Perhaps if you're a startup moving very quickly,
you might need someone with a specific skill set
My experience is the opposite of this claim ... when working for a startup you cannot afford the privilege of being specialized, but rather a jack of all trade that can easily switch between technologies and problem domains like putting on socks in the morning.
I've developed a couple of informal heuristics,
imperfect, but with some predictive power.
Your rules will give you a lot of false negatives, because the current hiring practices are completely broken, so naturally many people also know how to game the system (devs are a smart bunch in general)...
1. I also added lots of acronyms on my resumes in the past, because resumes are first read by HR people that look for keywords
2. I never listed XML or Eclipse, but I am listing Emacs :) ... regardless, this is in no way worse than listing those same requirements in a job posting, which many do
3. Certifications are cheap to get and in the corporate world certifications matter. I never got one, but that's only because I work with startups or with companies that know these certifications are useless
I agree with you, and for the record, I was only approaching this as one developer (out of several) doing an interview. It's just that, after several iterations of, 1. "Hey Mike, can you interview this guy tomorrow" 2. Looks at resume, sees dozens of acronyms, languages, platforms 3. "Ok, can you write a function to reverse a string?" and getting something like 4:
for (int i = s.length() - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
String newString = new String();
char x = s.charAt(i);
newString = newString + x;
}
1.) newString gets re-created every iteration of the loop, so it always contains a single character, and at the end of the loop it contains the first character of the string. 2.) Strings are immutable (in Java), so "newString = newString + x" creates a new object on every iteration. Better to use a StringBuffer and swap the ith and N - i - 1th characters of the string.
Isn't there some common library that contains a reverse() String method? That's why I like Ruby, for stuff like "string".reverse in the standard library. I can just use the language and know that the people writing the language are better language() method implementors than I am, which is fine. Not sure how well that flies in interviews at KPMG, but whatever.
1. I also added lots of acronyms on my resumes in the past, because resumes are first read by HR people that look for keywords
2. I never listed XML or Eclipse, but I am listing Emacs :) ... regardless, this is in no way worse than listing those same requirements in a job posting, which many do
3. Certifications are cheap to get and in the corporate world certifications matter. I never got one, but that's only because I work with startups or with companies that know these certifications are useless