5 ms·

Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets

Even if that’s the case, when it’s time to interview for your next job, would you rather be able to say “I led this major feature” or “I pulled a lot of tickets off the board and my team did $x”

kasey_junk 2y ago
You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).
- pc86 2y ago
  You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours. It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
  - rramadass 2y ago
    > trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job. IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012. No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone. When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product. I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.
      - kasey_junk 2y ago
        “By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.” This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.
        scarface_74 2y ago
        I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process. One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects. The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.
      - rramadass 2y ago
        The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.

kasey_junk 2y ago

You can couch the tickets as major work as well. Learning how to describe your work to people well is advantageous, it’s just not a panacea to avoid layoff (or get hired).

pc86 2y ago
You're not wrong but a decent amount of my manager's time interviewing potential employees is trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. If you can't describe off the top of your head, in pretty great detail, the implementation work required for these big initiatives, lots of interviewers will assume you're trying to pass your team's work off as yours. It doesn't help that most folks' resumes, especially for that mid-hoping-for-senior cohort, is about 50-60% stuff other people did that they're somewhat aware of.
- rramadass 2y ago
  > trying to suss out what is the work they personally did and what are just the thing their team accomplished while they were there. This is the single biggest reason i detest 1/2 page resumes and always ask for detailed CV. The "summary"+"qualifications" paragraphs in the beginning of the CV is the resume after which one can decide to read or not the rest of the details. For example, my CV is 8 pages long (i am old and have hopped between companies :-) since i give an overview and then the details of my specific responsibilities for each job. IMHO, everybody should present their CV like this and leave overviews to LinkedIn profiles.
  - scarface_74 2y ago
    I’m probably as old as you are and my resume is two pages. I’ve worked ten jobs and I don’t have anything going back further than 10 years. No one cares that I wrote C and Fortran on main frames, VB6 and C++/MFC/DCOM or that I worked on ruggedized Windows CE devices. This was all pre-2012. No one is going to read an 8 page CV. But honestly, I never depend on my resume to get a job. It’s a requirement. But I don’t blindly submit my resume to an ATS. By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone. When I was looking for a job before, I had one of the managers describe one of the products that I would be over. The problem was, that if they had taken an even cursory look at my resume, they would have seen that I had worked at one of their acquisitions that the product was based on and I designed the architecture of the product. I had worked at the company until 2020 and I was referred by my former manager to be a staff architect over all of the companies acquisitions.
    - kasey_junk 2y ago
      “By the time I’m sending my resume, I’m already 99% sure I’m going to get an interview because I’ve already talked to someone.” This 100%. My resume is always custom tailored to the hr process it’s going through because I position them to only be supplied once that’s one of the final check boxes.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        I wouldn’t even go that far. I use to have one resume that got sent out to everyone. As of last year, I have two. But if I’m going through the network, I already know the decision makers are going to pull my resume through the HR process. One that is focused on strategic app dev + cloud consulting where I emphasize that you can fly me out to customer’s sites along with sales and I can do requirement analysis and help close deals and then lead the projects. The other is for my “Plan B” jobs and more focused on hands on keyboard “senior” enterprise developer jobs.
    - rramadass 2y ago
      The point was to make explicit one's specific work achievements. In your case, it seems you do it via contacts/word-of-mouth which works for you. Reading a long CV is generally not that much of a chore since a lot will be boilerplate (eg. company name, duration etc.) which can all be skipped as you pick out technical/other details relevant to the job. I also disagree that older experience beyond 10 years (some even use just 5 years) can be skipped. The reason i like to see everything is that it gives me many clues as to the nature of the person i am to interview viz. whether they have a breadth of thought to understand different concepts, the experience to have done it in reality, whether they are adaptable/self-driven etc. Without this information in hand i literally have to spend the first half of the interview asking them what they actually did before i can move on to the interview proper.