My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.
No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.
In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.
>My resume has always been one page. I hate looking over 3 page resumes. I don’t care what you did in the 90s.
This is very culture specific.
Example: Like you, I usually keep a revolving ~10 years history on my CV. As the years progress, I drop anything > 10 years, as it's really no longer relevant.
Anyways, I was pointedly asked one time during an interview, recently, for a company in a different country, "Where's the rest of your work history since university?"
That was almost 20 years ago, now. You have any idea just how long my CV would be, now, with all of that information?
My solution to this has generally been to add a
"1997 - 2000 Various
Previous work history available upon request" at the bottom.
And then just carry a copy or two of the full CV with you to the interview. If someone wants to see it, let them. Generally interviewers have just been curious.
Even though I think ageism is overblown in the software development industry if you are buzzword compliant, I don’t take any chances. I leave everything off before 2008, my year of graduation and I go completely clean shaven and bald in an interview. (I’m Black it’s not abnormal). Most non-Blacks have no idea how old I am without the obvious signs of gray hair or a receding hair line.
White men can shave bald too, and anyone can dye their hair. There's even a famous hair dye brand that specifically advertises its product for use in gaming age doiscrimination! The product (Just For Men) and ads are gender-discriminatory, of course!
Not only that, but I don't want to be hired to fix some old VB6 app or write Crystal Reports. If I'm ever desperate for a job I would change my tune, but that's a different situation.
I took off anything related to C for a similar reason. While C and C++ have a special place in my heart, I was interviewing for a C# position around 4 years ago and I had an interviewer spend 5-10 minutes on C minutiae even though it had nothing to do with the job just to prove how smart he was.
I got the job. But, when I interview there are certain things I want to emphasize and that wasn’t one of them.
Everything. After 10 years it doesn’t really matter how much experience you have. I took off the two jobs I had between 1996-2008 because the skillset was outdated (VB6, Perl, Classic ASP) or something I didn’t want to do (C and C++). I’ve been doing C# since 2008 so I don’t think that will be irrelevant even in 2022.
No one cares that I wrote C for DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the late 90s or the systems I wrote with a combination of C++/COM and Vb6 in the early 2000s. I only go back 10 years.
In fact, I negotiated not to be a team lead at my current job.