'This project was done during a bad phase of the moon': Programmers share the reddest flags they've ever come across on resumes

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Jan 13, 2023 3:00 PM EST

"I had a resume from someone who earned an MBA at a 'college of transcendental meditation,'" shared one Redditor in this hilarious thread of programming resume fails. People quickly chimed in with times they had to hire programmer positions, and ended up seeing some of the worst resumes ever!

Some people tried to fool the interviewers by inflating their credentials. But in the world of programming, that's a risky move. As one person shared, they interviewed someone who claimed they invented an app. The only problem was that the interviewer had created that app — so they were immediately outed as a fraud. There are tons of bright red flags that commenters spotted while interviewing programmers. Luckily they shared their wisdom with us so that we can all get a glimpse into their world. 

Check out this very funny thread of programming resumes that were dead on arrival. Then, check out this story of an indie bookseller who was devastated to learn that they were about to lose a huge chunk of money for a super tacky reason. 

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  • 01
    Purple - width="800" height="450" rx- me widt 'I got a resume from a guy <defs that listed his last position as a Señor Software Engineer.' SS </linear Grad <filter x="- <feOffset dy sianBlur stdDeviation values-"000000
    via Florian Olivo Hire on Unsplash
  • 02
    Font - </> r/ProgrammerHumor u/jonscotch 7h Join What is the biggest red flag you have ever seen on someone's resume? Other A few weeks ago I was going through a pile of resumes and came across a resume for a front end guy that was entirely composed of the guys name, e-mail, and a link to his personal website, lastname.dev. So I go to lastname.dev. It looks pretty decent. Nothing too mind blowing. I view the source and the very first line is a comment linking to the template of the website hoste
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 03
    Font - Achilles Buffalo 15 hr. ago I had a resume for a help desk position come by my desk that listed in "Experience" that he was Level 1 Gold in Magic the Gathering. That was his ONLY experience.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 04
    Font - Tesla428 16 hr. ago We interviewed a guy that told the HR Manager, "The Prison Psychologist said the same exact thing!" You could have heard a pin drop. Turns out he had applied to work in maintenance at a federal pen. Great phrase to use to make sure people are listening.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 05
    Font - 16 hr. ago I had someone claim they were a senior developer at a hugely successful startup, that they had been there from day one, and had massive input into core architecture. I was an early employee but didn't recognize the name. LocalInactivist My first question was "So you know Jack?" (Founder) "No." "Rick?" (VP of Engineering) "No" "Scott?" (Primary Back End Developer) "No." "Jim?" (Primary Front End Developer) "No." "When did you work there exactly?" "Uh..."
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 06
    Organism - · 18 hr. ago. edited 1 hr. ago I interviewed someone who had a year gap. They said they took time off to learn Japanese, when we asked if they knew Japanese they said "no." ryaaan89
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 07
    Font - subdermal_hemiola I got a resume that had all these bizarre annotations on it. Like, "this project was done during a bad phase of the moon," and "spiritually, I was strongly aligned with the goals of this." The killer was one where the annotations had all this stuff in all caps, like "This project turned into an UTTER DISASTER because the client COULDN'T HANDLE BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO by a person WITH A BACKBONE." We handled that resume with tongs. +1 19 hr. ago .
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 08
    Font - NoBarracuda5415 17 hr. ago I had a resume from someone who earned an MBA at a "college of transcendental meditation"
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 09
    Font - Unlikely-Rock-9647+1 18 hr. ago I remember one I reviewed like a decade ago. The resume was like quintuple spaced with weird indentations, and was like ten pages long because the white space was so messed up. I didn't immediately discard it due to that because sometimes imports/exports or copy pastes when editing can screen it up. But then I tried to open the three web pages the resume linked to as example work and they all threw errors. We did not talk to that candidate in person.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 10
    Font - OGodIDont Know . 18 hr. ago Had a guy list "Personal Coach/Consultant" job for two years. Former City Councilman convicted of embezzlement. He was in jail. Oddly enough, he checked the box indicating he had no felonies. Job requires security clearance so we would have picked it up on the background had I not recognized his name.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 11
    Font - Tkyl 18 hr. ago I ended up interviewing someone in a similar situation. Was looking for a resume rendering programmer, looked decent. Nothing extraordinary, but worth a check. The first thing out of his mouth when asked about his experience... "I followed the tutorial on XYZ website." I almost ended the interview then, but instead decided to keep it going to give him (and me) more experience interviewing at least. Needless to say his answers to further questions did not get any better.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 12
    Font - xcski_paul +2 - 17 hr. ago I worked a remote job many years ago where they were looking for local people (to replace me, as it turned out) and all the resumes they got were people with 3 years experience calling themselves "senior developers" who listed every single CSS keyword they'd ever used. One of them, when I asked her if she knew JavaScript, said she knew "Angular language" (I think she meant Typescript?). They were all terrible, but my boss ended up hiring 3 of them. All of them w
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 13
    Font - No Replacement3482 16 hr. ago I got an email application for an offensive security position. The weird thing is that the guy refused to give his real name or address or any data that would indicate that I was dealing with a human. He knew his so tho.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 14
    Font - Wake95 17 hr. ago When I was a manager, I had two resumes claiming to have developed a product for a company that I had actually developed.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 15
    Font - Cartz1337 17 hr. ago I once got a resume that was entirely formatted like an RPG stat page from WoW or Diablo. Resume picture was applicant, photoshopped as Vitruvian Man (clothed) in a powerful t pose. Had a */10 rating system for skills, with flavour text describing some experience in each tech. Honestly it was well enough done that it caught my attention and I looked into it. His personal website, located in his 'backpack' resume section, was great, well thought out and usable.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 16
    Font - The dagger was he had his very unique steam and in game name for some of the games he played on his personal website. Looked that name up on steam... VAC bans, racist s▶on his profile. Profile matches games he expresses interest in on his website. Check forums for some of the games he played. More racist so, deleted posts galore. Declined, concerns of culture fit.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 17
    Font - oldmoozy 15 hr. ago I was sitting in a lab at my uni once. Turned around and observed a student trying to showcase his project work to a professor. Visual Voronoi diagram building app. Nice colors for the nodes I thought, my favorite. Well-styled graphical representation too. Then it hit me, it was my app from 2 years back. Don't know where he snatched it.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 18
    Font - pakidara +3 20 hr. ago "Wasn't my fault" in response to why they left their last job. ++224 Reply Share _chasls +1. 17 hr. ago "There was so much drama working there and my last place and my place before that... and the one before that "
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 19
    Font - rekabis S Java +1.9 hr. ago Reminds me of a story I once heard of a contractor that was at a massive tech event back in the early/mid 80s. Caught a glimpse of a program being demo'd that looked strangely familiar. Pushed his way through the crowd, sure as st it was a program he made for a completely different company two or three years earlier. People doing the presenting swore up and down that it had been created in-house, and not stolen. So he asked the people to run a particular comman
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 20
    Font - boofaceleemz +2 18 hr. ago Wouldn't answer questions or acknowledge statements unless they were asked/made by a man. All kinds of grievances came up during the interview that were all somehow the fault of the person's previous women bosses. ++ 153 2 Reply Share rksd +2 17 hr. ago JS Oof. At least they revealed who they were during the interview. .
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 21
    Human body - dooty4doot 14 hr. ago I got a resume from a guy that listed his last position as a Señor Software Engineer.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 22
    Font - gotsreich +1 14 hr. ago Minor, but they misspelled "meticulous".
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 23
    Font - MgntdGames 18 hr. ago I interviewed a slightly older gentleman for a senior developer position who had worked as a dev in the 90s but mostly in management positions afterwards. I asked him if he had kept up with programming on the side and he said no, but that it was like riding a bike and that he could still run circles around his younger peers. I gave him the easiest whiteboard programming task I could think of (counting the even numbers in an array or something like that) and he blanke
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 24
    Font - rdrunner_74 +2 18 hr. ago Not on a resume... But I had a tech interview. Put the guys name into a search engine and got a hit on Amazon about a Dev book for a very specific topic. During the interview he could not answer any question but the 1st warmup one. After around 10 he gave up. I was kinda confused since he had his name as Author for the book in question, so i asked him about it. His answer: I wanted to write the book to get to know the product. (I admit it was a prerelease announc
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 25
    Font - rbnhd_f +1 - 19 hr. ago Recruiters once asked me to interview someone who had 6-10 different fonts and text styles on their resume. Immediate red flag, but recruiter insisted that everything was fine and I had to go ahead with the interview. Ended up googling some of the bullet points a few hours before the interview, and found that almost all of them were directly copy/pasted from resumes available on the internet. Different fonts because they didn't even bother to reformat or paste with
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 26
    Font - B_Huij 16 hr. ago I have two good stories. One is mine. In college I worked at a residential solar company as an ops manager. Basically answering for a team of entry level office workers doing stuff like juggling inspections and permits for solar installations. Pretty high turnover on most of the ops teams there, and the company had a policy where every candidate had to be separately interviewed by at least two managers. so I did a lot of interviews in the 4 years I worked there. Mostly o
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 27
    Font - We had one resume come in from like a 35 year old guy with a cover letter. Okay, fine. We had a handful of older people working there among the college kids and it was generally no problem. Except the letter was about how the candidate was a convicted felon, spent his time in prison “self-studying law,” and wasn't afraid to take potential employers to court if he felt he was discriminated against during the hiring process due to his criminal record. In hindsight I should have just said I
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 28
    Font - Second story isn't mine, it's my brother's. He was working part time at a medical records data entry place while he was in high school. Super easy job, chill manager. The kind of place that will turn and burn anyone with a pulse because it's not exactly a career job. Manager had a wall of shame for resumes he had collected over the years. One caught my brother's eye and he asked about it. Manager cracks a wide smile and tells the story. Some dude wanders in off the street and said he want
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 29
    Font - Aetheriao 15 hr. ago Haha. I had someone apply to work on my team who must've not realised I was still on it. They were super junior when I had worked with them the first time and their CV literally listed my job title and my duties from the time we worked together. Very strange. They even acknowledged they'd worked on the team before! Imagine faking your title and role to the very team you were employed at in said role.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 30
    Font - NightFuryToni 16 hr. ago Add on top of that, I would get people with such resumes, and proceed to cheat on the interview. Goes blank for a bit when asked about something on their resume, waits a bit and a phone message tone pops up, followed by a textbook answer straight off some front page of the said tool.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 31
    Font - nitsky416 +1.15 hr. ago That it was seven pages and none of the jobs were more than eight months. They hired him anyways. Ended up scamming the company on the project they hired him for, and used our dental to get all his teeth pulled. Asked me to start calling him 'old toothless' with a wink. Ended up being the first engineer they fired in over 20 years.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 32
    Font - Breakfast Beerz J. 17 hr. ago I was hiring help desk analysis, all entry level jobs mostly of which hadn't quite finished their associates degree yet. Got one resume that was WAY over qualified for the role going so far as to state they were formerly the CEO of a web development and software company. He had something like 10 years of C++, 10 years of Java, etc. Huge red flags....but I was curious as I had never seem a rawume like that for such a low level job and was interested to see wha
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 33
    Font - A few days later HR got a call from him saying that he was in the hospital and was hoping he could still get an interview. I still wanted to meet this guy so I allowed it. He did show up for the interview this time and he did so wearing a Metallica Tshirt and grey sweat pants with a hole in the thigh. Come to find out the company he was CEO of was a company he made up because he made a webpage for friend of his dad's business. And all the experience he had in programming was from checking
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 34
    Font - cpp_warmachine +1 - 17 hr. ago I was asked to onboard a new employee, and was given his resume so I can contact him and to just see his previous experience. It was 14 pages; everything he'd ever professionally done, all overly verbose. 14. Page. Resume.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 35
    Font - Gr82BA10ACVol. 15 hr. ago Had one that came through and in his past employment under "reason for leaving" he put "they were about to fire me." Appreciate the honesty dude
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 36
    Font - Phate24601 16 hr. ago A grad who applied for a job with us, whom we didn't even respond to let alone interview, put down one of his previous gigs (might have been a uni project or just a quick cash gig he did as a student can't remember) which was creating a website. His CV had the link for people to take a look at his work pretty standard stuff we often have people link to sites they made or their Git etc. The website was terrible but the bigger problem was that it was a supposed "baking
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 37
    Font - Viviaana 16 hr. ago Did one of those 3 month courses and got to look over everyones portfolio, one girl had a homepage that was just a photo of a laptop with zero hints of how to get to the actual profile, eventually we found that 1 of the letters...not the first....in the word portfolio was a link. Then the next page was a list of all the titles of her projects with no links to any of them or even descriptions of what they were. Then finally, the only part she'd actually filled in, she h
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 38
    Font - Had another guy who didn't do anything to hide that he was just downloading other people projects, they all had watermarks, and the she did write himself he refused to name variables anything other than "name" and then a number Neither of them got jobs in IT lol
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 39
    Font - +1 - 16 hr. ago Resume-wise, a red flag for me would be a kazillion tech stacks listed- even the tiny npm packages. kdyz Interview-wise, I once interviewed a guy with 30+ experience- he mega failed the initial personality and culture fit interview due to a lot of issues such as not knowing how to answer questions, rambling, etc. but us who interviewed him passed him to our next phase, the technical interview, all because we thought we just might have been ageist. The guy hasn't had a stab
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 40
    Font - Next was system design where I asked him to design something with the intention of making the initial problem more complex by scaling it. He made a really bad, unscalable one and we asked him to improve his design multiple times while showing him how his design could break till he said "you know, I have a lot of way better ideas than this but I can't just tell you them, you know". I was speechless. He didn't pass. He also said you can use mqtt as a database- when I explained what mqtt was
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 41
    Font - +2.16 hr. ago Had someone link me to there github. It was 3 days old and contained a api setup for connecting to a DB. The files contained (many only contained) comments like "your tests go here". "Add routes here". BerriesAndMe Oh and they'd committed the built binaries with the code. Why show me this? To convince me that the entire resume is a lie? Edit: to be fair the link to his github (referenced in his message to us) was broken and only showing as a clickable box without actually go
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 42
    Font - chloee28 16 hr. ago I had a phone interview with a potential candidate who went into extensive details about how she was a Wiccan, into witchcraft, spells, and potion making. It was a very enlightening conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with the positon that she was applying for. Still stuns me when I think about it.
    via r/ProgrammerHumor
  • 43
    Font - littlepurplepanda 17 hr. ago Not so much a resume, but we Google people. And sometimes their usernames, if they stick Twitter on their CV. And there are people who will use the same username on Twitter and their nsfw Reddit account...
    via r/ProgrammerHumor

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