Does this FULL STACK Developer Resume Measure Up To The Rest？

Hi, and welcome to the RSé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. In this video, we're going to be looking at a full stack engineer's résé who has 4 and a half years of experience and see what kind of opportunities we can call out for them. A friendly reminder that in these ré reviews, I'm not roasting or grilling anyone's resume. I am here to offer constructive criticism, and that's going to mean that I am calling out things that I can be improved, as well as the things that I think that they're doing well. If you're interested in having the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can submit it to résumé[email protected]. With that said, let's jump over to this resume and check it out. All right, so as I mentioned, this individual is a full stack engineer with 4 and 1/2 years of experience. The first two years of their professional experience that they call out is also self-employed, which is an interesting call out. So, the structure of the resume, I like that they have a little bit of background at the top. I can I can see that being beneficial at a quick glance to see if you have things that you'd like to call out. Um, and we can see a bit of tech called out there. We can see that they have uh, you know, global remote team to build scalable systems, optimize performance. So, nice and light. That's great, I think, to have at the top. Not mandatory, but I think that can be a nice touch. We have skills right after that in this section here. And again, in previous videos, I've called out that I like this kind of thing to have a, you know, brief section for skills. That way any keywords and that kind of stuff can have an opportunity to get called out. I did want to mention that if I just zoom out on this a little bit, if we see that already, if we look at just the first page of their resume, we're over halfway through the first page before we even see any experience. So, I just wanted to mention that when it comes to real estate, like if you have a lot of stuff that you would like to include on your resume or you want to be able to show more value, more impact from the experience that you have, I would figure out a way to try and reduce the amount of real estate that's being used for everything above this first bit of work experience. Your work experience, I think, is going to be the most important part. So, trying to make room for that, I think, is ideal. Okay, so let's start by looking at their first job that they have listed out here. I wanted to call out and I actually had to follow up with this individual just to double check that they have a what looks like two months here on the resume for this job and they were saying that this is actually more of like a boot camp/ internship kind of hybrid. I just wanted to make sure because I think it becomes extra challenging when you have a short tenure at a place to be able to call out the impact you had. And to be clear, I want to say that it doesn't mean that it's bad if you have a short tenure somewhere. Yes, some places might say that they don't like that and whatnot, but from my perspective, I think any experience that you can call out that's beneficial, you should, but it will be more challenging to have an impact at a place if you haven't been there for a sustained period of time. So, I just want to acknowledge that as we start to go through this. To start things off, when I was going through my notes here, I noticed they called out the number of end points here. They also call out number of end points here as well. I don't think that this is super beneficial. I think that that is sort of like a checklist that you might have at work or the number of features or bugs that you fix, but number of endpoints isn't really that valuable from my perspective. So, I think that might be the wrong thing to try and focus on. What was the impact of that work? I don't really care about the number of endpoints per se because it doesn't really translate to something that I'm going to understand. I think that for most of these entries that we have here in their first job experience, they do a really good job of telling me what they built and they do a good job of telling me, you know, which uh tech was associated with that work. But what they sort of miss in my opinion is that this impact of that work. And I always go back to this statement like when you're writing your resume, you want to be answering this question for the ré reader, which is why should I care, right? So when they say something like created a GitHub profile viewer, right, they call out the text. So that's helpful. And then they say that they use GitHub's API for dynamic data aggregation. But you know genuine question like why should the resume reviewer care about this? Like what is the impact of that work? What is interesting about that work? And I'm not saying that it's easy to do this if especially if you had you know shorter tenure somewhere. In some cases you might not have been able to realize that impact. You might not have been able to get to the point where you've measured that impact. And sometimes when you're going way back in your work history, you might say, "I actually don't know what that impact is anymore." But this is one of the goals that we want to try and answer for basically every line on our resume. Another thing that I wanted to call out and I think this is an interesting opportunity is they said led development of a team, user and project management system. But when they talk about leading development, I don't know what that means, right? um they probably do very clearly, but I don't understand the scale of that, the scope of that, the impact of that. Was it leading a team of 100, you know, software engineers across a multi-organizational effort? Was this just the solo dev and you got to take charge on it? These types of things are interesting and it's not right or wrong, but being able to call that out, I think, is very helpful on a resume. This next job also has a short tenure. So we might see a similar type of challenge where measuring impact becomes a little bit more difficult. So the first line they say shaped both the front end and back end uh for a centralized cryptocurrency exchange. So one thing that I don't understand is like what does shaped mean here? I think I know what they're trying to say but again I go back to you know what was the scale? What was the significance of this? What was your role specifically? Were you sort of the architect and the lead designer of this leading a team across it? Were you just the solo person responsible for this? I don't really understand the dynamics in this situation. And this is a really good opportunity potentially to call out the significance of the role you played. But to me, it doesn't really come through when you just say shaped both front end and back end. Like I'm I'm missing extra context that this person probably has. This next one says delivered key features. to talk about manage external partner integrations and ensure compliance with security. This part delivered key features. Um I hope so, right? Like as a software engineer, it's kind of like this is just too generic in my opinion. Um I hope you delivered key features. I hope you fixed bugs and you wrote good tests, but I don't know the impact of this or or why it's here, right? Like tell me more about this. Why should I care? What were those features? What was the impact? They're key. I don't know why they're key or what they are. So just a small note, this one here says manage external partner integrations. I think this is interesting, but I don't have details on this. This might be one that I would say, hey, can you expand on this? Like external partner integrations. There's going to be interesting challenges that might come up with that. Did you have to work with other development teams to be able to go back and forth and and navigate this kind of thing? I I don't really know the the significance of this, but I I suspect that this one could be expanded upon. So I think that's an interesting one that maybe they could go call that out a little bit more in detail. Another one they mention here is driving platform scalability and performance through robust testing, monitoring, and code review practices. But what does driving platform scalability and performance mean? Like what was the impact of that? Is there a measured impact? Um it's great that someone was pushing for this, but I don't understand the significance of it. Like so I know that this is a task that they had. I know that this is something they were focused on, but were they successful with it? What was that success? So, overall, this uh second job that they have called out here, this one feels just a little bit light and kind of generic to me. Like I said, this could be because of a shorter tenure there. So, I I just want to mention it because if there's an opportunity where this individual understands a lot more of that impact and they can offer more details, then great. Please do call that out. I'm just trying to give my honest perspective when I read through this about what I'm taking away from it. This next one here in their third job, they talk about having a codebase modernization project. They say what they're doing. So going uh from outdated Nex.js and React versions, migrating wallet connection providers. Cool. Okay. But like what was the scale and scope of this? Right? I I understand what this work is, but I don't understand the significance of it. uh you know full codebase modernization project is the codebase you know hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code is it a small desktop application like I I just don't know I know I see that it's uh going to be for for some type of cryptocurrency platform um so I realize it's probably not a desktop application but the reality is that with a sentence like this we have a full codebase modernization project so there was probably a really good reason for doing this they talk about security, performance, maintainability. Tell me about the outcomes of that. Tell me about the success of this project, the impact that it had because you told me what is done but not the impact. The other ones here are kind of a little bit generic. Again, I think it tells me what is done but not really the sort of the significance or the importance. So, kind of the same type of feedback. Then I just save myself from repeating it. But, uh, this last one I thought was kind of interesting. Ensured prompt deployment of updates and enhancements by utilizing Jira. I don't mean to be critical on this one, but I don't understand how that comes together. In the other ones, like I have an idea of what's going on, tech that's used, a direction of like why they're including it. I just think that more detail could help. But in this last one, I just I just don't know what this is supposed to mean. Uh especially how Jira plays a role in that. So overall, like I think this one could use a little bit of work, but I think that they probably have a lot of the right pieces here, but the impact, the significance, why it matters is not necessarily coming through to me at least. All right, let's go to their self-employment. So at the bottom here, I do think I like a lot of this. Um, delivered tailored full stack solutions across web development, blockchain, digital design by gathering or finding client requirements through direct collaboration and identifying technical needs. This is a pretty important skill set to have as a software engineer. I think that a lot of developers don't necessarily get directly exposed to this which is super cool like you have development teams sometimes you have project managers product managers sometimes they take some of this ownership away from developers directly but getting access to this kind of experience I think is super cool great to call out they talk about developed and launched over 20 custom projects you know across different types of tech I think that's really cool to call out provided exceptional attention to detail and faithfulness to design specs so again collaborating with UX and designers. So, I think this this one's pretty good. Um, but like I don't understand I think the sort of the order of magnitude that we're talking about here. So, I like what they have going on, but let's, you know, just as an example, developed and launched over 20 custom projects like tell me more about some of maybe the larger scale ones or the more interesting ones, right? Just to make up an example. Was there anything where you're like, "Hey, I helped with a, you know, uh, scaling a site that had to have, you know, uh, hundreds of thousands of daily active users or something like that." Like, tell me a little bit more about some of the complexities and the accomplishments that you had because over 20 custom projects, I assume that there are some really good nuggets of of impact that could be called out. So that's what I would recommend is just trying to dive into a couple of these and call out like something that was really interesting or novel. All right. And then so that wraps up the work experience. On the education part, um they do have some post-secary education and then like I said, they have this sort of boot camp or uh like hybrid boot camp internship opportunity called out. So I think that's great if they're going back to try and skill up and get some extra experience. Uh, no. Uh, I don't think that everyone needs to have post-secary education or anything like that, but I think if you have it, add it. Some places will just filter you out if you don't have it. It's kind of just the way that different companies want to operate. I don't have control over that. So, I always say the more you have to add, you might as well add it to help increase your odds. Okay. So, when I think about the opportunities for this resume overall, I think one of the good things that they're doing is that when I read through this, the tech feels pretty consistent and I feel like I have a good idea of what tech they're using across their work experience. So, I think that comes through really well. But, I think that one of the things I noticed is that with some shorter tenure, and I'm making an assumption here, that the shorter tenure might make it harder to call out some impact. And it's not that you won't have any impact, but I think that you have a greater burden on you to be able to demonstrate impact when you're there for a shorter period of time. Again, to be fully transparent, I don't read this resume and go, "Oh, only a couple of months in this role. Oh, that's a red flag." Like, no, it doesn't matter to me. But when I'm trying to understand the significance or the impact of the work that you had there, of course, like it's going to be more challenging if a portion of that time is going to be ramp up and whatnot. So it just makes it more difficult and I think that they might be feeling some of that. Okay. And then the last thing I will note is they have 4 and a half years of experience. There is no section on their resume that is for projects and that's not the end of the world. Not every developer is going to need that. But I would just mention that especially if you are in a situation where either you're looking for job opportunities in different tech areas or you need to add more experience to bolster some of that you know those tech opportunities. I would say projects are a really good thing to try and focus on and include. I think that if this individual is reflecting on their resume and they're like, "Oh man, like maybe it is harder for me to show impact on some of these," then I would lean more into like, "Can I get some more project experience called out?" Or even things outside of projects. It could be volunteer work. It could be uh extracurricular things that you might be doing in the software space. Like I think there's opportunities there, but I just wanted to mention that in case they do find it difficult to call out some of the impact. If they watch this and they go over their resume and they're like, "Oh, heck yeah. I can go back over this and call out some more impact on these things." Awesome stuff. Maybe you don't have to lean on projects so much. But that's my sort of takeaway from going over this. So, thanks so much for watching. I hope you found that helpful. And a reminder that if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.c CA. Thanks and I'll see you next time.