Does This Senior Mobile Developer's Resume Make The Cut?!

This person was a senior developer. They were a team lead and they were a founder. But does their resume really highlight that experience properly? Hi, my name is Nick Cosantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. Welcome to the résé review series where I review the rums that you submit. Now, if you're new to this series, then it's worth reminding you that this is not a roast of résumés. I'm not going to be making fun of anyone's resume. But what I am aiming to do is offer my perspective on how they can enhance their resume. And that means that I'll call out the things that I think that they're doing very well and the opportunities for improvement. Now, before I jump into this person's resume, if you're interested in having your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résumés at devleader.ca and I'll see if I can get a review in for you. With that said, let's jump over to this resume for this senior developer. The background for this developer is, like I mentioned, they were a senior developer, they've been a team lead, they've been a founder, they've been a developer for approximately 9 years. So, let's start by going through the structure. Um, they have a summary right at the top. I think that this is kind of nice to do a little bit of an intro. I thought the end of this was kind of interesting. Knows how to deliver a solution from a note on a paper cloth. Now, it's kind of a funny way to put it, but this is really suggesting that they're able to deal with ambiguity. And especially as a senior software developer, this is a really good trait to be able to have to be able to deal with ambiguity because a lot of the work that you end up doing is probably going to be ambiguous. It's not really carved out and very obvious for senior developers. Now, this is a multi-page resume and there's no problem with that. There's two pages on this. We have work experience. We have skills. I think personally, I've said this in other videos, if you're going to include skills, I like having the skills up near the top, nice and condensed, and somewhere up near the beginning or like maybe right after the summary. And that way, I just know to go look for these types of things throughout the work experience. That's a personal preference. That's how my brain thinks when I'm trying to read through someone's resume. Other people that are reading resumes, they might tell you something totally different, but that's my word of advice here. something interesting that I wanted to call out and I don't know if you noticed it as I was scrolling through here but this is their whole resume and it's two pages and the thing that I didn't notice and again I'm scrolling through you may have seen it and you may not have but there is no school section called out or education section called out on this resume at all and most of the résumés if not all of them I think that I've done so far on this channel every single one of them has listed out education. The reason I'm calling this out is not to say, "Oh, well, this person didn't go to college or university. Let's make fun of them or they must not be smart." The reason I'm calling this out, and I wrote it in my notes, is that it took me three passes over this resume before I even realized that, which is kind of ridiculous, right? And the only reason that I even realized it is because I have been using a bit of a template when I'm taking notes to do these. And I have a spot from the previous ones that I've done that said something about the school section. I didn't even notice there wasn't a school section. So that just goes to show you, at least from my perspective, if you don't have postsecary education, I don't care personally, but I do think if you have it, include it. You might as well try to showcase your best self. And if that means that you went to college, university, boot camp, anything like that, you have certificates, add it, right? It's just showing that you invested into yourself and your learning. That's great. If you don't have it, that's okay, too. At least from a resume perspective when I'm reviewing them, I don't care. Some job descriptions, some hiring managers, some companies, they might require it. That's not for me to decide for every job that's posted out there, but that's just my opinion on résumés. So, anyway, thought that was interesting that it took me three readroughs before I even noticed. The other thing that I just wanted to call out is that right at the beginning we see that they have launching personal projects called out here. And I did a quick scan through, right? And I don't see personal projects called out on here. They have a whole other half a page here. And I think if they have personal projects, they should call them out. But the thing that I'm not totally sure of is maybe some of this uh other work experience here. Perhaps that could have been like maybe there that's what they're calling personal projects that they ended up commercializing. So, not totally sure, but I think if that's not the case and there are personal projects, go add a section for it. Talk about that cuz I think that's always an interesting opportunity. Let's dive into the work experience though. We can see uh Impact called out in the senior role here. So, right here is a good example. Reduce RAM usage from gigabyte up uh to 250 megabytes by removing 8% of the code in the Android app. So cleaning up the code base and you know shrinking the memory footprint. I think that's great. We can see designer and built an internal product that cut QA's time for LLM testing from 1 hour to 20 minutes. So that's a pretty big reduction as well. So I think that's a great call out down a little bit lower. I wanted to mention that there's this call out for sort of the scale of operation. noticed this in a couple of résumés recently and this wasn't something that I really noticed on some of the earlier ones that I've been doing, but I'm going to be looking for it now. Um, I think that if you can call this kind of thing out, it's pretty helpful. In my opinion, it's not that it's a requirement, but I think that it's helpful because some of the job descriptions I've seen posted, even for my level and role, right? So, as a principal engineering manager, I've seen positions where the job description says, you know, we expect that you've worked in systems that have scaled at, you know, to this many users or this many requests or whatever it happens to be. I think that as someone who's seen some of that now, especially if you have the opportunity to include it in your resume, you might as well cuz that gives a little bit more background for the sort of uh types of systems that you've been operating in. Something else that I think is really good on here and probably is going to be more and more and more demanded is we see agents and tools for Langraph based LLM products. Right? So we have some AI call out. Obviously so many things are going the direction of AI. I think that if you have any experience where you can call out integrating or working with LLMs that kind of stuff call it out. I think that that's going to start shining more and more. sort of anticipate that if we were to fast forward, I don't know, months, years from now, that that's going to become the expectation for basically everyone is that you need to have some amount of that because every role is probably going to be incorporating that in some way. So, if you have it, call it out. If you don't, maybe start doing some side projects with it. So, I think that's a good call out there. Another thing here is no code impact. And um I in a recent video I mentioned that one of the first times I ended up seeing this was on a on that resume and this resume has more of that and I think that's awesome. I want to highlight this kind of thing because I think that people underestimate the value of it, right? Especially because this person had team lead, they have founder, they're a senior software engineer. There's more to those roles than just landing code changes. Yes, the technical skills, the code changes, those deliverables, that's going to be an expectation. That's requirement for sure. But the other side of this is that if you're in those roles, you are expected that you have some other type of impact, some interpersonal skills that you can highlight, sometimes project management, that kind of thing. And if you have those opportunities to call out on a resume, do it. you're going to have behavioral interview questions where they're going to extract this type of information from you. So try to call it out on a resume if you can. I think it's a great opportunity to do it. So we can see here for the the lead position led a team of three engineers, right? So we get some idea of the scope that they were working in. I think that's great. This one here where they're a founder. I think some really interesting opportunity to call out. We can see led client communication and negotiation. This is a type of thing that I would say like the overwhelming majority of developers don't get the opportunity to do. And that's unfortunate because there's so many interesting interactions when it comes to working with customers or understanding how customers operate. Even things from understanding how a user is having challenges, right? And like you're trying to build things to solve their problems. You're not just trying to build whatever the user says. you have to understand the problem so you know what to go build all this kind of stuff and especially if you're talking about like what those communication uh strategies the timelines for projects negotiation like that's a whole set of skills like on negotiation I don't have skills that are in that category at all so like super cool that they're able to call out these other types of things we see manage team of six right so again something that's noncode related proactively maintain high software and code quality standards through code review and mentoring and training. All of these things are not a code specific thing and they are awesome to call out if you have those experiences. So really awesome to see that on here mentioned the scale part already. Um, but the thing that I want to call out from the work experience, and this is going to be probably my biggest criticism for this resume, is that aside from this one here, okay? And I realize that they were at this uh this company for I guess it's been a little bit over a year now. Okay. And I think down here we can see uh this work experience. Like I can see some things where we have like uh sped up order processing up to 2 minutes and increased income by 12%. Like that's impact, right? I don't really understand what this person did at their jobs. That might sound kind of harsh and I don't mean to imply that they didn't do anything or they didn't have impact, but let me scroll down a little bit. like this one here I think should be the spotlight if I were to speculate about this right if they were a founder of a company right they called out some interesting like led client communication this part outsourcing agency manage a team but like I don't have any idea like what this person did at this company and the the part that like kind of bothers me is like I'm sure that this person, if I were sitting down with them and I was like, "Tell me about what you did here." I'm sure they could list off a ton of stuff that's super cool, you know, super impactful, and it's just not coming through in the resume. And I would say like the same thing if we go up here, right? This one in particular is uh from 2017 to 2023, that's a a good number of years. We got let a team built robust iOS and Android apps from scratch using best practices and design patterns. This is extremely vague and like I bet that they did I bet that they built some awesome apps. Totally no.JS backend and like there's the scale part. Okay. And then we get to see some of the tech that was used. But like I don't understand any of the impact that this person was having from doing it. Okay. So, if we look at some of the italicized part, by the way, the italicized part to me, um, I don't know why italicize like does not stand out to me. It's a minor thing. Establishing a back-end server that serves hundreds of churches in the US from the grounds up. Okay. A couple little things right from the ground up um for uh for six years. Okay. So this is kind of like I think what the organization did, but like I don't really I just don't understand what this person did specifically and so I think there's opportunity for that. Here's another one. I realized this position so this one was like 8 months or so rounding. Um designed architecture and develop iOS application from scratch. Okay. Power the app with a chat and voice video calls. Cool. But like I would be very curious like because they were designing the architecture part like tell me more about that. I think there's such an opportunity across all of these to just call out more. I say this in a lot of the resume review videos but like I often say if I'm reading a line like I need to know why that's important. Why should I care about that? The interesting part is like that advice here, like they actually do call out things that I care about, but I'm still not getting a sense of like what they were actually doing. So, it's a pretty harsh critique to to call out. Again, not to be rude, but I fully believe that this person like if they were spending, you know, five, six years at a place leading a team building apps from scratch, you know, the backend server as well. I'm sure you did awesome stuff. Like, tell me more about that. I bet you in the interview, I kind of already said this, but I bet you sitting down with this person, we could extract that information. So maybe a good suggestion for this person is like sit down with someone, pretend you're doing a mock interview where you're explaining all the cool stuff that you built and the impact that you had and then record it and then get some notes made from it, right? Get the transcript, anything to try and help you add more like uh impact and more specifics to these uh these different work experiences. So that's my biggest piece of advice here. I think that's probably it. Uh, I think if that person were to do some of that, cuz the other thing that I called out at the beginning was like they mentioned personal projects, but there's no project section. I think this person probably has a lot of different experiences across all of these areas. And so, I don't think that they necessarily need a personal project section because I think they have a lot of that. But if they're unable to sort of fill in the details for what they did here, like I would I feel like I need to see I need to see more on the project section. I'm speculating that if they were to do sort of what I recommended up here, then adding a project section is is not really going to be necessary. Mostly I say get your project section in, especially if you're junior cuz you don't have the work experience or if you're trying to bridge the gap on skills and experiences you don't have for the role you want. But like I said, I think this person probably has a ton of it, it's just not coming through. So hopefully that was a helpful review, a friendly reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Thank you so much and I will see you next time. Take care.