3 ms·

That's fair. I was under the impression that when places give you the chance to put a portfolio/personal website link, the people reading your application glanc

by cole-k 4y ago

That's fair. I was under the impression that when places give you the chance to put a portfolio/personal website link, the people reading your application glance through them. I took a look at your resume. I feel I agree with most of the decisions you made (like prioritizing the projects). Some comments on this (same disclaimer as before): I have to wonder whether you would get more mileage out of shortening your summary statement to "Full stack web developer who will help your company succeed by completing projects on time and under budget." or eliminating it entirely. Certainly at least the large font "Summary Statement" can go, which would make room for you to add another project. I can believe the other commenter here who said that not having a 4-year CS degree will make it more difficult to stand out. So I can agree with putting your education last. But also I have this feeling that most resumes I've seen put it first. So I'm wondering whether it would make more sense to just own it. Again, your projects seem pretty legit to me, which I think can help compensate. Finally, I would spend some time trying to play with the wording of your bullet points. It can be easy to sell yourself short and just say things like "Built using the React.js library and Typescript." but like your portfolio website is actually really cool and I feel saying something like that doesn't convey how cool it is. Maybe to get you started you can try something like "Designed and built an interactive portfolio page with interactable elements that simulate terminal windows." The JSON part is pretty good but I bet you could embellish it a bit more too. Sorry I don't have great suggestions for this one - I struggle with it too. The other tip I can give is to write impressive numbers where you can. The canonical example is like if you can say "made processing widgets 25% faster" or "increased revenue by 10%," but I think there are ways you can be creative about this. One miscellaneous point: have you been grinding leetcode/reading cracking the coding interview? Much like the SAT, a lot of these technical interviews are just testing how familiar you are with the format and questions. It's a kind of bogus indicator of competency if you ask me. If you do the grinding, you should be ready for most the tech interviews that come your way.

platevoltage 4y ago
To be honest, the summary does feel cringy. I'm very new the whole corporate world and the language that comes with it (I'm an auto repair person by trade). I think you are right about the summary. If I were them, I wouldn't care about it either. Same with cover letters, but we need to write them anyway I guess. (preface: I am not referring to the poster that was mentioned above. I appreciate their input as well) I understand that having a comp sci degree, or really any degree gives you an advantage. It's just really discouraging to hear it talked about like it's an insurmountable obstacle. Especially since I've been told over and over again that "Jobs only care about what you know and what you can do". We actually had a couple of comp sci grads in my bootcamp, which I found interesting. All of the wording suggestions you have sound really good to me and I'll take them into consideration when I'm reworking my resume this weekend. I've been trying to keep my resume from looking like a big wall of text, while not sounding completely robotic. I've also always had a math/science brain, not a literary one. I wouldn't say I've been grinding leetcode (I spend time on Codewars for no reason other than I discovered it first), but I do jump on occasionally, more so if I have a technical interview coming up. If you couldn't tell, I spend a lot more time building projects and upskilling than I do with algorithms. Funny enough, the two technical interviews that I've made it to didn't have this whiteboard style interview. The last one I did was adding a feature to a javascript front end. It went okay, but I was seriously out of practice with Vanilla Javascript DOM manipulation as I do most frontend with React, and they didn't tell me what to expect. Just like before, thank you for all of the suggestions.
- cole-k 4y ago
  You're welcome! Yeah I'll be honest I think I have the resume game down OK but I'm clueless about cover letters. I like to believe that jobs only care about stated ability but I would also believe that if a recruiter had to pick to interview between someone without a degree but better-than-average stated ability and someone with a degree but average stated ability, they'd go with the degree-holder. I think especially right now with the higher demand for jobs they can be pickier too. Good luck with rewording, honestly I'd wager that writing a good 1 page resume is much harder than writing a 10 page essay. Being concise and precise is difficult - not to mention the fact that if you're like me you have to constantly avoid shooting yourself in the foot by not framing things as positively as you can (e.g. I'm definitely more prone to writing "I'm not so great with C++" as opposed to "I'm more adept with X/Y/Z, but I still have good proficiency in C++"). I do have this inkling that interviews are more and more rejecting the algs-style tech interview questions, which is good because those sorts of questions are largely irrelevant to day-to-day work (at least for a junior IME). I certainly don't think you need to nolife Codewars - and also that it's better in many ways to upskill - but I just wanted to check that you were prepared for it. It would be disheartening to hear that a good engineer got their foot in the door but was then kicked out because they couldn't conjure quickselect out of thin air (can you tell I'm still upset about a past interview?). And just like before from me, best of luck.

by cole-k 4y ago

platevoltage 4y ago

To be honest, the summary does feel cringy. I'm very new the whole corporate world and the language that comes with it (I'm an auto repair person by trade). I think you are right about the summary. If I were them, I wouldn't care about it either. Same with cover letters, but we need to write them anyway I guess. (preface: I am not referring to the poster that was mentioned above. I appreciate their input as well) I understand that having a comp sci degree, or really any degree gives you an advantage. It's just really discouraging to hear it talked about like it's an insurmountable obstacle. Especially since I've been told over and over again that "Jobs only care about what you know and what you can do". We actually had a couple of comp sci grads in my bootcamp, which I found interesting. All of the wording suggestions you have sound really good to me and I'll take them into consideration when I'm reworking my resume this weekend. I've been trying to keep my resume from looking like a big wall of text, while not sounding completely robotic. I've also always had a math/science brain, not a literary one. I wouldn't say I've been grinding leetcode (I spend time on Codewars for no reason other than I discovered it first), but I do jump on occasionally, more so if I have a technical interview coming up. If you couldn't tell, I spend a lot more time building projects and upskilling than I do with algorithms. Funny enough, the two technical interviews that I've made it to didn't have this whiteboard style interview. The last one I did was adding a feature to a javascript front end. It went okay, but I was seriously out of practice with Vanilla Javascript DOM manipulation as I do most frontend with React, and they didn't tell me what to expect. Just like before, thank you for all of the suggestions.

cole-k 4y ago
You're welcome! Yeah I'll be honest I think I have the resume game down OK but I'm clueless about cover letters. I like to believe that jobs only care about stated ability but I would also believe that if a recruiter had to pick to interview between someone without a degree but better-than-average stated ability and someone with a degree but average stated ability, they'd go with the degree-holder. I think especially right now with the higher demand for jobs they can be pickier too. Good luck with rewording, honestly I'd wager that writing a good 1 page resume is much harder than writing a 10 page essay. Being concise and precise is difficult - not to mention the fact that if you're like me you have to constantly avoid shooting yourself in the foot by not framing things as positively as you can (e.g. I'm definitely more prone to writing "I'm not so great with C++" as opposed to "I'm more adept with X/Y/Z, but I still have good proficiency in C++"). I do have this inkling that interviews are more and more rejecting the algs-style tech interview questions, which is good because those sorts of questions are largely irrelevant to day-to-day work (at least for a junior IME). I certainly don't think you need to nolife Codewars - and also that it's better in many ways to upskill - but I just wanted to check that you were prepared for it. It would be disheartening to hear that a good engineer got their foot in the door but was then kicked out because they couldn't conjure quickselect out of thin air (can you tell I'm still upset about a past interview?). And just like before from me, best of luck.