Improve programmer problem resume by hand

The easiest way to find a new job is through your personal career network. Connecting directly with HR managers with HeadCount is the most effective way to find new job opportunities through people who know you and have worked with you who are most qualified to endorse your outstanding technical skills and engaging personality. However, your network is all you can see (and therefore limit you) for now. If you don’t know the people at the company where you want the job, or you don’t have strong connections. You’re still relying on your resume to crack the door.

More than once, I’ve heard the argument that resumes don’t matter to programmers. These people think resumes are a relic of the past and now we only need to focus on a candidate’s Github resume. However, it seems to me that most candidates rarely do much work on Github beyond trying out a few small projects or forking someone else’s. Unless your job revolves around open source projects, your resume is all the information the person sifting through your resume has about you, and is often the key impression that determines whether or not you make it to the next round.

anti-patterns



Most of the resumes I see fail to communicate the potential value of individuals who can join our team. Instead, they reveal more or less antipatterns: vague descriptions of projects, punctuated by a list of technical points, buzzwords and so-called best practices. Qualified candidates were rejected because they didn’t meet my criteria, and there were plenty of candidates who didn’t make it through the resume mountain.

Your resume should articulate the value you can bring to the company and team (through the value you have provided to a previous or current employer). Below I list some of the bad anti-patterns and suggest ways to improve them.

Technical mastery

As a software developer, it’s valuable to talk to potential employers about the various programming languages and technologies you’re familiar with. For many positions, proficiency (or even mastery) in a particular technology is a career requirement. However, it’s not good to list technical terms without saying anything about what you know. Although your resume doesn’t have to be a detailed technical review. Your description of mastery of a skill will give the screener a positive impression and provide a talking point for a future interviewer when they look at your resume.

Antipatterns: List a number of technical tools

It’s like a shopping list of languages, technologies, and tools without any context about how you’re using them or how they’re irrelevant to the job you’re applying for.

• Example:

  Tools: Ruby, JavaScript, jQuery, React, Git, Jira, etc

• Promotion:

  Check out a series of mobile client apis for our Ruby on Rails project, such as tracking the price of a popcorn hot dog by country. Implement caching with ETAGS to reduce API response time by 60% when consuming API on mobile devices. Lead the team to upgrade to Rails5. Before that, implement and validate several Rails4 security patches.

• Promotion:

  Implement aggregation of popcorn hot dog price data for each country and provide the result to the client via JSONAPI (compliant with The Ruby on Rails JSONAPI standard). Sidekip is used to speed up the execution of scheduled tasks by crawling data from third-party JSON APIs and storing the results in MongoDB.

• Promotion:

  Lead and evaluate the migration to the new JavaScript UI class library. When deciding whether to use Angular or React. React was chosen for its lower implementation cost (not all team members had used both frameworks before), ease of componentalization (our UI components were made up of many small and easily reusable parts), convenience of implementing Flux like one-way data flow.

• Promotion:

  Due to the lack of a clear and dedicated product manager, our engineering team was led by the VP in charge of marketing, but I still lacked daily project management guidance. I proposed and successfully implemented JIRA on the team as the default project management role. In addition to my daily development work, I also worked with the marketing VP to refine and break down product requirements into JIRA tasks as weekly iterations.

Soft skills

Developers, like other employees, have the potential to contribute more to teams and organizations than their professional skills alone. Expressing your personal soft power is not only a good opportunity to demonstrate your value, but also a confidence that you know you are beyond your current mid – to high-level technical abilities.

Anti-pattern: “Excellent communication Skills”

That sounds good. Simply saying “excellent communication skills” on your resume says something about your poor communication skills.

• Example:

  Excellent communication skills

• Promotion:

  Lead and align an ongoing platform optimization routine (to pay off the technical debt we left behind on a regular basis). I introduced a set of code guidelines to regular meetings to avoid direct criticism of colleagues and to ensure that all team members had the opportunity to speak up and propose solutions to current technical debt.

Anti-pattern: Vague mentor work

Without further explanation of how or why you mentor colleagues

• Example:

  Mentor intern

• Promotion:

  Expand our team’s intern engineer recruitment program to my Alma mater to find the right candidates

• Promotion:

  I spent about 5 hours a week coaching my undergraduate computer science intern to accelerate the learning of javascript-related best practices in his last semester. Eventually, he was able to join as a full-time employee after graduation.

• Promotion:

  After knowing that colleagues in other groups were interested in learning Ruby, I organized a weekly reading club for engineers, regularly guided reading, arranged after-class exercises and reviewed their relevant answers

Cultural fit

As with soft skills, expressing your attitude toward your job and your perspective on how coworkers work together gives your potential employer valuable information about how you fit into the culture of your current team. A good manager always knows that a successful team is made up of people with very different personalities and abilities. After expressing your preferences and working style, he or she will know if you can shine on the current team and where you are in it.

Anti-pattern: Say nothing

Most resumes say nothing about the candidate’s preferences for team structure and the personalities of the people in the organization.

• Promotion:

  I like to work in a highly collaborative environment and would like to pair program at all times. I also like to participate in regular meetings that revolve around software architecture and system design after a well-planned project. I enjoy working with the product manager to sort through the requirements together. But I don’t like spending a lot of time on brainstorms and development at the beginning of a project.

• Promotion:

  I particularly enjoy working at early-stage startups because of the opportunity to take on the role of product engineer. I also like to research, brainstorm, and prototype features with members of the product and design teams before coding to implement requirements.

• Promotion:

  I work best on my own. I have no problem collaborating with colleagues on feature design and positioning, but as a natural introvert, I work best when I code alone.

medium.com/@mhriess/so…