As a programmer, what things impress on a resume?

https://www.quora.com/As-a-programmer-what-things-impress-on-a-resume/answer/Eric-Green-39

Neither a PhD, nor having worked at a big tech company have ever impressed me as a hiring manager.

First of all, with all respect to everyone I know who has done a PhD and has been exceptionally successful, I actually believe that having a PhD correlates negatively with being a good programmer. One needs to really differentiate between people who have a PhD in a field and are doing programming applied to that field vs. people who just have a PhD (including a PhD in computer science). The first can be exceptionally valuable if the field in question intersects with your business, however one should not be valuing these people for their programming skills but rather everything else they bring to the table. On the other hand, when I see that someone just did a PhD and then went on to writing code for a software shop, I really question why did they not do that right out of undergrad. Oftentimes the answers are not great.

Now, a big tech company has some real value on a resume: it’s basically a filter that tells you that this person meets some minimum technical competency. Basically they’re not going to be terrible. But that’s not really what I consider “impressing”.

Here are some things that I’ve learned to be impressed by:

• People who have built something, preferrably impactful and specific. Someone who owned a feature or a product from it’s inception all the way into production is going to catch my eye.
• Serious technical leadership. Someone who’s been a tech lead on a serious project (preferably big and impactful). Usually this also means seeing the word “architect” on a resume and some evidence that the person is not bullshitting.
• Lack of formal education or little of it. Now I don’t want to be anti-intellectual here and I’m not suggesting that simply lacking and education is a good thing. What I mean is when I receive a resume that looks strong and then I notice that the person in question went to some really mediocre school, or better yet, have no higher education, I am usually impressed. As I said above, I don’t find PhD’s impressive at all. More importantly if a candidate has a PhD that lowers the amount of information I can get from the rest of his resume. You see, if someone did a PhD and then went to Google or some other respectable place, that doesn’t tell me much because their PhD likely helped them get in. If someone went to a community college in Bumblefuck Missouri and then got hired at Google I want to talk to them ASAP.
• Cool hobbies and skills. Jobs that are not just software engineering. Look we all know you like to play board games and do Trivia Night. All of my guys (and yeah, they’re mostly guys) do. What I’ve found is that often you can bring some serious value to a software shop by hiring people who are not your typical software engineer. When those people also happen to be good software engineers you’ve really hit the jackpot.