[geeks] Opinions - Outdated technologies on Resume

[velociraptor]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Rick Hamell <hamellr at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was just curious how you all feel about adding outdated technologies
> to a Resume?

I'm teaching a resume class at various LOPSA-affliliated conferences
these days, so let me chime in with my $.02.

You have about 10 seconds to get sifted into the "maybe" vs. the
"don't bother" pile.

If the "old" technology is not explicitly relevant to the job
description, then it doesn't belong on your resume.  "Old" in this
context doesn't mean the previous version of an OS, or similar, it
means just the kind of rare, ancient stuff you listed in your original
message. The folks who are matching to a buzzword bingo list may get
bored and reject you simply because "I don't know what all these other
geek words mean."  The techies may reject you for the same reason
(insecure), or assume you're cleaving to old school tech and reject
you for that, too.  You may not believe the latter, but I assure you
it happens. You wouldn't believe some of the ridiculous things I've
heard fanatics of the "devops" movement espouse. History repeating
itself and all that.

It also doesn't belong there because of ageism (again, unless
explicitly relevant to the job at hand). Never, ever give the
"sifters" the ability to discriminate against you.  Even if they are
not discriminating based on age, listing this kind of stuff also gives
them too much information about your experience level, which unless
relevant, may get you excluded based on assumptions about your salary
requirements.

And then there's the, if you don't want to work on it why are you
listing it on your resume factor? Do you really want to be the guy
that's dragged into making the ancient dot matrix printer work with
the brand new invoice printing application (I heard two stories about
just these kinds of issues from my boss and co-worker on Friday).  I'm
all for making sure the business runs, but really, I'd rather keep
moving forward in my career than being stuck in the past[0]...unless
they want to pay me *a lot* for that knowledge of old tech. =)

As an aside, I agree with those who've stated they have a master
document with excessive amounts of detail and use that to generate a
specific resume for every job description to which they apply.  I've
gone a bit further. In addition to having the "master list," I am
putting all my resume versions into a source code system, and check in
each version with a comment about the job for which it was crafted.
Perhaps it's overkill, but I finally got sick of chasing around all
the versions.  I also continuously update the master, sifting through
work emails and documents periodically to add projects, problems I've
solved, and things I've learned to it.

tl;dr: Is it relevant to the job at hand? If not, don't bother.

=Nadine=

[0] Surely there will be no snark about my persistence with Solaris
from the sunhelp gang. ;-)