Does This Developer Intern Resume Stand A Chance?!

If you were applying for an internship, what should your resume look like? Hi, my name is Nick Coantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. This is going to be another video in the résé review series where people submit their resumes for me to review. In this video, we're going to be looking at someone's resume who is applying for internships. Now, I want to add the disclaimer like I need to in all of these videos that yes, I will be offering constructive criticism here, but no, my intention is not to pick on anyone or make fun of them. So, I will try to call out all of the things that I think they've done well and ensure that I'm calling out things that I think they should improve on. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résésdevleer.ca. Let's jump over to this resume and check it out. All right, so the additional context that this individual provided was they're applying to jobs that involve both CS and electrical engineering. So, they wanted to make sure that they were including some information regarding both. So, it's not just a pure software role that they're looking for. If we start from the top, obviously they're mentioning their university. They have some technical skills listed here. If you've watched the other videos, you'll know that I do like having some type of technical skills listed, whether that's technologies, stacks, languages, things like that. I think that that's going to be helpful. And I think that especially if there's a large volume of résumés that are going out and people have to review them, then if they're using any type of automation or simply just trying to look for ways to try and sift through RS faster than looking for keywords can be a helpful tool for them. Now again, I'm not suggesting that this is the best thing to do, but I think that it's a reality in terms of trying to get through a large volume of RS. So having them called out, I think, can be helpful. And hopefully as we go through this, we'll see that they're trying to mention some of these throughout their experience as well. Now, because this person is someone who's looking for an internship, they don't have uh actual work experience listed yet. So, if we go through, you'll notice that they have projects coming up here. And something to think about is that if they are say later on in university or college and they've had a couple of internships, then I would recommend that yes, they absolutely list their previous internships. So, for example, when I was going through school, I was very fortunate to be in an internshipbased program. So, it was called co-op and we had six internships throughout the entire course of my university experience. So, I was able to start, you know, racking up the experience to put on my resume, which really helped. But, of course, if you're just starting out, you don't have that yet, you can't yet list it. So, we do have projects here. Before I start going over the different things that they have under projects and then the other segments, what I would call out because I don't see it anywhere else on here is that there's opportunities, especially at college and university to participate in different types of clubs. You could be doing things like hackathons trying to get these other types of experience. So, I just wanted to mention that we're going to see projects listed here and that's great. But if they're looking for some other types of experiences, they've listed a couple at the bottom, but I think that there's going to be an opportunity where they could have added in some of these other types of things. And they might not have those experiences yet. And that's me encouraging the individual and perhaps you if you're in this situation. If you're like, I don't have actual work experience yet. Yes, I've been building things, which is awesome. By the way, I do think there's an opportunity where you could be volunteering for different teams at school, looking for different opportunities that way. There's clubs, things like that. you're at college or university, this is an excellent time to be trying to network and see some of those things. You could participate in hackathons, all sorts of options like that. So, just one more thing to layer on in terms of experience. Let's go look at their project. So, they say 3D ray tracer developed a 3D ray tracer in C++. So, we have a language called out. They say no external libraries. And I'm assuming that their goal here is to try and call out that they're, you know, trying to think through this stuff uh from almost like first principles, right? Like how do I actually create some of these things and understand that? So when I read this as someone reviewing a resume, when they say no external libraries, the first thing, you know, if you were thinking about someone trying to build something optimally, you would be like, well, why don't you use that? But again, I think that they're sort of in learning mode, and that's what I'm gauging from this, which is a good thing. utilize advanced mathematical modeling techniques and efficient programming practices. Okay, so this is a little bit generic. Um, we see advanced mathematical modeling techniques. That's that's good. Um, I guess if you're trying to call out that type of thing and technically based on where this person's at, um, in terms of their courses, which you'll see listed below, they're trying to highlight different skills they have depending on what types of jobs they're applying to. like for most of what I've done in my career and the sort of roles that I've been hiring for, if someone had advanced mathematical modeling techniques listed, it's not going to be a huge sell for me. But again, depending on where they're applying to, they did mention electronics, maybe if they're having to deal with a lot more low-level stuff, then the math can really start to shine through. So, I think that can be good. But saying, you know, it is kind of general. So, one thing that's common that you'll notice when I'm reviewing résumés is that we want to think about sort of this type of question, which is why should I care? And I don't mean for it to sound harsh, right? But when you're trying to write the content in your resume, why should the person reading this care? When I read utilize advanced mathematical modeling techniques, why should I care about that? If you're asking yourself that question, right? And maybe if you're applying to a job that needs that type of thing, that is something that will stand out. So, that's a great fit. If you're listing that on your resume and trying to apply to a job that may not need that, that might be sort of wasteful real estate on your resume. If there's another quality or experience or skill that you can layer in there, then you could swap that out. So, another thing that I'll mention is that if this individual was say applying to uh maybe more electronics related internships or more uh software heavy internships, maybe they want to have different variations of this, but this is just something to think about. But that question of why should I care? Or if you're writing it, why should the person reading this care? That's something that you want to go line by line in your resume and try to answer that. If you don't have a good answer for it, it might not be a good point or it might be a great point that you have not done a good job trying to explain to the reader. And the third bullet here, I think, is something great. This is the type of thing where uh especially if you do have actual practical work experience, this is what I'm trying to get people to call out. Implemented threading for a 4.6 uh x performance boost. Right? So, we're able to showcase something quantitative in terms of impact. If this was real work experience, it might be uh helpful framing to sort of indicate why that's beneficial. Right? So, if the context of what you were building was something that was a performance-heavy application and being able to have a performance boost like that, you could talk about more of the impact that's having. But overall, I think this is a pretty good project that highlights that they're trying to learn about things. They're taking their mathematics that they're learning in school and trying to apply to things and they're looking at optimization. So, pretty good. I think that's great. 2D radar simulation created a radar system to track multiple inherited types. Uh if I skip a little bit below I see leverage C++ for clean and efficient code structure. Uh so you know we see a language called out. That's great. Clean and efficient code structure. I will mention here that when we see C++ and then for clean and efficient code structure I would argue that C++ does not sort of predicate clean and efficient code structure. Right? So to list clean and efficient code structure, great. But it seems like they're trying to to tie these things together. Like I would actually argue most of the C++ code that I've seen written is almost the exact opposite of what I would call clean. Uh I've seen a lot of C++ code that I find difficult to read in terms of how it's organized. Um is it efficient? Probably. Uh but is it an efficient code structure? I'm not really sure. What I would just mention here is I think that they're trying to call out that they were putting some thought and effort into how the system was designed, which which is a good thing. But the way that this is listed here, leverage C++ to get that, I don't think that that's necessarily demonstrating uh sort of the reason why they were able to achieve that. So just to call out that if you're trying to talk about the fact that you were putting some thought into the architecture, the system design, the organization, sort of mentioning the language being the thing that gives you that I don't think is a great argument, but overall not a bad idea. Designed using object-oriented programming principles. So this is really good just to mention because especially uh at an sort of entry level internship, junior level, we want to think about what types of applications will people be building. And it's pretty common that there's going to be an expectation of having some object-oriented programming. Now, I know that there's maybe people watching this saying, you know, functional programming is the way to go. It's the only way. But a lot of places, you know, having some amount of object-oriented programming under your belt is going to be huge because having to spend all of your sort of internship time trying to onboard someone to these concepts can take a lot of time and that will be sort of costly in terms of that intern's experience. So if they have some experience like that, I would say absolutely list it. They say to ensure modularity, scalability and performance. I mean this is kind of like the similar argument to the point I just made previously, right? Object-oriented programming principles do not necessarily get you performance. Like that's not one of the reasons a lot of the time that you look to object-oriented programming, but modularity perhaps, scalability perhaps, flexibility perhaps, performance maybe not. But again, I think what this person is trying to say is I know object-oriented programming or at least the basics of it. So that's great. And then again that they have this focus on trying to build things with that are modular, scalable, and a focus on performance. I feel like they've tied these things together and they don't necessarily go together. This is a little bit nitpicky, but I'm trying to mention this not to say, "Hey, I think you did a bad job with this line." I'm trying to say I think you have an opportunity to emphasize these other things separately, draw more attention to them. So that's my point with trying to uh critique both this point and the last point. Okay. So they had these two projects which I think are great because they're trying to showcase that they're building some things on the side. And again C++ is a call out for things that might be more like focused on embedded or lowlevel for programming performance math. I think these are good things that might tie into their potential electronics focus. So, let's go a little lower. Lead code problem solving. Um, I have a bias here. Um, lead code problem solving, lead code in general, I couldn't care any less about. I think that most people will probably want to practice lead code when it comes to interviewing. And that's just because many places use lead code problems for interviewing. But just to sort of highlight why I don't care about this and it's again I'm not trying to tell this person like you're bad for doing this. I think it's very good that they actually have spent time on this but it doesn't impress me as someone reviewing a resume. If your goal is to and I'm going to sort of talk about how they've written this and how they might be able to do a little bit better. If the goal of this is to say, hey, look, like I know how to solve lead code problems like and that's going to be helpful in the role, I would argue like not really. And I say this in other videos, so if you're watching my main dev leader channel a lot of times, especially like during live streams and stuff, I'll talk about this that I don't find that lead code has a lot of practical carryover to real software engineering problems. doesn't mean that it's a waste of time to do it because I think if you find as like a good mental exercise, like a good challenge to go through, by all means do it. If you enjoy doing it, do it. But I don't think that it's a good substitute, and that's a key word, a good substitute for building things. As someone reviewing a resume, if I read lead code problem solving, for me, that's a hobby. That's how I see it. If you're interested in doing that kind of thing as a hobby, like that's cool. That's interesting. If your point is to say like look here's how much I've excelled at it. I think what they've done where they've listed their lead code profile that's helpful but like I'll tell you one more step that you could do is like imagine I had to review a thousand of these and they were similar. One more click two more clicks whatever it happens to be on each one of these. That's going to take time. Tell me more about why your elite code is so impressive. demonstrated expertise in data structures and complex algorithms. If you're doing lead code, that's probably what's happening by definition, right? And then see lead code profile instead. I mean, both these points here, and again, I'm not not trying to pick on this person by any means, but both of these points that they have under their bullets basically just tell me I do lead code, which is fine. So, go back to what I said earlier. Why should I care about this? That's the question we want to try and answer with every line we have in our resume. Why should I care about your lead code? Well, you're actually in the top X percent. You've solved this many problems. When you're solving the problems, you're in the X% range of performance. Like calling out these more interesting things and not making me go click to find them, I think is more interesting. I think that at the end of the day, uh, your lead code stuff is going to be potentially helpful for your interview, depending where you're interviewing, not necessarily helpful for a resume review, unless it's a hobby you want to call out or have something more specific about why I should care about this. But that's really what I have to say about lead code. I'm not telling this person to not do lead code. Not saying it's not good to do it. It's just that it's not going to be like a I'm not looking for people that can do this. in at least in my experience. I don't know many places that specifically do, which is a really confusing thing for many people because then you would say, "Well, Nick, why the hell do people ask lead code questions in interviews?" That's a good question. I don't know why they do. I think it's a terrible gauge for how people perform in software engineering roles. It's just unfortunately very common. So, let's get that out of the way. Let's keep going. Relevant coursework. Again, this person is in school. They're going for internships. I think that it's good that they're calling these out. I want to explain why in this format I'm not a big fan. And I'll put it this way. What I know from them listing this is that they have done some programming, they've done some math, and they've done electronics. Personally, I'm going to bucket like the the programming in one bucket and math and electronics in another because I find that when you're doing a lot more electronics, you're going to have more of a math kind of uh orientation in some of those things. doing like frequency analysis and stuff like that. It's going to be heavy in math and it's going to be more applicable to the electronics. Now, here's what I don't know and kind of where there's a lot more to be desired. I'm just going to pick a CS219. I don't know what that is. CS202. I have no idea what that is. ET 212B. I have no idea what that is. I believe what this person is trying to do is they're trying to demonstrate to the person reviewing the resume, look how many of these courses I've done and from their perspective, they know that they're valuable or they believe that they're valuable. And that's great because I'm not telling this person that these courses are not valuable. What I'm trying to say, and this is like a really important sort of software engineering lesson in terms of communicating to stakeholders. If you were imagining, if you watched other videos I have around soft skills and communication and stuff, this is sort of a like a a lesson for your career, which is you're going to be talking to people that have different understandings of the domain that you're in or the technology that you're working with. A lot of the time in practice that will look like you're a very technical person having to communicate with other stakeholders that maybe aren't as technical. That could be your manager, could be a product manager, it could even be engineers on other teams that have no idea about the space that you're in. In this case, this person who wrote this has a very clear idea of what these courses are. A very clear idea. They've they've lived through them. However, the person reading the resume, unless they know very well the course curriculum at the school that this person went to, this means nothing. There's so much more to be desired here that I believe that this person knows in terms of the information, right? They know what CS301 and 302 are. I have no idea. Is CS218 object-oriented programming? Boom. Write that down. Right? Like why should I care what CS202 is? If we go line by line through the resume and ask, why should I care? I think that someone would be able to say or the person that wrote this would say, well, you should care about CS131 because that's going to be algorithms and data structures. And I would say, awesome. That's not what it says though, right? It says CS131. I don't know what that is. So, that's the the meta point for the relevant coursework. But I do think that for uh interns that can be very very helpful uh for your first full-time role as a sort of entry level junior. If you don't have other work experience, listing coursework can be helpful, but it's kind of like diminishing returns at some point. If you had other experiences to list, I wouldn't list coursework at all. Where this person's at, I think that it's a good idea, but that's my suggestion. Kind of tell me what those courses are. Additional experience. Um, so experience with electronic systems, installation of repairs, including sound systems, automotive wire harness repairs, diagnostics. This is great, right? They're giving some examples that aren't just like, you know, I'm going to go build software, but it's still relevant to electronics, right? So, that would tell me if I were hiring for an electronics role, like this person has dabbled in this kind of stuff like almost as a hobby or on the side. They have some other interest or skill that they're kind of layering on here. And I think that that can be very helpful. So I think that's cool. Hands-on troubleshooting and technical problem solving skills in both hardware and software environments. Meta point on this one that they're trying to convey is that spanning both hardware and software, which I think is one of the things when they reached out to me, they said that is an interest of mine and that's what I would gauge from reading this. It ends up being very generic, right? So hands-on troubleshooting and technical problem solving skills. So, I understand that they're going to have to diagnose stuff and investigate and and try to fix and they're actually hands-on doing it, but I don't know what. There's an opportunity here to kind of enhance that. So, again, I don't have to guess. That's another sort of meta point with all of my critiquing. One of the points that I said earlier was around like why should I care? But the other sort of meta point is like don't make me guess because if there's an opportunity where I have to guess, it means that I have uncertainty or I might guess not what you're trying to get me to guess. So being explicit, trying to offer concrete examples, I think can go a really long way. Overall, I think it's great that this person has a few projects listed. I think it's good they're practicing lead code, but I would recommend maybe like, you know, answer the question, why should I care about this kind of stuff? and then you can try and transform that into something that is more valuable. I like that they have their sort of different programming languages and focus areas up at the top and they do have that listed throughout the relevant coursework as I mentioned I think is helpful to include but I would do away with just course numbers because all that I know from this is that you've done 1 2 3 4 5 six computer science courses I have no idea what they are and then again additional experiences if you have some things that are relevant I think that's very cool to be able to include another overall thing that I mentioned was that I know this person said both sort of CS and electronics related jobs that they're interested in for their internship, but if they were to try and tailor this, right? If they were like, hey, there was an internship that is uh strictly software or strictly going to be doing hardware, I might say, hey, you can try and dial this in a little bit more depending on specifically which direction. If you're doing a ton of volume with applications, that can be really tiring to try and keep tailoring. But if you can group them into categories like the ones I gave were softwarebased and hardwarebased that might not be so bad. Overall, I think this is pretty decent. I hope uh that's helpful critiques for this individual. And if you find yourself in a similar situation applying for internships and you feel that your resume is structured in a similar way, hopefully there's some helpful tips for you to think about. Remember, why should I care as I'm reading each line item? You probably know the answer. Try and make sure that that comes through. So, thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.