Does This Azure Developer Have What It Takes?!

Hi and welcome back to the ré review series. My name is Nick Cantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video, we're going to be reviewing a resume from a .NET developer with focus in CI/CD pipelines and Azure as well. If you're not familiar with this series, people send in their resumes and I review them trying to give them constructive feedback, trying to call out the things that I think are good, things that could use improvement, but I'm not going to roast them, so I'm not going to sit here and make fun of anyone. People have submitted these because they want my feedback and I will give my open and honest criticism. With that said, if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résé[email protected] and I recommend that you watch through this so that you can see what the review will be like and that way you can see if it will be a good fit for you. With that said, let's jump over to this individual's resume and have a look through. For a little bit of background, this is a senior software engineer. They said that they've been at a single company for around 5 years now and they've had three promotions. So they've also said that they target Net Azure and React ecosystem. So that's what they've submitted to me alongside their resume for a little bit of extra context. And if we start off by checking out their resume, I like to go over the structure first. And the thing that we can see right at the top is a little bit of a summary that highlights some of these points. So I do really like having something like this. I will call it out a little bit later as we read through, but a lot of what they've written on their resume absolutely aligns with what they've highlighted in the summary. This is what you would hope to see, but we don't always see this kind of thing. So, I think they've done a really good job trying to call out these brief points and then back it up with a bunch of data. Now, I mentioned this in the other ré reviews, but I do like having this section with skills and technologies called out right at the top. I think that's nice to have at a glance. And I think that if anyone's using any type of tooling that's looking for keywords, this can be really helpful as well. Another thing, if we go down a little bit lower, we can see obviously the work experience being the bulk of the resume. This is great. We have someerts called out and then education as well. And I wanted to mention that for both certificates and education, noerts aren't required. I think that if you have them, that's a great thing to call out. If you have them, you might as well mention them. But I don't think a lot of the time that they're going to be a requirement. At least from the experience that I have, this has never been a make it or break it kind of thing. But certainly if you have them, something that stands out. The other thing with education is that we can see this individual has a master's. Right? So again, I've never seen a master's actually be a gating thing in a software engineering position, but of course, if you have it, it's a great thing to call out. I'm personally a fan of people that are pursuing education. And I think that's great, but I would never hold that against someone if they didn't have a masters or something like that. I think great job being able to call out additional searchs and education because as you can see here, they've been in school from 2016 all the way till 2023. So that's a lot of investment in themsel to get better. Okay, let's dive into the meat of this resume. So if we start glancing through the work experience, something that should catch your eye, and this might seem like a very small detail, but I do think this helps. I'm going to talk about the formatting. So, you can see that there's bolding throughout this main section of the resume with the work experience. We can see that they're trying to call out the different technologies that they've been working with. I personally really like this because as we see the different experiences that someone's calling out, we can see inline the different technology and tools that they're using to back that up. The other thing that's really great, and I talked about this in the other ré reviews, is that we have the impact called out. Now, one little thing that I would suggest that they improve is not just highlighting something like the dollar value or just highlighting a single number, but something that I would recommend that they try to improve on this is highlighting something like this. So, reducing manual setup time by 70%. Not just the 70%. Because at a glance when I see 70%, I don't know what it is until I read more. But if the bold is drawing my eyes to reducing manual setup time by 70%, I think that helps a little bit more. So, small detail, but I think that it truly does help. I did mention that their work experience backs up the summary at the top and I had a couple of notes that I wanted to call out. So, I wrote down C andnet cuz it's one of the things they mention and we can see if we scroll down a little bit here. So, NUnit, BD, DDFI, mock, fluent assertions, these are all going to be net libraries. I just realized I've never actually had to say this one out loud, so that's a little bit awkward, but these are all things that you would be using innet development. So we can see that yes they have experience with some of those tools. I said on the Azure side there's a whole bunch of Azure called out here Azure DevOps Azure Kubernetes Service Azure container registries Azure application insights right they talk about setting up logging alerting and monitoring inside of different services in Azure. So we can see that they have a lot of different experiences with Azure that absolutely backs up their summary. And then the other thing that I mentioned is that they talk about CI/CD. So again, we see that with the Azure, we see that with Docker, we see that with Azure DevOps and the pipelines that they have set up. They have infrastructure is code and ARM templates as well. Right down here, right? So there's a lot of different work experience that they've written up about that backs up the summary. So again, might seem like a small detail, might seem like this should line up, but it's good that it does. One of the other things I wanted to call out before I really focus on the impact part because that's always my biggest focus area is that I really like that especially for a senior software engineer, they've called out things that span a bunch of different areas. So we do have things like CI/CD, we do have things like feature development, we have things like cost savings initiatives, we have things like testing as well. So we have a whole spectrum of different areas that they focused on. something that could be interesting to call out because I think that most of this almost all of it is really talking about technical implementation of things and yes I think that is going to be a really big focus especially for a senior software engineer there might be an opportunity to call out things that are a little bit more like sort of interpersonal right so I see down here collaborated in three amigos approach but this down here like that's probably the only thing where I see something about collaboration there could be a couple of other spots spots where we have sort of that opportunity, but that might be one thing that could be sort of lacking from being called out here. It doesn't mean that this person doesn't have that experience, but when I was reading through this, I saw a lot of technical implementation. Again, I think that's really awesome, but especially at senior, I would love to see maybe a couple of other things that span outside of that sort of just technical focus. Moving on to impact. This resume is loaded with impact. I think that's great. If you can take one thing away from this ré review, like the other ré reviews that I do, I think one of the biggest things that you can do that has sort of the the most impact is calling out your impact, right? So, if you want to make a good impression on the person that's reading your resume, just loading it with technical terms isn't really going to cut it. And I think that if you just list off a bunch of areas that you worked on, also not really going to cut it. But if you can demonstrate that you worked in an area and you can call out the impact that you had and ideally quantify it, even better. Because that means even if I am not intimately familiar with the application that you're working on, I might not even be intimately familiar with the tech stack that you're working on. I do understand what it means to save $40,000 a year. I do understand what it means to be able to save, you know, 50% time or moving something from 15minute turnaround to 3 minute turnaround. So something like we can see right here, right? These types of things I don't have to have intimate familiarity with, but I can understand the impact that you're having when you call this type of stuff out. So I think when it comes to interpreting a resume or leaving an impression on someone who's reading the resume, these types of things can make a huge difference. So, at a glance, we can see in the first two bullets, they have different things for cost savings, right? So, annual savings exceeding $40,000. We have another one exceeding $10,000. I already mentioned this one going from 15 minutes to 3 minutes for alert detection. What was the other thing? We have uh reducing post- deployment defects by 42%. Reducing test failures by over 80% due to external service downtime. There's so many quantitative impact scenarios called out here and I think that this is really good. And one more thing, I've kind of already mentioned this, but being able to tie that type of impact along with the technology that was used to achieve that I think goes a long way as well. The reason I say that is because if we were to just have this list up at the top with all these skills and the different technology, someone listed that out and I read through the resume and I didn't see the technology called out or I couldn't see how the technology was or which technology was used to accomplish the impact. It leaves me wondering just as an example like okay I see that they have application insights called out but how much experience do they really have with that? But if we were to scroll down through here, we can see that they were doing logging, alerting, monitoring. They had this impact here and they leveraged Azure application insights as one of the things that they used to achieve that in my mind that really bridges a lot of these things together. And I'm not left sitting here going, hm, how did that happen? Or what technology was used here? Or how much does this person actually know about this technology? I still might not know exactly, but I do know that they knew enough to be able to have this type of impact, which is really beneficial. Moving on to some opportunities. I have a short list here. Uh, some of these things are maybe a little bit pedantic. I just, you know, I'm reading through this some things that stood out to me in particular. The first one that I noticed was this line here. So, collaborated in the three amigos approach to refine. And then I sat here for a moment going, what the heck is this? So, I saw BDD and then I thought behavior-driven development and then I was looking at FRS and NFRS and going what the heck does that mean? And then I realize it's functional requirements and non-functional requirements. I'm a very technical person. I've been doing this for a while and the reality is that if it's going to take someone like me or someone else reading through this a moment to pause and go, hm, what does that mean? It might just be that I'm having an off day reading this and that's okay. I'll forgive myself for it. But any opportunity you can to make it easier for someone to interpret, even better. Something like this where you have acronyms and this could just be replaced by functional requirements, non-functional requirements, I think just take the opportunity to do it. Saving the extra little bit of space there, I don't think is going to be that helpful. So try to expand on your acronyms just to eliminate jargon where possible. Again, like I said, little detail. There's a couple of typos on the resume. one in particular like altering. Um, that's fine. You know, it wouldn't be like a deal breakaker, but again, this was submitted to me. I'm reading through it. I saw it. So, part of the constructive criticism back to the person that sent this in, have another look through. There's a couple of things like that you might want to just double check. With that said, the other thing I noticed, again, small detail, but if we have a mix of capitalization schemes between proper and improper nouns, I think there's an opportunity, right? So implemented logging with a capital L, alerting and monitoring with capital A and capital M. These aren't really like proper nouns, right? If we're calling out technologies, go ahead and capitalize those things. But this is really kind of just a generic thing. These don't need capitals. This is kind of a thing throughout the resume where we're mixing in different capitalization schemes. This seems like it's very minor, and I admit that it probably is very minor, but if you're just looking to enhance the readability, try to get those things a little bit more consistent because when you start mixing them in, it gets a little bit messier, right? A refund API, API should be capitalized cuz it's an acronym. Refund should not be little things like that just in terms of readability. If you're going through the time and effort to put your resume together, polish it up a little bit like that. There is a couple of spots in here that have like run-on sentences and I think like this section is one of them. This is a lot and it's great that there is a lot in here, but I think that this is uh you know, sorry, the PDF is getting all crazy on me, but I think this is one of the opportunities to just maybe split this into two bullet points or make it two sentences or something like that. When you start trying to pile too much into one spot, it's just a little bit overloading. And I think that you can make it be either a little bit more succinct or split it up and that'll just enhance the readability even further. Again, these are all very minor things. I think probably the biggest opportunity that I would call out here is side projects. This person, fortunately, as a senior software engineer, they do have a bunch of work experience. They were able to really call out a ton of impact. In my opinion, something like this where they have that much quantitative impact called out is impressive. I think that's really good. One of the things I wanted to mention though is depending on the type of work they're going for, the competition for the people applying to those jobs, if they need to enhance different coverage in terms of their experiences depending on from where they are to where they'd like to go to, it may be a good opportunity to try and have side projects. Right? So, when I talk about side projects, I think that there's different purposes for them. It could be so that you can demonstrate polish for something. Could be that you wanted to demonstrate that you're just learning about a technology or that you're really passionate about something on the side. There's so many different reasons to do side projects. And I always try to acknowledge I understand that not everyone has the same ability to commit extra time to side projects. I get it. But if there is something that this person feels is lacking from what's on their resume compared to where they'd like to go, side projects, right? If you're not going to get that experience on the job, say they were like, I want to go do something in AWS to round out some of my experience. Just as an example, I realize I have tons of Azure experience. They could go, okay, well, if I'm not getting that opportunity at work, maybe I'm going to go try building a simple application. And because I have so much experience on the Azure platform, I should be able to go spin up something in AWS to get logging, alerting, and monitoring going really quick. spin up something just to be able to demonstrate with a quick note for a side project. Hey, I was able to do this. Lots of different options there. But again, if you're looking to enhance what you have on your resume, maybe filling in some skill gaps and technology gaps, that could be a great option. Another thing that you could consider in this case is something like extracurricular activities, right? And I don't just mean like, hey, I like to go skiing. Although, you know, if someone wanted to include that in a brief note, I'm not opposed to that kind of thing. But what I mean actually is if you're looking to offer up, maybe you like going to meetups and you're interested in networking or you uh because this person didn't include a lot of things or anything on like mentoring or coaching for more junior people. Are there other ways that you could show that? Right? Maybe maybe this person doesn't feel they get a ton of that uh opportunity at work and that's okay, right? But if you want to be able to demonstrate it, are there things that you're doing outside of work where you could showcase that? Maybe you have uh some mentees on the side. Maybe you're participating in open source and helping, you know, coach some more junior people through their commits and things like that. I'm just making up examples off the top of my head, but if you had extracurricular things that could try to contribute to the areas that you don't have on your resume, include that. And if you're sitting in this position, and I like I said, I think this is a great resume, but if you're sitting in this position and you're going, I'm having trouble trying to land jobs or even get interview opportunities based on what I have here. If you're comparing what you have to where you want to be, projects, and maybe extracurricular things, maybe you can't even include them on the resume yet. You have to go participate in those things first. Those might be something to consider. But overall, I think this resume is great. Again, one of the things that really stands out to me is that quantitative impact and the fact that they've linked together the skills and technology with the quantitative impact and the different work experiences that they've listed. So, overall, awesome job. I think this person is going to do quite well in their job search. Very excited for them. And just a friendly reminder that if you thought this was helpful and you'd like your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résumés devleader.ca. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you next time.