Re: I Read “The Tech Resume Inside Out” and Updated My Resume
Published
Re: https://www.jacky.wtf/essays/2024/on-the-tech-resume-inside-out/
Quick aside, yes, it’s technically spelled résumé, but except for one-off instances, I just use non-glyph characters: resume.
Like Jacky, I’ve been giving my resume the N+1th rewrite/refresh/revision this year after reading The Tech Resume Inside Out. It’s a great resource and while there wasn’t much net-new content, it reinforced a lot of tidbits and feedback I’ve heard throughout the years. I’d highly recommend it for any tech-y humans reading this.
Something that I realized throughout this process is I’ve implicitly been continuing to write my resume with the lowest-common denominator being it being print-friendly. Let that sink in for a second. This is going back well over a decade to when I created my first resume as a teenager which I was generally handing out physically. This is what we were told. And it continued all the way through college, mostly driven by the career fair.
However, nowadays, my resume is really only viewed virtually. Sure, I’ve had on occasion it printed off myself just to look at it with a more analog lens and even sometimes a physical copy in an on-site interview. But, really, I should be prioritizing and optimizing for digital. Which I certainly have been—hyperlinks have been on my resume for years—but also a fallacy that I need to overcome is it’s much, much, much more a digital medium and I should probably lean into that and expand my resume to overflow on to a 2nd page. That’s not the case yet, but I expect it will be soon.
Here’s a few quotes that stood out to me from the reading.
And I’d stress how what really makes you stand out is having a tailored CV for the position.
Meh on this. It’s hard to balance minmaxing time spent on applications. Certainly make sure your resume has keywords from the job description, and tells the right story, but I’m also not convinced that each application should have a unique resume.
I recommend tailoring your personal summary section to the job you are applying for […]
Also iffy on this. Again, make it relevant…
With impact, you don’t need to be exact. “Close enough” is better than nothing.
This is something I’ve been historically bad at:
- keeping a work journal, log, or other sort of “brag document”
- keeping track of meaningful metrics from the impact I had
Set a [LinkedIn] headline to represent what you want to be found for.
Great tip, to be honest.
LinkedIn is not your resume, and your current position does not have to be your official title, as per your work contract.
Titles are bullshit and don’t tend to meaningfully translate from org to org.
Always have a current position listed [on LinkedIn].
I’m ashamed to say it took me months post-layoff to add my freelance work as my current position, even though I’d been doing it immediately since being sans full-time employment.
Use Boolean search when searching for jobs [on LinkedIn].
Stellar tip—had no idea this was a feature.
Questionable tip: search for mnemonic typos e.g. JSON -> Jason, Vue -> View. I’ve successfully done this on e.g. Craigslist RockShox -> RockShocks which is a suspension brand for bicycles.
Here are the basic elements that a cover letter for a developer role should have:
- Show off your good communication skills
- Demonstrate an understanding of the role
- Briefly explain your qualifications and why you think you’re a good fit
- Mention the company name
- Demonstrate that you read the company’s website
- Attach the cover as a PDF. It’s just easier to read than pretty much any text format that could be typed into a web interface Again, optimizing for ease of reading.
I’ve done this content more typically in email form, less as a dedicated cover letter unless the application requires it and I feel particularly compelled.
Some thoughts on software for writing resumes:
Standard Resume is recommended. I’ve also personally been curious about JSON Resume for years. The Markdown to PDF resume.md is pretty interesting—surprised I hadn’t seen it before. Also, CareerCup resume is new to me as well—though it’s probably because I haven’t read Cracking the Coding Interview cover to cover.
I think, in my ✨ ideal ✨ world, I’d have the source of truth be in a JSON resume schema file. Probably JSON5, literally for the sole purpose of using comments. From this resume manifest, maybe I’d pipe this into a resume.md (via mustache, for example) which could be then generated into a PDF. Alternatively, figuring out a proper resume in LaTeX has always interested me, but I’m not convinced it’s worth the hassle.
For reference, my resume continues to live in Google Docs. It’s fine, it does the thing well enough.
Some resumes I used as inspiration:
- Jacky’s resume, of course.
- Xe’s resume, in particular for the final 3 sentences targeted at LLMs. 🙃
Again, I’d strongly recommend The Tech Resume Inside Out.
Hell, if you’re feeling really stingy, you can view the original PDF which is completely free and is still better than most advice you’ll find out in the wild.
With all that said, you can check out my resume.
Constructive feedback welcomed and appreciated. Cheers.
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