Month: June 2020

1. Your resume sucks
2. You don’t have a portfolio
3. You’re not getting a referral
4. You don’t know how to tell a story
5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

This post will likely be the shortest. The question is… do you need a portfolio? The answer (unsurprisingly): It depends.

I often see conflicting advice on this topic so I think it’s best to break this into two buckets:

1. Cases when you do need a portfolio
2. Cases where you don’t

Cases when you need portfolio (or one may be beneficial)

• If you’re a brand new developer switching careers… you have literally no reason for anyone to believe you’re competent unless you can show them projects and code you worked on (and a lot of them)
• If you have SOME (1-2) years work experience, but little to no academic experience to help bolster your resume
• If your type of work is highly visual (ie Front End Engineer or hybrid Design / Engineering type role)

Cases where you don’t need a portfolio

• If you’ve had a lengthy-ish career (3-4+ years), your developer war stories should take precedence at this stage
• You have a strong academic CS background and are just looking at new roles (a portfolio might help, but hopefully you’ve already had some internships along the way)

That’s it… seriously. To recap, if you are just starting out a portfolio is REALLY CRUCIAL. I can’t count the amount of posts of despair I’ve seen that read something like this:

“I can’t get a dev job anywhere! I keep sending my resumes and they get rejected. Here’s my resume:” ** Proceeds to show resume with 0 relevant work experience except for that one webpage they built for Joe Schmo’s crab shack, and purported knowledge of Javascript** “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong!”

The reason no one is contacting you is because they have no reason to trust you. You need large meaty projects you’ve built on your own time to fill in your lack of work and academic experience.

1. Your resume sucks
2. You don’t have a portfolio
3. You’re not getting a referral
4. You don’t know how to tell a story
5. Your technical skills aren’t up to par

DISCLAIMER: I know that Covid-19 is impacting peoples’ job search. However, I’m still noticing a lot of remediable issues with resumes I’ve been reading. I’m sharing these tips because I realize not everyone has heard this advice / has the privilege or access to someone to professionally review their resume for them.

Your resume sucks

This is the number one reason I see people get rejected at the door. It seems stupidly obvious, however I’ve come to realize that ‘understanding’ what a good resume should look like is in many ways a position of privilege.

Many people who have good resumes have refined it diligently over time, and gotten peer or professional feedback.

So how do you know if your resume falls into this category? You don’t until you start asking other people.

What do I do then?

Be brave and share your resume with everyone and anyone who will look at it. If you have a close friend or family network that you trust, start with them. If you don’t then start on the internet. Share it with people on forums. If you have the money hire a professional to review your work. BUT YOU NEED TO DO THIS STEP.

Many people get stuck here because they are TOO afraid to show other people their work, please ‘get over this’, because cold applying to 100 places with a resume that’s horrible won’t get you anywhere.

With that all of that being said here are some quick tips you can apply to your resume to make sure it isn’t horrible the first time out:

1. One page only please – Unless you have over a decade worth of experience, no one wants to read your 3 page resume. If you aren’t sure what to cut, focus on the most temporally relevant sections (ie what have you done for me lately?)
2. No stupid or distracting designs – That’s right, no cares about your artistic flare on your resume (especially if you’re an engineer). They want something that is clear, concise, and easy to read
3. Lead with what’s important – If you’ve got a decent amount of work experience, lead with projects and experiences first. If you’re a new engineer lead with your projects with Github links etc. DON’T lead with your education if you’re trying to show off what you can accomplish on the job, no one cares, put that at the end.
4. CAR – Context. Action. Result. It’s ridiculous how many people I see fail when writing their project descriptions. Frequently I see entries like this: “Built an application in collaboration with designers and product.” This entry sucks, it tells me almost NOTHING about what you’ve accomplished, or how you’ve collaborated. Instead it should be something like “Business project x needed a new service built, I built an application using XYZ tools and helped drive ABC metric. The resume was a 100x increase in revenue because of key feature 123.” This example is obviously contrived, but next time you read a line on your resume ask yourself, “Did this tell me anything about what I actually did?”
5. You’re underselling yourself – To my point above, many people (especially engineers) fall into this trap because they feel like they ‘didn’t do anything’. Don’t be that person, either tell the minutiae of your story or don’t bother writing it out. If you end up at an onsite a good interviewer will be probing you for details either way, so you better understand what you worked on.