Does This Data Engineer's Resume Have What It Takes？

Welcome to the RSé review series where I review the rums that you submit. My name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. This video we have a resume that was submitted from a data engineer. And full disclosure, I hire software engineers as a software engineering manager. I do not hire data engineers, but I figured this would be a good opportunity to walk through some of the structure of this and to call out some things that stand out to me and some things that could be improved. Now, if you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résumé[email protected] and I'll see what I can do. All right, so to kick things off, I want to talk about the structure of this resume. So, I wanted to call out that I do appreciate having something like the tech section called out at the top. So, we see tech, data, tools, methodologies. I think this can be really helpful at a glance in terms of getting keywords and things like that. I like having the work section called out with some school. uh we don't necessarily have to have all the details of all the courses and stuff but some education if you have it I think that's helpful if you have searchs courses anything like that that you want to be able to showcase here that's good and then personal projects so you know highlevel overview I think these are all good things because of course some people will go through this kind of stuff and not even add personal projects and I think that's a missed opportunity so the other thing that I wanted to mention as well that we do have a GitHub at the top so if you have a GitHub or personal portfolio that you want to link to. I think that's helpful. I would also mention though that if you're trying to have all of the important stuff there and it's not showcased here. If I'm not impressed by the resume, I'm not going to click out and look for more. So, just want to remind you that if you have awesome stuff there, try to make sure that it's brought in here so that I can be impressed when I read through the resume itself. Okay, going through the work experience. Again, highlevel overview. One of the things that I'm not really personally going to need or want to see on a resume, this person has redacted the information, but they have brief summary of company 2 and brief summary of company one called out on the resume. And I think for me, that's not super beneficial, right? So, we can see that here. We can see that up here as well. I don't think that that really adds much, but again, this is maybe their style of how they want to do it. I would say that if you're trying to get more real estate back on your resume, you don't really need to have that. But I do like the part that's right below it. Right? So we see this part right here. So just like a one sentence little summary. We have all of the details and stuff, right? I think that's going to be where the most important part is. So we'll walk through that. But I think just like a one-s sentence kind of thing like this is actually kind of nice just to get a overview of what your role was like at that organization. Again, at a glance, if you were to just kind of scan through this, what I do really like is that not only did we have the technology, skills, and tools and stuff at the top, but we also see that throughout all of the listings here, right? So, Azure, we see Python, Azure CLI, Snowflake, Cortex, ML. If you look across all of it, like even SQL Server jobs, I really like that we have that sort of in line with the experience so that I'm not reading something and trying to guess at what was used there. So, if we're looking at some specific things, one that I wanted to call out right away was built the organization's first data warehouse solution with Snowflake uh and Azure cloud services. I think that this is a great one to call out, but I do think there's a bit of a missed opportunity here. The reason I think that is because when I see first data warehouse solution for an organization, to me, that's probably super impactful, right? So, I would love to know in like maybe one more line or an extended part of this sentence like what did that unlock? Right? I'm pretty sure and this person probably is aware that wrote this resume that they know the impact that had. Right? Being able to say that's the first data warehouse solution. Awesome. Okay. That's a foundational thing. Tell me more. Right? In an interview, I would certainly want to ask more about that. But in terms of seeing it on the resume from the perspective of an applicant, I would love to see just a little bit more called out here because I think that's a really good opportunity to stand out even more. One that I think has a bit more potential for opportunity here. If we read this one, it says build custom data extractors in Python to replicate data from SAS REST APIs. I suspect that the author of this probably understands the value of this. They understand why that was important. Now, something that I will mention basically in every résé review video is that when you're going through your resume line by line, you want to answer why should someone care about this? Because if it's not immediately obvious, it's not adding value and you should either remove it from the resume or you should add the detail that's going to make that matter. So, when I read this, I don't really understand why that's beneficial. I'm not saying that it's not. I'm not saying that it wasn't impactful, but I think this is a missed opportunity to call out why that was valuable. And one more that I wanted to call out from the top part here is automated Docker container deployments using Python, Azure CLI, Bashcripting, and improving deployment speed and image consistency for applications. This is great, right? This is something where it's like, hey, my work had some benefit. It had some impact. So, we see deployment speed and image consistency. But one thing that we could try to do to improve this is if the person knows the amount of increase, then I think that would be a really good thing to call out, right? Improving deployment speed by 1%. Doesn't really sound so great, but if you can say that you improved it by cutting the time in half or saving minutes or hours, something more quantifiable, again, I think that's just something that can make it stand out even more. But overall, I think that it's really good that you can talk about the projects or the work that you're doing and the impact that it has. When you're able to quantify it, it helps a reader who may not know the details of what was going on, understand the impact of that. Now, going on to the first work experience that they have, right? So, from May 2021 to July 2023, I think that most of these are really awesome, right? But they have a bit of a theme going on with them. So you'll notice that these three in particular talk about some type of impact that they had. So if we read this one here, built a solution to qualify all of company 1's 600 locations for cashback rewards using purchasing data driving increased sales for their distribution centers. This part driving increased sales. Awesome. This is the impact. But what could we do better here? Well, if this person is aware of what kind of increase that had, that's such a good opportunity to demonstrate just how much impact there was. So, I think that there's a bit of a missed opportunity here, but overall being able to show the impact is great. Next up, I think this one is awesome. It says, "Enhance the accuracy and performance of inventory related querying by creating fact measure groups with clustered indexes for inventory tables." Again, this person's a data engineer. So, being able to call out data specific things. Really good. And then you can see reducing query execution time by 97%. This is in my opinion like such a solid example of being able to say what you did and the impact it had. And not only was it reducing query execution time, 97% is pretty ridiculous. So, I think that's just a really good standout line on the resume. Now the next one, audited, troubleshoot, and optimize store procedures and SQL server jobs. Optimize store procedures, right? By how much? What kind of savings do we get? I think this one's good because it calls out some type of impact, but the missed opportunity here is calling out just how good, right? I would love to understand more. So if this person made it from the application part into the interview, this is of course something that I would love to understand more, right? Tell me more about that impact. So instead of waiting for the interview, call it out on the resume. Make that something that stands out for the person that's going to be looking through the applications. Jumping down to projects. I love when people have projects on their resumes. And I think that all three of these projects are super cool, right? So the first one is developed a Discord bot in Python. It's able to generate images from prompts. It uses a local version of stable diffusion and it has TensorFlow works CUDA and alongside the open AI API. So, there's a mouthful of different things related to AI here, which is great because I think that probably most jobs right now, there's probably some interest from companies to make sure that people are thinking about AI. It's the hot topic right now. So, if you're showing some interest, you're trying to work on projects that have some of these technologies. I think that's just a great opportunity to call out. It's almost like if you're not doing some amount of this stuff, there's going to be other people doing it. They're going to be standing out. So I think this is a really good one as a first project on this list. The next two though, especially from the perspective of a data engineer, right? Build a Python bot which trade stocks based on technical analysis. I think that's super cool. Both this one and the next one are like super nerdy things, but I think that's the best kind of project that you can call out because you're going to be demonstrating that you're building something. It's going to be technical and probably something that you were pretty interested or passionate about. So, I would love to understand more about this project. If I were in the interview, I would be like, "Tell me all about all three of these projects." But this next one, too, created a BI dashboard which analyzes my Spotify listening history of over 200,000 stream songs. Again, like why is this so interesting? Well, from my perspective, if someone's really interested in working in data, the fact that they have two projects like this that have a lot to do with understanding data modeling, analysis, to me, that's highlighting that they are really interested in this stuff. It might be something that they're good at, but it's also probably something that they really enjoy, or they probably wouldn't be spending more time building side projects like this. I think it's a great way to call stuff out and especially if they're able to call out tech that they're using alongside it. Right? So, Python bot. So, I understand that they're being able to program in Python BI dashboards and then up here we see that we're being able to work with some of the AI tools. So, stable diffusion, TensorFlow, CUDA, open AI APIs. So, these are all things that are going to stand out in terms of keywords. And I think that overall this list of personal projects is great. To summarize briefly, no, I'm not totally experienced with hiring data engineers, but what I do think really stands out is calling out the projects and the work experience and being able to correlate that with the impact. I think there's a little bit more room for improvement with quantifying that, especially if this person is really into data, right? It'd be great if they could showcase that and call out some of the numbers more specifically if they have them. And otherwise, the projects on this list, I think, are totally cool. I think they really stand out and that would be my big recommendation for you if you're in a similar situation, right? Make sure that you have projects that are going to stand out because of the people that are applying for the same jobs as you because if other people have projects that stand out, you need to make sure that you're competing with those people. Overall, awesome work from this individual and I wish them success in their next role. Just a reminder that if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résumé[email protected]. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.