Does This Senior Engineer With AWS Experience Have What It Takes?!

Writing resumes isn't easy and that's why I always recommend that you have someone review your resume. But that's probably why you're here, right? Hi, my name is Nick Cantino and I'm a principal software engineering manager at Microsoft. Welcome to the RSé review series where I review the résumés that you submit. Just a friendly reminder that if you're interested in having your ré reviewed, you can send it in to résumés devleader.ca. Now, with all of these ré reviews, they're not roast. I'm not here to make fun of people's rums. I will try to call out the things that I think they've done well, the things that could use some improvement, and just opportunities to try and stand out. The resume that we're going to be reviewing today is for a senior software engineer with roughly 7 years of experience in back-end software development. So, let's switch over to the resume and check it out. Okay, so starting off with the structure of the resume. It is a single page and I like that they have their work experience essentially taking up the bulk of their resume. That's kind of what I would expect to see for a senior software engineer. And if you are more a junior and you don't really have that work experience built up yet, that's okay. Your resume will look a little bit different. I do like to see the skills at summary sort of that they have at the bottom. I do kind of like that at the top. That's a personal preference because to me that serves as like an introduction for what I'm going to be diving into. Minor detail, probably not a make or break thing. That's a personal preference. But I do like that so that I can see what I should be scanning for as I go through their work experience. The fact that it is a single page, I don't actually know. I haven't talked to this person, but when I see single page résumés, especially for senior software developers, makes me wonder if they were trying to collapse things in to fit on a single page or perhaps they just felt that they had a page to work with and they filled that page with their experience. If you are a senior software engineer and you do have lots of experience, you have other things you want to call out. I don't think there's anything wrong with going to two pages. I've seen people with three-page resumes. I do think the typical thing we see is one to two pages, but going to two definitely not a problem if you have the material to go along with it. Next up, I'd like to dive into the work experience that they've laid out here. So, couple things just really briefly just on the formatting because I think it's a minor thing, but I also think that it helps a lot, at least when I read RS. I do like this style where people bold the technology and the skills and also the impact that they've had. This isn't like a requirement, but again, as the reader of a resume, it just draws my eyes to the things that I think are important, right? So, that's why I like it. If you want a little bit of pop in your resume, I think that that can be something that helps. Even though it's really simple, I think it makes a difference. So, um I like that. Uh the impact call out, I think, is one of the major things. If you watch my other ré reviews, I think that this is one of the most important things you can do on a resume is try to call out the impact that you're having in your work. So, we see things again if you look for the bold, right? Your eyes jump right to it. We got bold, but that's technology up at the top here. But then we see reducing compute cost by 75% achieving 95% cost reduction. There's more down here. We see scale down here. There's lots of stuff called out that's bolded. And I think that really helps sort of points around scale and requests per minute. I think we see scale for users, right? Monthly active users and uh the request per minute part is right here. I think that those are really good for framing. I've noticed especially when I've looked at, you know, job descriptions for senior principal, even for like roles as an engineering manager, right? I often see that people are looking for they want to see like experience. It's not only that you've worked at a software company, but you have experience working on projects of a certain scale. And it's not that people without that experience wouldn't be qualified or couldn't do the do the job. But I do think that there's something to be said like I do have experience working in systems where you know there's millions of users versus something where you're just trying to launch something. You haven't had to deal yet with those scale issues. There's just experience that goes along with that. But that's just something that you could be building up. I think if you have it, it's worth calling out. But that's why I do think that this kind of thing is really good where you have like, hey, this is what our application has been built to handle. And again, down here we have the monthly active users to demonstrate that this is what we are supporting. So I think that's awesome. Something on this resume that I think was done well, and I think when I reflect on some of the other résumés that I've been reviewing, this seems to be glossed over a little bit. So I wanted to touch on it. We see that there's a spot on here where we have right here drove organizationwide efficiency by mentoring and promoting developer experience. Right? So this kind of thing is something that I think is really important when we start looking at this title here senior. When I talk about this type of thing across all of the other content I produce, whether that's newsletter articles, live streams on my other YouTube channel, code commute, LinkedIn posts, you name it. One of the things that I really try to drive home is that when you're trying to get, especially from like mid-level to senior and beyond senior, there's going to be so much more than just code. And I think that being able to call this kind of stuff out on a resume is huge. You will have behavioral interview questions that touch on this kind of stuff. When you have a resume that's filled with all these technical impacts that you've been able to have, like awesome. I think that that's the baseline. That's the expectation. you got to have that. But then I think that people forget this kind of stuff. So I love to see that it is called out. I would say especially if there is more experience then you know you could add more content into the resume. You could fill it in the other spots that might push you over that one page sort of limit that you might be striving for. But if there's goodness to call out that way I would absolutely do it. I think that this is an understated thing that people seem to neglect. But I love that it's called out on this one. for education. I always like touching on this because I think there's a lot of question about education. Um, education is not something personally that I go like looking for. I think if you have it, awesome. Call it out. If you have a master's as well, call it out. The thing that I like about education is not like which school you went to or that you did go to a school but if you have gone to one for me that's just illustrating that like hey you were interested in investing into yourself your own learning awesome call it out. Uh if you don't have it you went to a boot camp or something call it out. If you didn't do any of that for me that's not a make or break for some jobs when you're applying. Some places will have that as a requirement uh at least in the job description. Personally, and I've heard this from other people, I would say if you don't have it and you have a lot of experience, apply anyway. That might be something that you're automatically filtered out, but I think that if you feel you meet the rest of the job description in terms of the experience and the expectations, I would still apply personally. But again, like this person, if you have the education uh in terms of like masters, you have your bachelors, call it out. I think it's super helpful, but it's not a deal breakaker from my perspective if you don't. Okay. Now, I want to talk about some opportunities on this resume. I do think that this is pretty solid, but I think there's a couple things that we could try to do to improve it. There's a couple little things, and I'll start with those just so we can build up. So, yes, these will sound like they're kind of nitpicky, but at the same time, I think that if you're trying to put your best foot forward, you might as well try to do these little things. And you might find that in terms of stylistic things that you can try changing them up. But I do find that some sentences are a little bit wordy. And what I mean by that, I wrote a note here. There's one example that I wanted to call out in particular. We see contributed to the development of the connections platform engine utilizing right. So contributed to the development right this is doing two things. One, it's putting a few too many words together. And the second part is that it's like under undermining like your potential impact on this. When you say contributed to the development, um, yes, I understand that you were working on a team doing this, so you contributed to that and the work that you're doing is development. I get that. But you could just say developed the connections platform engine, right? You can cut out extra words to make it less wordy. This is the kind of thing that I recall doing like when writing essays and stuff in school just because I wanted to get the word count up. I think on um résumés, not essays, on résumés, you want to try and do the exact opposite. You want to get to the point. You want to uh sort of demonstrate that you had impact. So this is like a double whammy where I think it's a little bit wordy and at the same time is kind of like reducing the impact. when you say contributed to the development again understood that you are a contributor on that but it's almost like uh the phrasing is kind of making it feel lessened there's a few things like that on this resume again not deal breakers but I think that if we go through the wording and I'm not going to go through every single sentence that's for the person that submitted this resume to do if they're interested but I would recommend going through and just seeing if you can make things more succinct because I think that uh that will clean things up a little bit. There's another really small thing uh and this is again just a readability thing in terms of flow. Uh probably this is super minor and people won't even notice it but when we have uh mixed tense on things it gets kind of weird. What I mean by that is like we have past tense. So developed and maintained those happened in the past developed is in the past contributed is in the past. There are some things uh most of it is like in the past but there's a couple of spots that are not and I think one in particular might just be a typo. This says contributes instead of contributed uh as a full stack developer I think but there's a couple of spots that you know integrating platforms like this is um like current tense. So little things like that I think just go through try to get that consistent. It's just polish. Again, I've said in other videos, if someone submitted a resume to me and it had a typo, I'm not going to be like, "Oh, this person must be dumb. There's no way we could ever hire them. Mistakes happen. It's not the end of the world. It's okay." There are examples of that, though, where I've seen like not a typo, but I've seen like three, four, and I'm like, "Okay, like I don't know, like did this person maybe just not actually go through and read it, you know, double check it?" These are things that I think that you probably should be doing. They're easy things that you can uh navigate. They don't take a lot of investment to go do, just do it. But in terms of the tents and all that kind of stuff, that's a super minor thing. One thing that I wanted to call that's probably a sort of a a bigger call out is that the work experience feels kind of light. I think that the first one when we see the senior backend engineer, like that one's pretty good. And perhaps that's just because it's more recent, but I think it's pretty good. When we go through the rest, it feels a little bit light to me. And I don't mean to say that to imply like the work itself isn't good. I don't mean to say that like that the person didn't do impactful things, but it's almost like someone's saying like I worked at a place and they haven't yet demonstrated to me like why I should care about that. That's some phrasing and framing that I like using when I talk about like every line of your resume should like make me feel that way. like this is why I care. Just to give you an example, I'm just going to kind of pick on, you know, this one here, right? Develop to maintain robust application logic for no code automation SAS. Okay, so what I get out of that whole sentence is or part of the sentence is knows how to use no code integrating platform. So there's some integration points. Cool. If I use those things, interesting. If I have systems that I need to integrate with that are third party, interesting. Okay. um has some concept of like web APIs, okay, and then like some of the scale, right? Authentication methods for over 100,000 monthly active users. I have no idea what this person actually did, though. Like, and again, I don't mean for that to be insulting or rude. I just they probably know. They probably know and they're like, I did awesome work there and I'm sure they did, but as the reader of this, I just don't really know, right? Enhanced core platform dependencies, including like enhanced core platform dependencies. I don't know that's like again not to be rude it's it's like fluff enhanced core platform dependencies including the workflow backend monolith and internal analytics engines. Okay so you you enhanced the backend is this entire line is what that means and then optimizing performance and cost reporting. Okay. Like that's the part that's interesting and I don't actually know what this person did. I don't know what the impact of that was. The only other thing that's like basically when I read all of that is that there's some no code experience. They used some of these technologies and they worked in the back end. I would definitely recommend to this person to go through their previous experiences and like if I'm the person reading this resume, I want to know the stuff that you contributed to, not just like a like a super quick note on it. Now, it's challenging. I get it if these experiences were a few years back and you're like, "Oh man, I can't really remember what I did." please try because like I said, I'm sure for both of these and probably even this one, this one's uh much further back. I'm sure that this person did awesome work, but I don't really get that when I read the resume. So, that's probably my biggest uh critique of the resume and I think the biggest opportunity because I think if you compare the first section as a senior backend engineer, I think the rest of it like doesn't live up to that one. I should call out too that might be on purpose. They might have said, "I need to fit it into one page, so let me like, you know, pack this one full of goodness and then these other ones because they were in the past, I'll just go lighter." But I would say like there's no requirement that it has to be one page. So if you had goodness to write that's like that first section, do it for the rest. Absolutely. Next thing is, and again, not a requirement, but I think it's a good opportunity. I don't actually know what types of roles or jobs that this person is going for in terms of like the domain that they're interested in. Obviously, they have some AWS experience, right? They're done a bunch of backend work. Maybe they want to stay in that domain. That makes sense because they have a bunch of that experience. They they might be in a good spot. Now, if they are trying to go into something else and their sort of backend experience doesn't really match up with that, great opportunity is a project section. do some side projects. Yes, I realize some people will say like, I don't have time for that. I can't make the time to do it. But I would say if you're having challenges landing those roles and you don't have the experience that you're sort of expected to have based on those job descriptions, if you don't have that in your resume, try to go create some of that. Show the curiosity that you were trying to learn. Do some side projects. They don't have to be fully polished. They don't need a million users. You don't have to have paying users or anything. Just show that you were trying to go work on some of that. Learn about it and that way it's at least called out on the resume. Again, that's a really big beneficial thing, especially if your skills don't line up. If you're more junior, you're really going to want to lean into that. As someone who is more senior, I think that you can, especially, like I was saying before, lean into some of your previous work experience to be able to say, "I did this professionally." But you can use that to close some of the gaps. That's probably it for this resume. I do think that it's off to a really good start. I think that this first section they have up here does a really good job and I would love to see them model this section across the other spots. Little thing for me that's a personal take is this primary skills. I'd like to see up at the top just cuz it's a bit of a summary. And if this person is going to expand like this type of framing into the other work experience, go to two pages. I think there's an opportunity for that. Overall, pretty solid start though. And just a reminder that if you want your resume reviewed, you can submit it to résumés atdevleer.ca. Thanks so much and I'll see you next time.