Too Late For This Developer? Let's Review Their Resume!

Welcome to the résé review series where I review the résumés that you send in. My name is Nick Cantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. In this video, we're going to be going over the resume of a self-proclaimed late starter. That's just going to mean that they're starting into getting their job a little bit later than they might expect is normal for the average person. Before we dive into looking at this resume, I just wanted to remind you that if you want the opportunity for your resume to be reviewed, you can send it into résuméser.ca. With that said, let's jump over to this resume and check it out. Okay, so as I mentioned, this is someone that submitted their resume and they have acknowledged that they feel like they're a bit of a late starter. And that's just going to mean, like I alluded to a little bit earlier, that they got started at school and then they ended up having a little bit of a break and went back and now that they're trying to go for their first job, they're a little bit older than they might expect the average person graduating from university is going to be. They've also mentioned when they sent in their resume that they feel like they have limited time for side projects and they called out that they had some questions around their cumulative GPA. So, I figured I would address this in another video on my other channel called Code Commute. So, when that's ready, I will link it right up here and you can go check that out. And finally, for a little bit of extra context, they are in their final year of school. So, they've mentioned that they're in their senior year. And that's the last little bit of context before we jump into looking at the rest of this resume. In terms of the structure of the resume, I do like that they had their GitHub link at the top. And I want to remind folks that having a GitHub link at the top does not mean that someone's going to go read through your GitHub, but if they're very interested and they want more information, it's a great opportunity to be able to find out more. But just keep in mind that it's not going to be something that people go look into if they're not already impressed by what they see here. Personally, something that I like seeing on a resume is a small section that just calls out different technologies you've worked with or different skill sets that you have. So, this person's called that out. Something that I will call out a little bit later, especially when I go to summarize some improvements. There's a couple of spots, including in where the redacted black marks are where we have some uh not really typos, but sort of like capitalization issues. So, we can see distributed systems uh right here has a capital I and it really shouldn't. There's just little details like this that I think would be nice if they were just kind of cleaned up, especially because it's a trivial thing to do. So, if you have gone over your resume and you need extra eyes, make sure you have a friend, a family member, someone go look it over for little details like that because personally, I'm not going to be the type of person that's going to completely turn away someone for a typo or a small little gotcha. But when I see a bunch of that kind of scattered throughout a resume, just makes me think that maybe someone wasn't putting some time and effort into it. So, um, just a small detail, but I feel like it's an easy one to to improve on. One thing that we will notice about this resume overall is that it's pretty light. We're not going to have, uh, you know, previous work experience. But I did want to take the opportunity to mention that like even if this person didn't have prior software engineering experience, like they're going for their first job as a software developer, if they did have previous work experience outside of software development, I would include it here, especially if you're just getting started. And I've mentioned this in previous videos, but my belief is that if you have other work experience, I don't really care what domain it was in, what role it was in, I think having something listed is better than absolutely nothing. And that's because if you've worked somewhere potentially, there are transferable skills. And I think that some individuals might feel like, ah, not really, like I was just, you know, someone that worked in an office doing something else or whatever it happens to be. But sometimes even things like working in teams or being able to have uh different projects that you were working on as part of your work experience could translate into something that is going to be beneficial when you're working as a software developer. So every little bit helps. But if this person doesn't have any prior work experience and it's not listed, that's just the way it is for now. Something that I was thinking about if we don't have prior work experience is that there might be an opportunity to go do some volunteer work. And I realize that if this person was calling out, they don't have a lot of time even for side projects and things like that, then maybe volunteer work might be difficult. But, uh, volunteer work would be something great to be able to just start filling out some experience. I also took a note to say things like being able to help organize meetups and things like that. Not only would that be helpful just in terms of some experience, but that might be great in terms of networking as well. So, in general, if you don't have prior work experience, I think that any opportunity you can find to go try and create some of that experience could be beneficial. It doesn't mean that you have to have someone that was employing you, but being able to contribute in some way to software development, I think could be awesome to start beefing up a resume. Jumping down to the experience and project section, this is going to be where most of the information is on the resume, right? Aside from the technologies and languages part, personally I do like when people are able to call out the different technologies that they were using on their projects, right? So in particular, we can see JavaScript, HTML, CSS, MongoDB, JavaScript, C.NET, C++, Juice Framework, CMake, Java, Java Effects, Galile. I think that having stuff like this is helpful, especially number one for things like automated tools that are going to be looking for keywords. Uh second is for people that are trying to optimize their scanning, right? So if they're not using tools to do it, but as a human, they're kind of the ones just skimming through looking for keywords. Yes, it does happen. I think that that can be helpful because your eyes are going to be drawn to it or you're doing a control F or something on the PDF or whatever document was submitted to try and look for some text. So I think it can be helpful just to include. I'm glad that this person did it. And something else that I really like that they did was across two of these projects. So right here we can see that they listed group leader and then down here as well they had group leader. I like that they have this called out. I think that it's helpful because a lot of the time when we're talking about side projects we want to be able to have things that help stand out, right? So in particular uh often it's like a technology, right? Like hey look, I've built stuff using this technology. That's why I would be a good candidate. But I think something else that's really awesome that they've been able to call out is that they're talking about things that aren't just the technology. And if you think about it in terms of standing out, if all of the people that they're sort of competing against for a role, if they're not really calling out things like being able to lead projects, and I'm assuming that these ones are just at school, but this is still something where they were taking some type of leadership responsibility, I think that that can help stand out. If I could make a suggestion though, if we look at the bottom one here where it says group leader and then it talks about some specifics like help coordinate team of developers set up CI/CD researched for future implementations to help guide the team and improve code quality. These are specific things that they're calling out that they did as a group leader and I think that that's awesome. If we go up to this one here, help coordinate and manage the team to ensure smooth operation and improve code quality. This to me is pretty generic and I would just encourage them like they think they did a really good job in the bottom one. Could they do the same type of thing for this one? Like can you tell me in your resume what you actually did? So, as a group leader, I understand that this might be some of the outcome, but it feels a little bit generic, a little bit generalized. So, can you call out some specific things because I think that that would help really translate what your impact was. And just a quick note, because I was looking up at the languages, I saw that they included Rust. I know that Rust right now is especially very popular. It's got a lot of people's attention. Everyone's trying to go learn Rust because uh seems to be making waves in social media and stuff. And I'm not saying it's good or bad or anything like that. I just think that it's uh becoming uh it's trending a lot more, right? It's nothing to do with the language itself, whether I think it's good or bad. But when I was looking through this, I figured that if we were going to see experience and projects being the main section here, because there is no prior work experience, where's the rust part? Right? We see it listed here, but I don't see anything down below where Rust is included. So, my uh piece of advice would be that if you want this to be something, say there's a job that you're applying for and you're like, "Hey, this this place uses Rust and I want to be able to showcase that I've worked with Rust." Like, how do you do that, right? Like, where is the project? Where is the experience with that? Because I can see for the other languages like Java, for example, I can see that Java was used here. I can see JavaScript was used here and here. I can see the C andNET part, right? So, we can make progress across all of these. And perhaps even now that I'm kind of thinking about this, I think Go might be in the same position unless I'm just missing it. But I think that if you're going to include some of these languages and you want them to stand out like, hey, like here's the thing I did that demonstrates that I know this, do try and include it in some work experience if you have it or in a project. Otherwise, I'm kind of led to believe that the other languages you've listed are the ones that you actually have worked with and maybe Go and Rust, you've like seen them, and that's not really going to be the same type of thing. But, of course, I've also talked about this in other videos that I've made that knowing languages is not the beall end all. Uh, depending on where you're applying to, some places will take the time to go and teach you the language. I know that for myself at Microsoft, I've hired on employees that don't know C and then they learn C. But we have the resources to be able to do that and some companies, especially small startups, do not. This is just something to think about depending on where you're applying to. One other note on the experience and project sections, and maybe I'm just being picky here, but I think something that could help make some of these parts stand out a little bit more, is just formatting. So if we look, every section in the experience and projects part has two bullet points. But I think even for something like calling out the group leader part, it would be beneficial just to have another bullet for that. Because if I were skimming through this and say I had to go through a whole bunch of RS, say I have hundreds of résumés to go through, if I don't have a bullet calling out this part and I don't have a bullet calling out this other group leader part, this might just be something that gets missed. And it's not because um you know people are trying to ignore things, but when you're going through such a volume of résumés, I can imagine that people will be glossing over things. So you want to think about trying to help the ré reader just have these things really stand out to them. So small thing that I think could help at least a little bit. Okay. Now for some general opportunities when I look at this resume note that I took was that I don't actually know what types of roles or domains this person is trying to go apply for. But if we look at some of the projects that they have here, we can see that we're talking about geo referencing metadata. There was another part that was up here about VST plugins for audio processing. Like these end up becoming some niche things and I think that that can be cool. I think that that's, you know, something where you're spending time building in these areas. But I would say that if you're trying to think about applying to particular domains or companies that work in a specific type of domain, if you can, and I know this person said that they were kind of strapped for time for side projects, I would think about trying to build things that are either more generalized. So like these two projects up at the top, I think these two are pretty generic and that's nice in terms of being able to say maybe like some full stack type of development. So that can be helpful. But when we start having really specific ones, I would say that sometimes they don't stand out as well. However, if they were trying to apply to roles that were about audio processing or something that had to do with georreerencing metadata, graphical interface for displaying and interfacing with geospatial images, right? If they're trying to apply to domains where this stuff feels more relevant, these could be really, really awesome. So having a bunch of different side projects and being able to tailor your resume, especially if you're like, man, that's a job that I really want to go for. I really want to try and stand out. You can consider swapping some of the projects and that way that you're putting your best foot forward. So I just wanted to use this as an example to call out that having some general ones could be really good. And then if you have some niche ones, you may or may not want to include more niche ones depending on the role or the opposite and have them more general. And that's just going to be about where you're applying to. And the last point that I wanted to call out for this person was that I do acknowledge that they were saying that they do have limited time for side projects. But the thing that I wanted to sort of make apparent is that if they don't have prior experience and we're trying to think about the job market right now and how it's going to be highly competitive, the experience has to come from somewhere, right? And that means that if you don't have the work experience, it's going to either have to be from volunteering. It's going to have to be from trying to, you know, commit to open source stuff or building your own projects. You're going to have to get the experience somehow, and that's going to mean some type of time commitment. I realize that everyone has different life circumstances, right? Of course, that's just the reality of things. But I would just say that if you're unable to continue to make progress in terms of building on the experience and projects, you will probably find that it's going to be very challenging and you're going to have to spend time somewhere. Whether that's networking to try and find a place where you can get taken in, get an entry- level job. If that's going to be building more projects, right, you're going to have to dedicate time to that. time is going to have to be spent somewhere. I always encourage people, yes, I do understand that your situation may mean that you don't have much free time, but we have to look at our priorities. It's just the reality of things. If other people are making time for it, that might mean that they're getting ahead in terms of what they're able to do for their experience and projects, and those are the people that you're competing against. And you can't control that. But you can control the time that you do have. So, just something to think about. Like I said though, everyone's circumstances are different. I just wanted to kind of uh call that out for other people that might be in a similar position where they're saying, "Hey, I don't have a lot of time for it." The time has to come from somewhere. So overall, I think that this has some area for improvement in terms of building up the experience in projects because we don't have the prior work experience. Uh, I called out things like volunteering. That could be it helping go to meetups, organizing meetups. That could be contributing to open-source. That could be volunteering. All of those things do involve time, though. So, I wish this person success. And just another reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résuméser.ca. Thanks, and I'll see you next time.