I don't think it's skimpy, but maybe wrongly ordered and perhaps some stuff should be omitted.

Example :

Accomplishments (at the top) : High school dropout Education (at the bottom) : Member of MENSA.

seems obvious to me which one of those two should be getting played up more.

His site has been personally very helpful to me, and I hope that he has a run of better luck.

According to his autobiography, he moved as a teenager from Taiwan to Paraguay, then to Bolivia and finally to Canada. That's a very different story than simply "high school dropout". http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/xah.html

Sounds like writing him a new, attractive, professional resume could be very helpful. Clearly his biggest issues are dealing with people and presenting himself.

Side note: that he could live at all in San Francisco on that kind of income is truly impressive. At $1600 a month, rent alone is over $17000 a year.

I'd remove both, as they paint a picture that is predominantly negative (even if it might be incorrect).

I agree.

Some don't realize that a resume isn't a life-journal, but rather a carefully crafted group of documents which should help to paint the image of a choice candidate in the eyes of the interviewer, not the interviewee.

Like much in life, the biggest part of the problem is stepping into the shoes of the other party and learning to craft what they expect to see.

Having helped numerous friends and loved ones with their individual resumes was personally enlightening for when the next time comes that I must make one.

It actually does look pretty good, until you realize he doesn't list any real previous job experience anywhere.

Which is the worst, unforgivable sin (even worse than being old). It doesn't matter what you have done, if there is no corporation to witness to your ability and you do not have a fresh face. Hence "entry-level" positions requiring 5 years of experience, and yet you are unemployable forever if you don't have a job within 5 years of graduating. It might as well be law.

Is having corporate experience really that much better though?

I mean, obviously working for someone for several years implies some level of competence, but your work is nearly always locked away and you can't show it off.

Ideally you'd want someone who does both; working for someone, which demonstrates the ability to work on a team, while also contributing to open source and making their own content, upon which you can grade their technical skills.

As someone who has worked in the corporate world since graduation, I feel I have little to show that is concrete. It's all hearsay.

I feel I'd be better off if I spent time developing myself outside of work hours so that I can have something visible to the world to be proud of, but frankly with a family to take care of it's a struggle to get the energy to do that. I'd like to have my cake and eat it too. It's a little depressing to me, honestly, but it is what it is.

Practically speaking, yes, having corporate experience is much better.

After leaving the school (I didn't graduate), I spent 2 years doing self-directed learning about computing. I have commit access to PyPy and LLVM, am credited in release notes of Mono and IronPython, and hundreds of open source commits to show off. I still had a lot of trouble landing a job. I got lucky in the end, but it was rough.

You seem to overestimate how open source contributions are judged in job search. Corporate experience is not hearsay; it is concrete. Open source contributions are not concrete, because most employers do not know how to evaluate them.

I have had mostly the same experience.

On the plus side: a lot of companies care about Open Source experience and are able to evaluate it.

On the down side: companies who do it are still the minority, and you'll get a lot of competition from similar folks, who'll likely have written even more open source code than you did, and if they have had a real paid-for work experience will probably be preferred

> Is having corporate experience really that much better though?

Yes, a thousand times yes. At a minimum it gives you insight into some product/set of products that are commercially viable and people use. You get experience with at least one build system, and code architecture someone took to market. It also gives you a paycheck that frees up worries about food and housing. In the least demanding of these jobs you can use the down time to learn other technologies by building a MVP of the current product in another technology or contributing to open source projects your corporate job uses. The insight gained from one "real job" is a million times more helpful than trolling github and trying to figure out what a given project is used for in the real world.

It also gives some assurance that you won't be unmanageable in a working-for-hire context, or a HR problem child in other ways.

Long-term corporate employment is more valuable if you're seeking corporate employment. Only a few corporations (relatively speaking) place any value on open-source project association.

Apparently one reason that Valve did do well for themselves was that they were something like the first to seek out and hire modders rather than just new grads and gaming-industry made men. Naturally they were looking for the best, most accomplished modders but at the time they had their pick of them.