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Your resume tells a story. What story does yours tell? If you haven't stayed very long at jobs, red flag. If you have done a lot of different things that don't

Your resume tells a story. What story does yours tell? If you haven't stayed very long at jobs, red flag. If you have done a lot of different things that don't relate to the job you're applying for, yellow flag. FAANG salary? Red flag. Mid-20s? Yellow flag (sorry, ageism is real: if they're looking for senior/leadership/etc that's unlikely to be found in someone in their 20s). Pay for a professional resume review and fix any problems they find, whether you agree or not. Keeping multiple resumes is best practice, and always write a good cover letter. Focus on your professional network. Most of your jobs should be coming from referrals from coworkers, not cold-calls on a jobs board. This is the only way to continuously get hired regardless of the job market, and is very important as you get older (again: ageism is real). Personal projects count for a lot for a software developer. Make sure you have at least a couple small projects that you maintain regularly. Contributing to open source is nice, but unless you're a major contributor, it isn't a big factor the way owning a project is. Make it really shiny: good docs, clean code, linting, testing, CI/CD. Using the latest tech is encouraging. You're applying during a time when hundreds of thousands have been layed off at the beginning of an economic recession. It's gonna be hard for anyone but the most qualified candidates to land a job now. Just look for the jobs you're a shoe-in for, get employed, wait for a better role.

CSSer 4y ago
Could you elaborate on what you mean by FAANG salary? I’ve always heard the prevailing wisdom is that if you’ve got one of those names on your resume you’re basically set.
- codingdave 4y ago
  It means they assume you want to keep that high salary, and won't waste their time calling you back if their target compensation isn't competitive with FAANG, because going through an interview process only to have the candidate reject the offer isn't productive for anyone.
  - JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    One more reason companies should post the salary range. If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.
    - paulcole 4y ago
      > If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range. Close but not quite. It's more like: > If someone with FAANG is still applying, it appears they're willing to work for that range. When I'm willing to go through the job interview process and say no to an offer I don't like, I completely ignore the salary range. I'll get the interviewer and team to love me and then just decline if they won't go above their range. Or I'll take it because they've convinced me the job will be enjoyable enough to offset the lower salary. Plenty of things in life are flexible if you ask. But plenty of things aren't flexible even when you ask. Sometimes, I'm willing to waste my time to find out which is which.
      - codingdave 4y ago
        Sure, but the recruiter isn't willing to waste their time to find out if you deem their role good enough to accept something lower, or if you are going to make them go to bat to spend more money on you. It is better for their goals to move on to someone who is actually seeking something within the target compensation's budget.
        paulcole 4y ago
        Yes, except my comment and the comment I replied to had nothing to do with your point. I replied to: > If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.
    - freedude 4y ago
      Oh you would be surprised what people think. They think you will change your ability to pay almost just as frequently.
- otikik 4y ago
  From the point of view of someone who has had to hire in the past, here's how it would go in my head: Oh, this person has worked at Google (for example). Our compensation is good, but not Google-good. I could look that the rest of this resume, if this person is a good fit, have an initial 40-minutes meeting with them to discuss compensation, start the hiring process, and then they will reject us because we're lower than they are accustomed to, or because they have found something that pays more. Or I could move this resume to the reject pile and move on to the next candidate. Oh my, look at the time.
  - JohnFen 4y ago
    This. Also, there's the issue of fit. Plenty of companies don't operate like FAANG companies do. If a candidate is FAANG-heavy, it raises a serious question about whether or not they'd fit into a non-FAANG company.
    - kayodelycaon 4y ago
      Any resume including a recent Microsoft QA position is an automatic reject for me. Microsoft does not hire technical people, they hire robots who need their tests written for them.
      - CSSer 4y ago
        The nice thing about this thread is it seems there are lots of little gems that help decide where I'd definitely like to not work in the future.
  - stcroixx 4y ago
    Yes, this, and I know the problems we're solving are not as interesting as what anyone at Google is doing, so I assume they would be bored and only stay until they find something more interesting. So, pass. FAANG kind of traps you - you can drop out of that world into a scrappy startup, but not boring stable corporate dev.
- cguess 4y ago
  It means you're set for a very specific type of job in a very specific industry. If I'm launching a start up and you showed up to be employee #4, unless you were #4 at the FAANG or are in your late 30's or older, I'm probably not going to hire you. The fact is that FAANGs do things in a very particular manner and on small, focused teams. That's the opposite of how start ups work and applying most of the managerial "skills" that are in place at FAANGs are a good way to apply a ton of unnecessary bureaucracy to a company that doesn't even have an HR department yet. "Founder is formerly Google and Facebook!" makes me stay very very far away from the company because outside of the VC world the reason those words have power are red flags.
  - neilv 4y ago
    > or are in your late 30's or older, I'm probably not going to hire you. This sounds illegal in the US. (Also, it's the opposite of the usual illegal ageism we see in post-dotcom tech companies.)
    - vikingerik 4y ago
      The Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids only discrimination against workers over age 40 in the US. It does not prohibit age-based discrimination against a worker who is under 40. Nor does it prohibit discriminating in favor of a worker over 40. More generally, discrimination in employment is legal by default, unless a specific protected class is created by a specific law. Many classes of discrimination are legal, such as against smokers or obesity. States and localities may have more restrictions than at the federal level, of course.
    - a_techwriter_00 4y ago
      To my knowledge in the US "40 and older" is a protected class but "under 40" is not.
    - pacaro 4y ago
      Ageism is a weird one from a discrimination standpoint. My understanding is that it's specifically defined (in the US) to prevent discrimination against those over 40 As an engineer in my 50s I've never personally been on the receiving end of ageism, but I've definitely seen extremely smart young engineers passed over for opportunities because they were deemed too young/inexperienced
chapium 4y ago
Length of stay seems like a hit or miss metric. A lot of contract work is done in 1-2 year engagements.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  True, and it's not that having a bunch of short-term engagements is automatically a bad thing. But it's a thing that requires explanation, because it can speak to fit. Some people are only really good for a couple of years at a position. After that, they get bored and move on. If you need to fill a position with someone who will last longer than that, seeing a bunch of 1-2 year engagements on your resume is a strong hint that you might not be a good match for the needs of the position. If you don't care so much about longevity, then it may be a non-issue, or even a positive thing.
wnolens 4y ago
> Personal projects count for a lot for a software developer This has not been my experience. I have zero personal projects on my resume (despite actually having some) and have no issue getting interviews. A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO. > FAANG salary? Red flag. Completely not my experience. I am constantly being poked and prodded by recruiters and have to play hard to get until they reveal salary as it's usually too low. SO many times they try to convince me to do an interview loop first and reveal comp afterwards ("it depends on how you're leveled in the interview"). I think it's 90% relevance of your actual job experiences. Fix up your resume/linkedin to really sell yourself better. Put any and all technologies/languages you've used - recruiters have that stupid a heuristic.
- haspok 4y ago
  > A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO. _Any_ reasonable experience nullifies personal projects. The myth that a personal github account full of open source personal project activity is the only way to go should die already.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    Once I had some good volunteer experience outside of work, I listed those like they were jobs and dropped projects and GitHub from my resume. Hasn't been a problem.
  - hosh 4y ago
    It is not the only way to go. However, for people starting out, with no experience, then you have to have something else to show for it.
- habitue 4y ago
  > This has not been my experience. The claim is that personal projects can help. You don't have any personal projects (so they haven't helped you) but that isn't evidence personal projects aren't helpful, only that they are not strictly necessary.
JohnFen 4y ago
> always write a good cover letter. The importance of this can't be overstated. This is just my opinion based on years of interviewing and hiring devs, but... The resume tells you the "what". What is the candidate's experience, what is their skillset, etc. Resumes get a once-over, mostly to see if the candidate is in the ballpark for the position. The cover letter tells you the "why". Why should I hire this candidate over the others? Why does the candidate want to work here? etc. The cover letter is the more important of the two. Assuming a candidate has the technical skills required, the things an interviewer really wants to know are softer: will they fit in with the team? Will they be happy in this role? And so forth. This is what the cover letter should be talking about.
- CabSauce 4y ago
  I've participated in hiring for dozens of positions. I don't read cover letters.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  I've never read or written a cover letter and I have a single-page resume. I've got two sentences at the top of my resume explaining who I am and what I do. I use much more flowery language but I basically say: I'm team lead. I care about communication. I want to know your business and customers. I want to work with stakeholders and help them solve problems. The rest of my resume backs this up. And at the bottom, I describe all of the business skills I learned over 4 years of running a furry convention. It's written just like all of the other jobs. It's worked pretty well for me. I don't get calls from people who dislike furries and the first two sentences got me my current job.
  - jjice 4y ago
    Anecdotally, I've never read a cover letter as someone who's interviewed a good chunk of engineers, but not nearly as many as a lot of the folks on HN. I have however had a much better initial response experience from companies that I added a cover letter for. I think some larger companies that have a resume and cover letter upload on their site just might prioritize those who wrote a cover letter as well. That's just a guess though.
el_don_almighty 4y ago
Let the hiring manager EXPERIENCE your success by telling a story, a little vignette of each career or project stage. What challenge did you see, how did you overcome, and what was the outcome? For example, turn this: - experience with imbedded i/o in C for mobile equipment into this: - "Team needed a 1-10ma vehicle sensor input using the NXP Semiconductor AN4731 so I prepared a POC demo board with C code in 7 days allowing continued progress and delivered the finished code 14 days later after peer review and unit testing. No changes were made to the final deliverable" This version shows the challenge, how you approached it with urgency and an understanding of how your work impacted the downstream efforts. Finally, this story reveals your knowledge of quality process development and final delivery. Writing these stories takes more time: the challenge, what you did, how it was superior Tight, cohesive insight into telling your story requires practice and reflection so don't expect success the first time without some editing or proofreading from others Once you begin this process, you maintain this portfolio forever by adding adventure summaries each year I was very impressed with a recent post regarding the storytelling structure from Dan Harmon and it may offer a great starting place for laying each out before condensing it into that golden nugget: I came, I saw, I conquered. Original Article: https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34576085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34576085
the_only_law 4y ago
> Your resume tells a story. What story does yours tell? This is actually a huge problem for me right now, and I’m not sure how to solve it. My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech. There’s all sorts of things I’ve done and worked on. In both my professional career and as a hobbyist I’ve hacked around with stuff, learned interesting skills that have helped solved all sorts of odd problems, picked up a lot of knowledge about different software and it’s internal workings, but it was tangential to my job at best and would feel out of place in a resume, but it’s a lot of stuff over the years. I’ve experimented with putting some of my open source contributions in there (partly to fill space since I don’t have any education to add). To be honest, it feels like embellishment, given how small it was in reality, but it is something that looks impressive on paper. Unfortunately, it’s just not very relevant to the sort of work done in my professional career and at best it’s gotten me a jaded “that’s interesting” during a final round of interviews. More recently though, I’m just not getting any interviews.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  > My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech. Reframe: successful companies, practical projects, mature and reliable tech.
- maldev 4y ago
  I have a third person intro at the top of my resume. I feel it helps alot, and makes me stand out. It's only a ~4 sentences, but it says what I like to work on, how I'm passionate about it, and what unique things I can bring. Think of it like a resume pitch on a resume.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  > It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech. It should be possible to write those up in such a way as to be less boring. But the other reality is that 90% of all the jobs out there appear to be with "boring" companies, have "boring" projects, and use "boring" tech. Companies generally avoid things that are too exciting -- exciting has risky as its partner, and companies prefer to minimize risk. However, it's also very common that there's really interesting stuff in all that boredom. If I told you what company I work for, the project I was working on, and the tech stack I was using, you'd very likely yawn. But the work is actually very interesting and exciting when you dig into it. When I put this on my resume, I will focus on telling what was interesting about it, because that will also tell what my contribution was.

CSSer 4y ago

Could you elaborate on what you mean by FAANG salary? I’ve always heard the prevailing wisdom is that if you’ve got one of those names on your resume you’re basically set.

codingdave 4y ago
It means they assume you want to keep that high salary, and won't waste their time calling you back if their target compensation isn't competitive with FAANG, because going through an interview process only to have the candidate reject the offer isn't productive for anyone.
- JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  One more reason companies should post the salary range. If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.
  - paulcole 4y ago
    > If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range. Close but not quite. It's more like: > If someone with FAANG is still applying, it appears they're willing to work for that range. When I'm willing to go through the job interview process and say no to an offer I don't like, I completely ignore the salary range. I'll get the interviewer and team to love me and then just decline if they won't go above their range. Or I'll take it because they've convinced me the job will be enjoyable enough to offset the lower salary. Plenty of things in life are flexible if you ask. But plenty of things aren't flexible even when you ask. Sometimes, I'm willing to waste my time to find out which is which.
    - codingdave 4y ago
      Sure, but the recruiter isn't willing to waste their time to find out if you deem their role good enough to accept something lower, or if you are going to make them go to bat to spend more money on you. It is better for their goals to move on to someone who is actually seeking something within the target compensation's budget.
      - paulcole 4y ago
        Yes, except my comment and the comment I replied to had nothing to do with your point. I replied to: > If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.
  - freedude 4y ago
    Oh you would be surprised what people think. They think you will change your ability to pay almost just as frequently.
otikik 4y ago
From the point of view of someone who has had to hire in the past, here's how it would go in my head: Oh, this person has worked at Google (for example). Our compensation is good, but not Google-good. I could look that the rest of this resume, if this person is a good fit, have an initial 40-minutes meeting with them to discuss compensation, start the hiring process, and then they will reject us because we're lower than they are accustomed to, or because they have found something that pays more. Or I could move this resume to the reject pile and move on to the next candidate. Oh my, look at the time.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  This. Also, there's the issue of fit. Plenty of companies don't operate like FAANG companies do. If a candidate is FAANG-heavy, it raises a serious question about whether or not they'd fit into a non-FAANG company.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    Any resume including a recent Microsoft QA position is an automatic reject for me. Microsoft does not hire technical people, they hire robots who need their tests written for them.
    - CSSer 4y ago
      The nice thing about this thread is it seems there are lots of little gems that help decide where I'd definitely like to not work in the future.
- stcroixx 4y ago
  Yes, this, and I know the problems we're solving are not as interesting as what anyone at Google is doing, so I assume they would be bored and only stay until they find something more interesting. So, pass. FAANG kind of traps you - you can drop out of that world into a scrappy startup, but not boring stable corporate dev.
cguess 4y ago
It means you're set for a very specific type of job in a very specific industry. If I'm launching a start up and you showed up to be employee #4, unless you were #4 at the FAANG or are in your late 30's or older, I'm probably not going to hire you. The fact is that FAANGs do things in a very particular manner and on small, focused teams. That's the opposite of how start ups work and applying most of the managerial "skills" that are in place at FAANGs are a good way to apply a ton of unnecessary bureaucracy to a company that doesn't even have an HR department yet. "Founder is formerly Google and Facebook!" makes me stay very very far away from the company because outside of the VC world the reason those words have power are red flags.
- neilv 4y ago
  > or are in your late 30's or older, I'm probably not going to hire you. This sounds illegal in the US. (Also, it's the opposite of the usual illegal ageism we see in post-dotcom tech companies.)
  - vikingerik 4y ago
    The Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids only discrimination against workers over age 40 in the US. It does not prohibit age-based discrimination against a worker who is under 40. Nor does it prohibit discriminating in favor of a worker over 40. More generally, discrimination in employment is legal by default, unless a specific protected class is created by a specific law. Many classes of discrimination are legal, such as against smokers or obesity. States and localities may have more restrictions than at the federal level, of course.
  - a_techwriter_00 4y ago
    To my knowledge in the US "40 and older" is a protected class but "under 40" is not.
  - pacaro 4y ago
    Ageism is a weird one from a discrimination standpoint. My understanding is that it's specifically defined (in the US) to prevent discrimination against those over 40 As an engineer in my 50s I've never personally been on the receiving end of ageism, but I've definitely seen extremely smart young engineers passed over for opportunities because they were deemed too young/inexperienced

chapium 4y ago

Length of stay seems like a hit or miss metric. A lot of contract work is done in 1-2 year engagements.

JohnFen 4y ago
True, and it's not that having a bunch of short-term engagements is automatically a bad thing. But it's a thing that requires explanation, because it can speak to fit. Some people are only really good for a couple of years at a position. After that, they get bored and move on. If you need to fill a position with someone who will last longer than that, seeing a bunch of 1-2 year engagements on your resume is a strong hint that you might not be a good match for the needs of the position. If you don't care so much about longevity, then it may be a non-issue, or even a positive thing.

wnolens 4y ago

> Personal projects count for a lot for a software developer This has not been my experience. I have zero personal projects on my resume (despite actually having some) and have no issue getting interviews. A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO. > FAANG salary? Red flag. Completely not my experience. I am constantly being poked and prodded by recruiters and have to play hard to get until they reveal salary as it's usually too low. SO many times they try to convince me to do an interview loop first and reveal comp afterwards ("it depends on how you're leveled in the interview"). I think it's 90% relevance of your actual job experiences. Fix up your resume/linkedin to really sell yourself better. Put any and all technologies/languages you've used - recruiters have that stupid a heuristic.

haspok 4y ago
> A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO. _Any_ reasonable experience nullifies personal projects. The myth that a personal github account full of open source personal project activity is the only way to go should die already.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  Once I had some good volunteer experience outside of work, I listed those like they were jobs and dropped projects and GitHub from my resume. Hasn't been a problem.
- hosh 4y ago
  It is not the only way to go. However, for people starting out, with no experience, then you have to have something else to show for it.
habitue 4y ago
> This has not been my experience. The claim is that personal projects can help. You don't have any personal projects (so they haven't helped you) but that isn't evidence personal projects aren't helpful, only that they are not strictly necessary.

JohnFen 4y ago

> always write a good cover letter. The importance of this can't be overstated. This is just my opinion based on years of interviewing and hiring devs, but... The resume tells you the "what". What is the candidate's experience, what is their skillset, etc. Resumes get a once-over, mostly to see if the candidate is in the ballpark for the position. The cover letter tells you the "why". Why should I hire this candidate over the others? Why does the candidate want to work here? etc. The cover letter is the more important of the two. Assuming a candidate has the technical skills required, the things an interviewer really wants to know are softer: will they fit in with the team? Will they be happy in this role? And so forth. This is what the cover letter should be talking about.

CabSauce 4y ago
I've participated in hiring for dozens of positions. I don't read cover letters.
kayodelycaon 4y ago
I've never read or written a cover letter and I have a single-page resume. I've got two sentences at the top of my resume explaining who I am and what I do. I use much more flowery language but I basically say: I'm team lead. I care about communication. I want to know your business and customers. I want to work with stakeholders and help them solve problems. The rest of my resume backs this up. And at the bottom, I describe all of the business skills I learned over 4 years of running a furry convention. It's written just like all of the other jobs. It's worked pretty well for me. I don't get calls from people who dislike furries and the first two sentences got me my current job.
- jjice 4y ago
  Anecdotally, I've never read a cover letter as someone who's interviewed a good chunk of engineers, but not nearly as many as a lot of the folks on HN. I have however had a much better initial response experience from companies that I added a cover letter for. I think some larger companies that have a resume and cover letter upload on their site just might prioritize those who wrote a cover letter as well. That's just a guess though.

el_don_almighty 4y ago

Let the hiring manager EXPERIENCE your success by telling a story, a little vignette of each career or project stage. What challenge did you see, how did you overcome, and what was the outcome? For example, turn this: - experience with imbedded i/o in C for mobile equipment into this: - "Team needed a 1-10ma vehicle sensor input using the NXP Semiconductor AN4731 so I prepared a POC demo board with C code in 7 days allowing continued progress and delivered the finished code 14 days later after peer review and unit testing. No changes were made to the final deliverable" This version shows the challenge, how you approached it with urgency and an understanding of how your work impacted the downstream efforts. Finally, this story reveals your knowledge of quality process development and final delivery. Writing these stories takes more time: the challenge, what you did, how it was superior Tight, cohesive insight into telling your story requires practice and reflection so don't expect success the first time without some editing or proofreading from others Once you begin this process, you maintain this portfolio forever by adding adventure summaries each year I was very impressed with a recent post regarding the storytelling structure from Dan Harmon and it may offer a great starting place for laying each out before condensing it into that golden nugget: I came, I saw, I conquered. Original Article: https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe... HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34576085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34576085

the_only_law 4y ago

> Your resume tells a story. What story does yours tell? This is actually a huge problem for me right now, and I’m not sure how to solve it. My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech. There’s all sorts of things I’ve done and worked on. In both my professional career and as a hobbyist I’ve hacked around with stuff, learned interesting skills that have helped solved all sorts of odd problems, picked up a lot of knowledge about different software and it’s internal workings, but it was tangential to my job at best and would feel out of place in a resume, but it’s a lot of stuff over the years. I’ve experimented with putting some of my open source contributions in there (partly to fill space since I don’t have any education to add). To be honest, it feels like embellishment, given how small it was in reality, but it is something that looks impressive on paper. Unfortunately, it’s just not very relevant to the sort of work done in my professional career and at best it’s gotten me a jaded “that’s interesting” during a final round of interviews. More recently though, I’m just not getting any interviews.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
> My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech. Reframe: successful companies, practical projects, mature and reliable tech.
maldev 4y ago
I have a third person intro at the top of my resume. I feel it helps alot, and makes me stand out. It's only a ~4 sentences, but it says what I like to work on, how I'm passionate about it, and what unique things I can bring. Think of it like a resume pitch on a resume.
JohnFen 4y ago
> It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech. It should be possible to write those up in such a way as to be less boring. But the other reality is that 90% of all the jobs out there appear to be with "boring" companies, have "boring" projects, and use "boring" tech. Companies generally avoid things that are too exciting -- exciting has risky as its partner, and companies prefer to minimize risk. However, it's also very common that there's really interesting stuff in all that boredom. If I told you what company I work for, the project I was working on, and the tech stack I was using, you'd very likely yawn. But the work is actually very interesting and exciting when you dig into it. When I put this on my resume, I will focus on telling what was interesting about it, because that will also tell what my contribution was.