatim from my professor.

So a portfolio full of poker related projects might not be ideal then?

I never included poker on my resume, but the four year gap always came up.

I interviewed at a small company where I had to talk to a bunch of HR and non-technology types who clearly didn't appreciate it.

I interviewed at a huge multinational corporation where I only had to talk to engineers all who thought it was super cool so I work there now. As an added bonus the pay is way better.

It sounds like you have a good professor. You should at least learn how stuff works under the covers. We get these crappy offshore Java devs who have no idea how to work without eclipse. They literally don't know how compiling works. Or JS devs who are completely lost w/o jQuery.

Yes it's true you don't have to understand how a transistor works to be a good programmer. But you should at least understand one level below the one you normally work in. Otherwise you're going to have a very hard time debugging when weird things happen - since it's all just magic under the covers to you.

Also the odds you'll get an entry-level job writing a gui interface in Java in 2014 are fairly low (there is a huge glut of client-server programmers). So don't sweat swing too much.

Yeah some companies like to wait until after you're hired - because that's when they find out stuff like your SS# and birthdate that they can't legally ask for as part of the hiring process. Although now a lot of companies run a credit check before hiring - so for them that's probably their due diligence.

Yea, good, I don't care for this section all that much.

This is basically how the topic came up. I have a few poker related projects that, before black friday, generated enough passive income to allow me to get involved in a bunch of other projects. The takeaway was "ew poker".

This is awesome. The interview that I mentioned was with the owner of a very small company. I'm also in the Midwest US so location could be a factor.

LMAO, "not knowing how to code is preventing me from being a developer, I'll just lie about that on my resume." How about flipping it around, would you want to work with someone who only got the job because they lied about their qualifications?

is only using eclipse for java that big of a deal?

No – eclipse is awesome. But you should at least have a vague idea of how dependencies are managed and things get compiled into jars and wars.

If they're sharp and it's not a senior-level position – sure. I bluffed my way into my first couple jobs and did fine. The second one was even labeled senior Java developer.

Programming is unlike other disciplines. If you're good at solving puzzles, it's pretty easy to pick up and be productive right off the bat. You won't write the most maintainable code ever, or know how to write a good framework, but you'll be productive.