This may be the best resume I have ever seen

This may be the best resume I have ever seen
jimplush.com

* Has a graphic which must be interpreted simply to find the last few projects the candidate worked on.

* Uses a proportional diagram scheme that is (a) worse than pie charts (an achievement) and (b) requires a color coded legend to illustrate the simple clause: "[Project Name]: Rails, CSS, jQuery".

* Straightjackets the candidate's work experience into "technology used" instead of "accomplishments earned".

* Attempts a comparative analysis of experience with different tools both as a "developer" and a "designer" without explaining the significance of either term; what's a "Photoshop CS5 Developer" or a "Textmate Designer"?

* Or is the blue "frequency" and the orange "expertise"? Why is the graphic laid out so that the cutesy venn diagram looks like a color key?

* Spends something like 1/3 of the real estate of the graphic on an almost entirely uninteresting attribute of the candidate (what terminal she uses, what text editor she uses, what browsers [seriously.] she uses). Designers can be expected to know Photoshop. Nobody cares about your editor.

* I have no idea what the subway-map illustration of command line tools and web services even means; the impression I get is, "this person will add baffling complexity to things in order to avoid boredom". Whoah, where do I sign?

* Extraordinarily inefficient representation of the candidate's Rails experience; a simple resume would lead with "Rails developer with over 5 years experience" instead of burying the lede in another cutesy picture.

* No reasonable employer cares about college credits earned in high school, the age you were when you coded your first website, or what platforms you tech-supported in school, and yet that material consumes more visual weight than the number of years the candidate has doing Rails development.

Resume tip. Here is the terrible thing about spending time on your resume pointing out your favorite dog breed or color-coding your choice of text editors: people with real accomplishments would never, ever do that, because they only have two pages of heavily-bulleted text to convey those accomplishments in. What you say with a resume like this is, "I hope someday to have major accomplishments" --- whether that's true or not.

It's not just that infographics are a crappy format for resumes (and, they simply are.). It's that this is not a good infographic. In fact, since we're all so familiar with resumes here, it's actually a really good example of the problem with all the cheesy infographics that have been floating around for the past year.

The blogger who highlighted this "graphical resume" did a disservice to the person who created it; I have no doubt the author is an totally reasonable human being who sends normal resumes to people when resumes are what's called for.

For anything else, particularly development, it'd be in the discard pile pretty quick.