How To Stand Out Applying To Jobs - Principal Eng Manager Live Stream

e all right it looks like we're live here I'm going to get this chat turned on so we can see it here um so this is going out to YouTube and twitch so I probably need to figure this out but the chat is coming in from twitch and YouTube the messages that you see on the screen I sent on YouTube um so if you're watching this on Twitch and you want to click the link I'm sorry I think I don't think you can click that um but yeah this is going to be an AMA like last time I forgot to press the record button locally but that's okay I'll just download it off YouTube the last week's live stream I had a bunch of questions that I had asked my Discord Community uh and then we had some great participation from the chat uh while streaming so that was awesome so thanks so much for that this time around I am trying to focus on a newsletter article and I put that in the chat and that newsletter article is what I sent out to my email subscribers and it stemmed from a conversation that I had on Friday uh which I thought was awesome so some context someone had reached out to me uh on LinkedIn you know trying to ask some questions about uh you know getting their I I don't know exactly if it's their first software engineering job they're doing some work for uh a family member that's programming related but they're kind of getting into software engineering like maybe a little bit later than than a lot of people that's totally cool so this individual wanted to ask me some questions about you know from my perspective um you know how might they go approach that uh we got to chat about rust and c and development in general but conversation kind of moved towards you know how might I go do that and this reminded me that I had put out a bunch of content man I feel like a couple years ago I should double check but kind of like a little bit before I tried to start taking YouTube and blogging like a little bit more seriously and doing more regular content creation I had put a couple of videos together and written a couple of articles about the sort of like three phases that I see to getting a job and this is sort of after you know you're building up your skills and experiences and stuff but when it comes to getting noticed so you're applying to jobs like how do you stand out then there's the actual interview process itself and then you have the job and how do you make sure you do a good job while you're starting your job and for me I see these as three very distinct phases and the reason I think they're distinct phases because there's different things that you're trying to optimize for in each of these phases and to be a little bit more specific like when it comes to getting noticed right like you need to make sure that you're finding ways that you can like Stand Out compared to the other people applying right just as an example when it comes to interviewing like you won't hear me say this often because I'm pretty vocal about not really liking leite code I don't think it translates very well into uh like Hands-On software engineering but I think for applying for jobs like most places having some uh experience solving lead code problems generally that type of thing comes up in a lot of interviews I personally don't like it I don't think it makes a lot of sense to quiz people that way but it comes up a lot so I would recommend people focus on that kind of thing for interviews even for my my role at Microsoft I'm a principal level software engineering manager and for my role I still had coding problems right I literally worked on lead code problems for weeks leading up to my interviews and I've been programming at that time uh for over 15 years right and I still wanted to practice that so that I was prepared for the interviews right so that um I know that those types of questions are going to try and trick you so I just wanted to make sure that I could navigate them and that's a skill that you'll want to have during your interviews and then in this third phase by the way I'm just kind of cherry-picking a couple things from each of these because we're going to focus on the first one but in the third phase it's really like you're on the job right so what skills like what focuses should you have to make sure that you're doing a good job and I would kind of already said like I don't think your Elite code skills are necessarily going to translate very well um being able to like a lot of your soft skills are really going to shine at this point they're going to do a a good job also in your interview hopefully right if good like companies are kind of checking you out for these uh interpersonal skills your ability to collaborate and that kind of thing that's a for me that's a very green flag then those types of things are going to translate well to when you're on the job so uh I do think that I would prioritize and focus on very different things in each of these phases yes there's overlap like you always want to be writing code the entire way through that's helpful um but yeah I I just think that the priority shifts so what I wanted to be able to do for this conversation is talk about some of the things I wrote about in that newsletter article that focus a lot more on that sort of getting noticed like prior to having your interview you know what should you be doing and the the premise of this I kind of said at the beginning of this is that like you want to be able to stand out so obviously right now and over the past couple of years it's it's no secret right like the job market for software engineering for Tech in general is extremely challenging and I want to be able to talk about this kind of thing without minimizing it for anyone because I don't want to sit here as someone who's currently employed being like Oh it's it's just simple like follow these three steps and anyone can do it like that's not it's not what I'm trying to say I want to recognize uh and be very explicit about it that I understand that it's challenging absolutely um I want to make that clear but the whole reason I want to talk about this is because I think a lot of the time if we F and it's kind of like it's a natural thing I do this a lot but we focus on things that we can't control and it makes it seem like things are insurmountable they're very frustrating and people want to give up right so if you're trying to gain experience as a software engineer you're trying to land your first role or you're in dire need of like a role change you want to switch companies right if you're looking at the job market and going well there's so many people applying like all it's a you know it's a hiring Market it's not for the people looking for jobs it's it's going to be awful so much competition like these are things that you can't control unfortunately right like it would be great if we could but we can't so instead of putting so much energy into that and saying like why should I bother like it's just something you can't control so I would highly recommend obviously easier said than done trying to shift that Focus right shift the focus from putting all of that energy into feeling upset about how challenging the job market is because it is and you can't change it by being frustrated about it so take that energy and I want to talk about some of the things that you can start to focus on and like I said these are things you can focus on but it's not like a just check the box and and I'm telling you you're magically going to get hired or something like that it's not my intention so please don't you know read into this that oh Nick says it's only I have I think Five Points I want to go through if I just do these Five Points then he says it's going to be easy it's not it's going to be hard it's going to be hard for sure and it's going to be hard even if the job market wasn't the way it is right because there's always going to be competition and you always need to make sure that you're trying to do things to stand out it's just that right now it's a little bit more challenging okay so all of that out of the way um I wanted to make sure I had a disclaimer about that because I think it's important the the thing that I want to talk about to start and I say this a lot I'm not the only person that says this especially is like a software engineering content creator but I strongly advise you to be creating things and when I say creating things I mean trying to build projects trying to write software I think that this is absolutely critical and I think that this pays off in many different ways the first way is of course I do think that building software is is the best way to learn you're applying knowledge to building things right you're getting Hands-On practice you're debugging you're refactoring code you're getting stuck in problem solving like all of these things are just real you will be doing this on the job right so it's only artificial in the sense that the projects you're picking and some of the challenges you're trying to fix like yeah like that might not be a real thing that you're doing of course right you're kind of making up the projects or you're trying to tackle these different problems so that part's a little bit artificial but okay you want to go connect to a database you want to start um making something fault tolerant you want to be able to figure out how to deploy things like these are things that happen in real life when you're building real software systems this happens so I think that's like personally spending time building things is an awesome way to get that experience this is going to feed into some of the later points so you get experience practicing things you can start looking at the jobs that you're interested in and saying like what what kind of tech stack are they working with right like oh like this is um just to give you an example right like I used to work at a company that built desktop software when I got hired there there was nothing to do with cloud or anything distributed at all so for me and this is it's a little bit of an unfair example this is fresh out of University right but I'm just kind of using this job as an example like having a ton of distributed computing experience like that wouldn't have been applicable so if I was fresh out of school and being like I got to beef up my resume I got to practice these things and learn these Concepts if I were looking at this company being like man I really want to work there what I wouldn't have done at that time is go okay like I'm just going to go learn how to write web applications and uh how to get stuff in Amazon or Azure like no like that wouldn't have been applicable for this job so what you can do is start looking at these roles that you're interested in look at some different companies see what their like Tech stack is looking like see the types of things they're building and obviously try to find something that's align with your interests if you can I think that's ideal and then try to build projects that might be incorporating some of these things like it's not a a it's not like a a requirement right in a lot of places um like I've hired people I was talking with someone about this recently we've hired people onto the team uh and even my previous team at Microsoft they don't even know CP and that's cool like we will teach you C you can program in Java something else like cool you can pass your technical you know uh interview like great we will spend the time teaching you that some of the smaller companies can't really afford to do that because they need you to be up and running very quick something to think about but I would say spending time building projects lets you kind of cherry-pick maybe I should be focused on this kind of thing right like I really want to make mobile applications I don't really know where to start okay go look at some job postings for companies that are hiring for that you might see things like flutter you might see I don't know like zamarin once upon a time now Maui foret folks right like you'll see these things coming up and go cool like maybe I should try building something like that so not only to get the Hands-On practice but you get this opportunity where you can start picking some things to put on to your resume and like I said that's going to come up in a little bit um of these other bullet points that I have written down but I think that's important so building things skill up from it building things allows you to have things for your resume both really important and to tie into my next point it's going to be about learning in public and I like this idea a lot but I think how it's implemented and how some people approach it maybe I'm not a huge fan of and I I want to elaborate on this a little bit so I think that learning in public can be a really awesome way to and this depends on the person right I'm not telling everyone hey like you got to get a Twitter account or get on LinkedIn or you have to start blogging you don't have to do that but I think that that kind of thing for some people can be helpful for a bunch of different reasons one is that you start developing a skill around communication and I love talking about soft skills or what I like to call like human skills in software engineering because I think that it's not prioritized I think that a lot of resources online or even in school you see everything about you know technology what algorithms and data structures what databases are you using how do we you know how do we do all this stuff like how does how do we um compile code and how does like the processor interpret that and work with it like you learn all of these things and then no one talks about the fact that you going to be working in teams and collaborating and problem solving and communicating and that's what you do most of the time as a software engineer so um I do think that learning in public gives you this opportunity where you're able to think about the things that you're working on right so whether it's the projects You're Building or uh maybe you were watching a video reading an article and you're trying to apply it in some context and you're like hey I want to talk about my experience doing this I'm going to make up an example right uh actually I I'll use something that I'm doing right now I'm I'm literally doing this currently I am working with mongod DB in C and if if you've watched some of my YouTube videos over Friday today and then the rest of this week I have videos going out about using mongod DB from C I have used mongod DB from C before but I'm doing a project right now in my spare time and I'm feeling like hey I'm kind of relearning some of these things great I'm going to go learn in public I'm putting these videos out for people to show you and I'm coming from a little bit more of an authority perspective which is what I don't recommend for people but I'm doing just enough Authority because I'm comfortable with these things it's because I've done these things before I'm kind of reapplying them in the current context but I'm doing that to be able to help translate what I'm working on to different audiences this is a critical skill for a couple of different reasons one is that it helps you learn things better because when you go to explain it to a different audience it's really fascinating if you think you know something and you try to explain it to a different audience if you don't know it well you quickly realize how well you don't know it and it's uncomfortable um I probably a lot of people have experienced this um especially if you get excited about learning things and you want to go tell someone about it you might find like you're stumbling on your words and you're like I just like I don't know like I tried it and it was cool and but like you got nothing else to kind of add to it and someone might ask you a question and you're just like yeah like I don't know I don't know anything but you realize very quickly so I think that's a really important part and the second important part is this idea about translating information to different stakeholders why this is important as a software engineer is that when you're working in teams and collaborating your direct team members if you're working in the same code base and stuff it's very likely that they'll understand things at the same technical level as you for the most part right now if you're on a bigger team and the areas of code that you're working in start to be bigger and bigger you might already have silos within your team and talking to different team members that don't work in that area of the code you can still talk to them at a technical level but you might have to put in some extra effort to say oh like this part you might not know about like let me find a better way to explain that so you have to practice translating things and then you might have maybe some other roles that are less technical so sometimes this is a generalization not all the time sometimes project managers are a little bit less technical because they're not working directly in the code engineering managers right here um less technical because we're not working in areas of the code we have our own technical experiences right but if you were to say you're on my team and you want to explain what you're working on probably what isn't effective is talking about line by line what you're changing right but if you're able to summarize what you were doing and translate that to me in a way that I'm going to understand it that's a really important skill and I think that when you're learning in public you can really work on this because you might be trying to talk about some details about something but if you dive into the very nitty-gritty details and you post about it and you're sharing information about it you might have people that are like what the heck are you talking about and maybe they're curious right they're like what the heck are you talking about that sounds really cool but I don't know what you're saying now you got to go cool how do I how do I explain this to someone who doesn't know the details right so I think that can be really helpful I think that learning in public can be a great way to network right so people who and this is going to tie into this point about how to how I think you can do it right and wrong I think if you're transparent about the fact that you're learning right like I'm not an expert I'm learning this thing here's what I think I've learned you will have people that are more like closer to experts or have more experience they will jump in and they'll try to correct you and they'll say hey like not quite like here's how you do it you're always going to have internet trolls of course but I think if you try to come across as an expert and you're not because you're just learning this thing you will very quickly find that people notice people pick up on it very quick and you will have far fewer people trying to encourage you about the learning and far more people on the trolling side and that might discourage you so I think learning a public can work really well but try to be transparent about your learning and uh I think honestly try to focus on the fact that you're gaining this other skill about communicating information I think that can be very helpful in fact um just for a little bit of History because and I don't think a lot of people know this I've mentioned it a few times in uh the the weekly Vlogs I do I posted on LinkedIn a couple times um and some YouTube videos but this whole Channel my whole Dev leader brand is literally started from learning in public in 2013 and I started Dev leader it's just a Blog so Dev leader CA because Dev leader.com was already taken and it has been this entire time which sucks but I started Dev leader CA and I did that because I was put into a management role and I was still an individual contributor writing software and I said I don't know how to be a manager like I have no idea what I'm doing I'm fresh out of school it had only been a couple of months that I've been you know as a software engineer outside of uh school I had internships and stuff so I had two full years of work experience by the time I graduated but not as a manager I have no idea what that means right no idea so I said I need to learn this right I had great support from my HR manager one of the best people I've ever worked with and was just like I know that I'm going to have support at work so I'm not afraid of like it being a catastrophe or anything like that but I need to learn I need to be reading things I need to be trying to gather information and I told myself what what would be a better way than just trying to sort of document some of this right like if I'm going through this probably someone else's too I'm not the I'm not the only person in the universe right so I started Dev leader and I started trying to blog about this now I gave up very quickly it was I think less than six months or something uh huge regret because I kind of restarted in 2013 so a decade later um 2023 I think I just said 2013 my apologies um so yeah decade of a delay but the whole point is that I started learning in public I thought that would be an awesome way um and I should have stuck with it I think that would have been really cool so I do encourage you to do that if you're open to that idea okay third thing that I have my list from my newsletter that I sent out is about um volume and what I wanted to talk about here was that I get like I get this a lot and like I work at Microsoft currently so it sounds it might sound a little bit backwards coming from me uh but I think I'm a great person to be able to try and explain this so I think a lot of people look at big Tech like it should be their first job and their last job right if I get into big Tech I just never have to worry ever again about work right the pay is good everyone wants to work there the jobs are secure like it's just the ultimate place to be and I'm not going to say what I'm about to say to bash big Tech in any way like I love working for Microsoft I have no complaints working for Microsoft so don't try to Mis uh construe what I'm about to say but like I don't think that for everyone big Tech is the first step you should take and I don't think it's the last step that people should take for some people it might be a great fit right that's totally cool right there are places that Microsoft pays well there are places that pay better than Microsoft if that's what you're after if that's the ultimate goal right there's lots of different factors what I would say though is that I think sometimes people look at smaller companies and dismiss them because they're like well it's not Microsoft it's not Facebook it's not wherever so like why would why would I want to work that's not going to look good on my resume why would I do that right but the reality is at smaller companies you have such a ridiculously good opportunity to learn things right you have and it's it's hard to maybe um understand unless you've gone through it so for folks that are watching this and it's like kind of looking for your first job um and you you haven't you haven't worked in big Tech and you haven't worked at startups um yeah like you can get a crazy amount of experience if you put your the time and effort into a small company right it's like for me I did this um my internships were at small companies um now I've I've talked about this and I've written about it but I would say in my internships I did not put myself into them unfortunately right I had a different work ethic at that time which I regret I think that would have been awesome for me to really try and take advantage of a learning opportunity but I wasn't like that and when I graduated and I worked at a startup I was very much like that um like very much uh invested right I I worked all the time because I loved it I was like this is so cool I'm getting to have an impact like no one made me do it and I think at some startups there's I'm not going to deny it there's going to be startups where you feel like you're constantly being overworked this is different like no one no one told me to I just love to do it so something changed for me where I was able to invest myself a lot and I think that if you find a startup or a small company where you're very interested in what they're doing like you can make sure that you have these really cool opportunities like the competition the whole point about this sorry I'm on a tangent the whole point is that there's a lot less volume when I say less volume it's a couple of different things less volume of people applying right competition is still pretty Fierce right there's no denying it it's very challenging right now but if you pick a small company I can guarantee you they're going to have less applicants than Microsoft right like the the competition will be less cool like that helps you stand out that's the whole point of this conversation is if you're looking for a job how can we get you to stand out you can't control how many people apply to jobs you can control which jobs you apply to so try to keep that in mind and keep in mind that small companies aren't like a bad thing there are going to be situations where startups are brand new and they're like hey we don't know if we have money like you they don't seem like they're stable like that's going to be a thing you have to go consider read into and figure out so I'm not trying to say like it's a bulletproof alternative but the same same way like big Tech has not been a bulletproof alternative for a lot of people over the past couple of years for job stability so there's no perfect solution here but I want to encourage you to look out outside of big tech there are lots of great opportunities the learning experiences I don't know if I can say this enough but at small companies you can have a huge impact within the company right you can learn lots of things and some of these things that you'd be learning are not necessarily just like a technology thing which is great as software Engineers we always want to be learning about technology and I get it but you start to see lots of things that you might not see at bigger organizations right you might be uh exposed a lot more to customer interactions you might feel like you're a lot closer connected to customers which is something that I think a lot of software Engineers miss out on like statistically I would say there's a ton you're like I'm just getting these requirements from a product owner you know leadership wants this my manager tells me to do it like I'll just I'll sure like it might be an interesting challenge to go code up but like I don't really know why which sucks because I think having that experience being connected to customers and really understanding customer needs is a huge value ad it's engaging and it helps you as a software engineer really understand like why are things being prioritized a certain way so smaller companies not guaranteed but more often than not you get more of that exposure you get to experience things this sounds kind of funny but there's going to be some stuff where you're like I don't want that experience but it's good experience and what I mean by that is like you'll hear that at smaller companies you have to wear a lot of hats is what they say so you're you're being in a bunch of different roles at the same time and I think for a lot of people especially as software Engineers like we want to we want to write code I get it yeah writing code's awesome and there's going to be times at small companies where you're doing other stuff and it's not writing code and those experiences can be very very valuable even though it's not exactly you know it's not writing code and it's not what you you expect but I I wouldn't uh rule out small companies in your job search please uh consider them like I said the volume for applications will be less the volume of people at the company will be less which means you can stand out more as well and have bigger impact um lots of learning opportunities again for that same reason so please don't rule them out lots of cool stuff there okay we got two more points left and then I'll wrap this up and maybe what I should do is try to figure out I said I was going to get better at doing this I'm going to do a little bit of a Midstream ad because I got to do that um I'm going to press this button and hope it works there I'm still here cool so I do have a few courses on dome train now um I realize that this stream is uh for General software engineering but these are C based courses if you're watching this and you're like hey I want to get into programming and I don't know any program pring languages yet or I'm just starting out uh I have two courses getting started and this deep dive c one that pair together the getting started c one will teach you how to program in C with zero experience so I wrote this course for Nick chaps is to take people who like have never programmed before teach you very basic things if statements Loops things like that and guide you through that and by the end of it the promise is not that you're an expert that that would be lying but you should be able to write basic programs in CP and be able to read the code so great start the Deep dive course that's after that just Builds on that so it's another six hours of content and by the end of that my opinion at least is that you are again not an expert because I hate promising people that oh just do a course you'll be an expert but what you will get out of this I'm going to scroll through a little bit you can see the curriculum here so walk you through like object-oriented programming it's a huge focus of it um there's stuff like how you can work with uh files binary data Json XML stuff like that as well and a little bit more about like asyn we stuff at the end which I think especially for more modern programming being able to write asynchronous codes really valuable so I think together these two courses are great if you're just starting out and you have literally no experience uh in C or programming at all this getting started one's a great fit and this third course that I have is actually the first one that I did for Dome train and it's refactoring and I was really proud of this course because a lot of my experience I always like to joke about this but it's unfortunately real when I worked at a startup um so the the company that I worked at before Microsoft I worked there for eight years and I wrote a lot of the original code base for a lot of their products and that meant that my code lived long enough that it was the Legacy code that I was refactoring and other people were refactoring and I had to go teach people about the code and how to go refactor it so I spent a long time also refactoring code unfortunately lots of cool experiences though and so this walks you through a lot of the basics again I'll just kind of Click through and go through the curriculum really fast here this one does have like a refactoring exercise at the end so I take an application and of guide you through it you can see how some of this stuff works uh so I like this kind of approach because it's a little bit more practical but um some of these are basic refactoring concepts that in my opinion if you understand how they work you can start to think about refactoring more complex things and I do talk about refactoring versus rewriting here so there's a big uh section on that because that's a very important thing that I can guarantee will come up in your career and you want to understand how to properly navigate that so that's my my little Dome train advertisement for my courses like I said there's three here and yeah uh if you have any questions message me add it to the chat check them out um I will always say and I say them in the say this in the courses the best way to learn is to code so as if you're going to get these courses or anyone's courses make sure you're programming alongside apply the knowledge or else the courses will far less valuable so that's my Spiel thank you let's get back to the main stream and so the last two parts I want to talk about because there's only two left in my list are um kind of more about the resume side of things and the resume side of things to me like one of the big focuses is about like how you represent yourself and I think think that there's like one of the really stand out ways to do that is like being uh quantitative and this is really challenging for people that don't have prior work experience and even for people with work experience sometimes they don't focus on the quantitative part but it's not a requirement but back to this point about standing out you can stand out more if you try to talk about quantitative things so for example some some things that may maybe don't stand out very much or like built built a mobile application with C okay like I see mobile I see c those are those are cool things um if you're at a mobile like development company let's say or you know I built the back end and the front end um of a web application using uh C and Blazer and asp.net core again you have some of these keywords popping up which is actually my my last point that I'll get to but cool okay you built something awesome sometimes people will say like worked in a team to go do this okay cool so there's some teamwork stuff but what people end up missing out on is like you want to flip the perspective around pretend you're the person who has to go through the resumés right this is the whole like I said the whole point of this conversation is how do you stand out if everyone else is saying things like I built a something using this technology you just you just will not stand out one of the benefits to actually building things is of course some people won't even have that they'll say you know in school I learned these languages or I did a boot camp and had these experiences right but I personally think that going back to the first point I made in this about building things and having these projects are that if you don't have the work experience to go put on your resume you can this is going to sound funny so I'm going to try to clarify but like you can create this artificial resume it's going to be based on real things you're going to build these things and try them out and explore them but they're not for work but you can go tailor what you want to go build and have the experiences for so you're unconstrained in the things you want to go explore so instead of just saying I built these things because yes that is going to be a Step Up on people that can't say that there's still going to be a lot of people that say yeah I built an asp.net core web app I built stuff with blazer I know how to query SQL databases awesome right all of these things help but there's still a ton of people that say the same thing so how do you stand out well I think if you start using quantitative things inside of your resume that's going to make it shine a little bit more because people are drawn to that so how does that look I'll use an example if you've already been working and you're looking for a job so you could say like um was working on a web application and uh worked on a feature using X technology again some keywords in there and was able to optimize latency that the customer experiences by uh 50% reducing it down to like Point uh sorry let's say like to 20 milliseconds or something and what's cool about that is that people go oh like this is an individual that was creating business value right they don't have to know all the details about the company you worked for but they can start to translate like you did something that had an impact and that's a big part of this um even better if you can have a monetary value of course right companies people hiring like oh you save the company you know 15% on their costs or you save them million dollars a year like that stuff just stands out and it stands out because other people aren't saying it there's going to be some people saying it of course but there are so many people that just focus on the uh learned this technology they try to keyword stuff everything they can but someone's reading it being like what the heck did this person do I've actually had people send me resumés on LinkedIn and no I don't I'm sorry I don't have time to do this I've done it for a couple of people and quickly realized I'm like I can't sustain this but I've had a couple people send me resumes and like no I'm not making fun of them for you know in in any way but I've seen them and they're just like keywords like what did you do and I would tell them in the feedback I'm like these are awesome things that you got to work on but I'm telling you honestly like I cannot tell what you actually did and it sounds funny to say that because they'll say well our team built a mobile application and we shipped it on time and it was in you know react and had a nodejs backend and I'm like cool like what did you do right like you were on the team and I know that that's great and I want I want to trust right this is the thing I want to trust that you did awesome work but I don't like I don't know you if I'm the recruiter I have no idea who you are I can't just trust that everyone's you know doing these things I have to start inventing things in my head for what you're doing like no so think about it from the recruiter's perspective and give them all of this evidence about why you're so awesome and it's hard I had a conversation in my early in career mentorship Circle today and someone asked it was amazing question someone said I have a really difficult time trying to talk about myself in a positive way for things like for resumes or Microsoft we have something called connects which are uh or individual contributor or like manager to um direct report kind of checkpoint and it's highly recommended that you try to talk about yourself and like the things you've accomplished in those conversations and this person said like I really struggle with that like how do I stop myself from saying like my team did this or like someone someone did this for me they helped me and so we chatted through that it's a it's an unnatural thing for a lot of people including myself I gave them the example like as an engineering manager I experience a similar thing right my team delivers the code for these things and then what am I supposed to say at the end right like I didn't code the fix I didn't code the feature um I might have had some architectural input but my you know these Engineers put these design docs together so like how do I do that I have to find ways that I can represent my contributions and my role as a manager is very different so it looks different when I report on those and it's the same thing that I'm getting at here so you need to think if you're an individual contributor what did you do explain that to the person who's reading your resume right and if you're at a point where you're like oh man like maybe I wasn't doing anything like that might be a good sign that you need to start try reprioritizing something now that's for people that have had some work experience if you haven't that's totally cool right there's always going to be these ENT Lev positions available and I say that with confidence and I say that because you can't just have a team of like principal level Engineers staff level Engineers depending where you are whatever you can't just have that and you can't have that because you can't sustain the different things that keep those Engineers engaged in doing their best work your team doesn't grow in scale so I'm telling you this as an engineering manager right like I want to have awesome employees but that doesn't mean awesome employees need to all be max level you need to make sure that there's a range so that you can have Engineers helping other Engineers level up there's going to be principal level and senior level people that move and switch teams so you need to be leveling other people up to grow into those positions constantly bringing a new Talent so there will be junior level roles entry level roles all the time and that means that yeah you're not going to be expected to have this experience that's quantitative on your resume that's like I saved a company a billion dollars this year so how do you how do you get the quantitative stuff well going back to being like a little bit artificial you can create these scenarios right I think if I saw this on a resume I would think it's awesome so if you were building projects going back to point number one you build an asp.net core web app awesome it doesn't have to be fancy right you're not trying to build something that you're going to sell that's not the thing that's going to impress me as a hiring manager I don't I don't care right I just want to see that you're learning and exploring things and you're improving that's what I want to see so you're building this thing and you go okay I built it and I'm using a SQL database and has a UI and I click the buttons and I need to load you know uh there's 100,000 records in my database now and now I have a performance problem it takes 10 seconds to load the page Okay cool so now you have something with numbers right like you have a performance problem and even if you didn't you could go say like it works pretty good but I want to optimize it right you were trying to look for optimization opportunities so how could you try to make it so that your query is um done in pages right you want to have like an infinite scroll type of thing for your page uh could you just Implement paging in general so you don't have to try and load everything so you could have the user click through pages if that was a better user experience could you look at the latency maybe that's a big issue because you're doing multiple queries right maybe you're missing indices whatever it is um I could list off a million things that you could go explore but my point is that you can go look at the things you've built and say how can I go optimize this that would be I think that would be super cool to list on a resume to say you know built a web application and then I uh you know a second bullet point or something is like optimized to improve performance by x uh Factor by focusing on this switch Technologies change the algorithm change the the data structures being used whatever and to me if I were someone looking at resumés if that was someone that got selected e depending on the company and how they operate right it could be like a you know a initial interview where it's like hey like that seems like a cool thing like just tell me about it it right like I want to I want to hear you talk about that kind of stuff and understand like how you approached it why you approached it um how you approach the problem solving and kind of got to that solution why you decided to stop like why not keep going right like it would just be a really cool conversation to hear how you think through that and to me that's extremely valuable so I think it can stand out on a resume and what we're not talking about today is interviews but I think that will help and the third phase is the on the job stuff and I think if you're doing that kind of stuff already that helps for on the job so that's like real experiences that you're creating from like an artificial starting point okay that's the the quantitative stuff um I want to wrap this up with keywords I'm going to keep this part pretty short because keyword stuffing a resume I already talked about this part if your resume is basically just fluff and keywords as someone that looks through rums I can't tell what you did keywords are helpful for for volume right so if you're thinking about the companies that get all of these different rums coming in it's impossible for a human to go sift through all of them right it just is depending on the size of the company it could be ridiculous numbers of resumes coming in someone would just not have time to do it now that means that you have to set a bar somehow and I'm not saying that setting bars this way means that you're guaranteed to get the best talent or that it's fair but like you you need some way to filter them right that could mean like look if they're not listing postsecondary education we're just going to filter them I'm not saying that's the right thing to do I'm not saying I support that you have to post secondary education not what I'm saying I'm just saying that that is a way to filter in theory people that have gone to get postsecondary education that's one step that they were doing to say hey I wanted to better myself cool you could generalize that to say that maybe statistically that ends up being better software Engineers I'm not saying it is I'm just saying you could maybe rationalize that or generalize it that way okay bars moved up hey we're not getting these keywords right like again smaller company bigger company they're like we got all these people applying it would beneficial if they knew the Technologies we work with right I already told you that I've hired people onto the team there's teams that I've been on where people already hired they didn't know the languages I don't care we'll teach you but for some people like if you put the keywords in right okay well this person already knows or they have experience with it that just helps and I think this is most important just for like when you're applying to places that get tons of volume you want to make sure you have keywords in there the different Technologies and the different types of things that you're probably going to be working with and the reason I wanted to keep this short is because I don't want to overemphasize that this is how you do it but if you look at the job you're applying for and it's talk you're say you're interested in like web development and mobile development okay and you are looking at these two different job opportunities look through what they're asking for and try to make sure that you're calling that out in some capacity because if they happen to be using some amount of filtering because of the volume of resumés having some of those keywords could help it's all I'm saying I'm not saying it's a rule it has to be done but I think for volume situations it could help I would not spend all of your time trying to do this part because all of the other things that I mentioned I personally think every single one of them is better uh investment of your time and effort right focusing on keywords instead of building things or uh learning in public I think would be more beneficial um the I talked about applying to smaller companies instead of big Tech sometimes like you're already reducing you know the competition that way I think keywords can help but don't make it a a focus okay I think that's it for the different topics um so just to kind of wrap up this was a a newsletter article that I put out um so I do have a Weekly Newsletter and maybe I'll do another like mini kind of AD here to to round it out so um I'm still here cool it's funny I'm used to switching over and stuff when I'm recording but if it messes up then I don't have an issue I can just edit it but this is live so I do have um a newsletter you can see the URL at the top here it's weekly. deev leer.com newsletter and you can see my newsletters are pretty big they actually used to be bigger but I do try to write an exclusive article on every single one of them and this one was about these three phases I kind of listed them as like applying which is what we talked about today interviewing is what I'll put out this week coming up on Saturday and solve problems will be the the work experience once you're hired so that'll be the week after and yeah I just wanted to quickly scroll through I wrote this article that talks about all these things that I just kind of live streamed here and uh if you like this kind of thing if you like what I was talking about today and like my newsletter I think would be a great fit and just to kind of show you if you're more interested in like the more technical things I do a recap of all of the videos and all of the technical articles that I put out as well so um if you're like well I wanted to learn something about C this weekend cool like like here you go there's a whole bunch of stuff including my stupid face um but yeah lots of Articles and stuff for you to go through lots of videos from the week but every week there is an exclusive article right at the top and um generally like it's it's mixed generally I try to talk about something more like software engineering related not just a particular technology but um I will mix it up here and there so um try to have something for everyone and we'll switch back and this worked again cool I feel uh I feel a little bit more confident in the the tools I'm us cool um but yeah I think that's going to wrap it up for today so I hope that you found this valuable I will continue to try streaming so far it's going to remain on Monday uh at at this current time which is 9:30 p.m. PST I will reconsider uh different times and stuff I just have to come up with a good schedule because I don't want to I don't want to replace my other content creation this is supposed to be a supplementary thing so we'll do these um they will remain as amas for now but I do want to do code reviews as well I haven't decided if the code reviews themselves will be a separate stream uh or you know I'll inter leave them with this but I do want to make sure that I have a a bit of a forum for for people to ask questions and stuff as well so live streaming audience is currently extremely small um that's fine like it's just kind of starting out but I want to make sure that I have that and then if you know as that grows and in traction that people can jump in and you know they're watching say you're watching this and it's already been recorded right you might say oh crap it would have been cool to ask about X like great come next time and come ask me or ask me ahead of time and I'll answer it on the live stream for you so I just want to make sure that there's uh a forum for that kind of thing so uh I appreciate the support thank you so much um I already showed you my courses on don't train so I have to advertise that again and this was based on a newsletter article so again if you like this type of content you like the way that I'm kind of explaining it and going over it I the newsletters that I put out every week are basically on this type of thing as well so I hope you enjoyed that uh if you have ideas for the next live stream you want other things answered like I said put it in the chat leave comments on stuff message me on social media I'm trying to be present on every single platform so reach out to me uh just let me know I'm happy to try and answer anything I can so thanks again for all your support and I will see you next week take care