4 ms·

Here is my honest first impression. I'm not trying to be complete or imply that these are my only issues. It's just a sampling of thoughts I had. The typeface

Here is my honest first impression. I'm not trying to be complete or imply that these are my only issues. It's just a sampling of thoughts I had. The typeface with its wispy horizontal strokes is murder to my eyes. It's an extremely poor choice for on-screen legibility with such a text-heavy resume. Wall-of-text syndrome, compounded by poor typeface legibility and total document length. Who is your audience? As an engineer, my overall sense is that I wouldn't hire you for a very technical role. If that is a correct assessment of your skills or if your intended audience isn't engineers then that's okay. One thing I noticed was your bullet point on fixing a cron job. You stumbled upon a bug with, as it turns out, important ramifications. The way it's written makes it seem like you're trying to bullshit non-technical people into thinking this was a technically impressive feat rather than a stroke of luck. I get you're trying to make a case for your value to the business, but I frankly find it odd. You might want to proof-read it better. As a random example, "document how everything service worked" clearly has something missing.

ronnier 16y ago
While you are at it, want to critique mine? http://ronnie.me http://ronnie.me
- synotic 16y ago
  I can :)... Your resume usually serves two different audiences — the screener, and the person interviewing you. You should optimize for both audiences, and possibly work on breaking up "Skills" a bit. Your resume should be scannable, and most of the English before the important info can probably be dropped: Developing applications leveraging Parsing, querying, scraping, and transforming Object-Oriented Programming with Worked with and developed for You're mixing technologies with programming languages with disciplines with applications. I prefer just seeing: Programming languages (fluent): C#, Java, and VB.NET Programming languages (studied): C, C++, VBA, VB6, classic ASP Disciplines: Database administration, GIS programming, unit testing, mobile development IDEs: Eclipse, Visual Studios I might just drop things like Eclipse, Firebug. -- Re: experience. In general you want to highlight the things that are different. In particular seeing "VB.NET Programmer" and "C# Programmer" over and over isn't illuminating. I want to know the places you've worked, so swap the company and position, and put the company and bold. You're working at Amazon which looks fantastic. So that should stand out. Similarly in your projects, "URL:" is redundant and not the piece of data that's changing. Drop it and put the project names in bold instead. Formatting things: In education, the list of classes don't need to be on separate lines. The choice of green checkmarks is a little strange. Simple dots might work better. The blue subheadings don't line up with the text, which is distracting. Are you copyrighting your design or the resume? Either way it seems unnecessary.
  - ronnier 16y ago
    Thanks! I believe you are spot on with your review. I'll address them as soon as I can. You are right, some of it is repeated. I did this mainly for SEO reasons, which has worked wonders by the way (Amazon and Microsoft both found me through my website, among others).
btilly 16y ago
Thank you for your feedback. I'll clearly have to do yet another proof-reading pass. My intended audience is the manager, and people higher up in the company. If I get to an interview with an engineer, I'll have plenty of chances to prove my technical chops. But to get there I need to impress people higher up. And the way that I aim to do it is to convince them that I both have technical skills, and understand what provides value to the business. Note that since switching to that resume format, I've been offered substantially better jobs. (And I've landed another good one.)
- psykotic 16y ago
  > Note that since switching to that resume format, I've been offered substantially better jobs. (And I've landed another good one.) Congratulations! The format's appeal to business-minded folks with no technical background is clear. Everywhere I have worked and would want to work, hiring decisions have been made by technical people, so this is never something I have had to worry about. I can see how the dynamics would differ elsewhere in the industry. The general lesson is to think about your audience. Another reply to your post suggested you should have a scannable list of technology buzzwords to pass HR screening. That might be good advice most of the time but bad advice if you're submitting your resume by an inside track that goes directly to the hiring manager. If you were submitting your resume to a company whose culture is engineering oriented from top to bottom, you'd want to put a different emphasis on things, and so on. Best of all, of course, is to have your reputation precede you so that the resume is nothing more than a reminder and a set of talking points for the interview. I've been getting used to that with my last few jobs. Unfortunately, right now I'm in the midst of applying for an O-1 visa, so I've had to minutely enumerate my technical accomplishments, explicate their business relevance, and just hoot my own horn endlessly for the benefit of visa examiners who are industry outsiders and understandably cannot read between the lines. The level of documentation and the burden of evidence is immense: 180 pages and counting.
  - btilly 16y ago
    My expectation is that the final decision will be made by technical people. However to get there I have to get through non-technical people first, and then the salary and position negotiation again is likely to involve non-technical people. As for companies that are engineering oriented from top to bottom, I did get hired by Google. You don't get much more engineering oriented than that!

ronnier 16y ago

While you are at it, want to critique mine? http://ronnie.me http://ronnie.me

synotic 16y ago
I can :)... Your resume usually serves two different audiences — the screener, and the person interviewing you. You should optimize for both audiences, and possibly work on breaking up "Skills" a bit. Your resume should be scannable, and most of the English before the important info can probably be dropped: Developing applications leveraging Parsing, querying, scraping, and transforming Object-Oriented Programming with Worked with and developed for You're mixing technologies with programming languages with disciplines with applications. I prefer just seeing: Programming languages (fluent): C#, Java, and VB.NET Programming languages (studied): C, C++, VBA, VB6, classic ASP Disciplines: Database administration, GIS programming, unit testing, mobile development IDEs: Eclipse, Visual Studios I might just drop things like Eclipse, Firebug. -- Re: experience. In general you want to highlight the things that are different. In particular seeing "VB.NET Programmer" and "C# Programmer" over and over isn't illuminating. I want to know the places you've worked, so swap the company and position, and put the company and bold. You're working at Amazon which looks fantastic. So that should stand out. Similarly in your projects, "URL:" is redundant and not the piece of data that's changing. Drop it and put the project names in bold instead. Formatting things: In education, the list of classes don't need to be on separate lines. The choice of green checkmarks is a little strange. Simple dots might work better. The blue subheadings don't line up with the text, which is distracting. Are you copyrighting your design or the resume? Either way it seems unnecessary.
- ronnier 16y ago
  Thanks! I believe you are spot on with your review. I'll address them as soon as I can. You are right, some of it is repeated. I did this mainly for SEO reasons, which has worked wonders by the way (Amazon and Microsoft both found me through my website, among others).

btilly 16y ago

Thank you for your feedback. I'll clearly have to do yet another proof-reading pass. My intended audience is the manager, and people higher up in the company. If I get to an interview with an engineer, I'll have plenty of chances to prove my technical chops. But to get there I need to impress people higher up. And the way that I aim to do it is to convince them that I both have technical skills, and understand what provides value to the business. Note that since switching to that resume format, I've been offered substantially better jobs. (And I've landed another good one.)

psykotic 16y ago
> Note that since switching to that resume format, I've been offered substantially better jobs. (And I've landed another good one.) Congratulations! The format's appeal to business-minded folks with no technical background is clear. Everywhere I have worked and would want to work, hiring decisions have been made by technical people, so this is never something I have had to worry about. I can see how the dynamics would differ elsewhere in the industry. The general lesson is to think about your audience. Another reply to your post suggested you should have a scannable list of technology buzzwords to pass HR screening. That might be good advice most of the time but bad advice if you're submitting your resume by an inside track that goes directly to the hiring manager. If you were submitting your resume to a company whose culture is engineering oriented from top to bottom, you'd want to put a different emphasis on things, and so on. Best of all, of course, is to have your reputation precede you so that the resume is nothing more than a reminder and a set of talking points for the interview. I've been getting used to that with my last few jobs. Unfortunately, right now I'm in the midst of applying for an O-1 visa, so I've had to minutely enumerate my technical accomplishments, explicate their business relevance, and just hoot my own horn endlessly for the benefit of visa examiners who are industry outsiders and understandably cannot read between the lines. The level of documentation and the burden of evidence is immense: 180 pages and counting.
- btilly 16y ago
  My expectation is that the final decision will be made by technical people. However to get there I have to get through non-technical people first, and then the salary and position negotiation again is likely to involve non-technical people. As for companies that are engineering oriented from top to bottom, I did get hired by Google. You don't get much more engineering oriented than that!