"No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school, the age you were when you coded your first website, or what platforms you tech-supported in school, and yet that material consumes more visual weight than the number of years the candidate has doing Rails development."
I think this is a ridiculous statement, but we almost certainly have a different definition of what makes an employer (cough) reasonable.
My priorities in a resume read are passion, then applied intelligence, then experience. The information you're ignoring here is valuable with essentially no additional variables (doesn't matter much where they went to high school, or what the website did). How long someone I don't know paid you to write code in whatever technology is almost useless information to me.
No, he's right. It's hard enough trying to keep normal stuff to two pages without all that random stuff. My "high school" (UK secondary school), gets 1 whole line. I dropped the bit about being the top student (at GCSE) in my school years ago.
OK, I admit, I have dedicated 4 whole lines (3-5% maybe) on my C.V. to my personal interests. If I get an inexperienced interviewer who wants to make me comfortable they provide easy openers (it's cool, I'd rather get straight to business and talk about their business), and emphasise I am not my job.
I'm not even out of college, and I've already dropped the high school bit from my resume entirely. Does anyone really care what a potential hire did in high school once they've had a real job or graduated from college (save someone being an extreme outlier that completed most of their college degree in HS or what have you)?
I think this is a ridiculous statement, but we almost certainly have a different definition of what makes an employer (cough) reasonable.
My priorities in a resume read are passion, then applied intelligence, then experience. The information you're ignoring here is valuable with essentially no additional variables (doesn't matter much where they went to high school, or what the website did). How long someone I don't know paid you to write code in whatever technology is almost useless information to me.