Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: Why am I suddenly unemployable?
221 points by rogual 11 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 291 comments
Never used to have any trouble finding employment. But it seems as of recently my CV is toxic waste. If recruiters reach out, I give them a good time to call and never hear back. If I reach out to them, silence.

Did I do something recently with an unpopular technology? Did I piss off someone powerful? Did I get too old? Who knows!

Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too. Suddenly nobody wants to know.

Has anyone here been in a similar situation? Did you fix it? How?

CV in case some kind soul wants to take a look: https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pdf




You are apparently in the UK, but the job market in the U.S. has similarly been very spooky lately. I was laid off and have received almost no interviews outside of a single previous employer. My resume was flat out rejected, even from places that I had previously worked or was made an offer from as little as a year or two ago. It was really weird. As in, previous contacts would not even reply to emails or LinkedIn messages. I felt the same thing, thinking things like if I insulted someone's dog or something. I even got contacted by a former company asking if I'd be interested in coming back, and then when I responded, they responded with a flat "we don't see a fit". Just purely bizarre.

I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used <x> technology and worked in <y> domain, they don't want to even speak to you. They'd almost rather higher a new grad who happened to work in <x> than someone with experience in many languages and domains. It's really weird. I've been thinking a lot about how to make my own path, because it's exhausting trying to apply and work for myopic places.


It’s not you. Nobody is hiring. The ones that say so are in no rush. Executives are pushing hard on doing more with less and improving profitability.

Things should loosen up when the Fed and EU announce rate cuts this year. Hang on. I know this isn’t the answer you were hoping to hear. Perhaps try your luck with contracting? There is more openness to that in this climate (lower threshold to commitment).


We really need to stop assuming there's going to be rate cuts in 2024, especially from a trying to get a tech job perspective.Rate cuts aren't going to happen unless there's a weak economy

Inflation numbers came in hotter than expected this week. Consumer sentiment is improving. Employment is still high. Investment in manufacturing was massive in 2023.

these same people predicting rate cuts were the sames ones predicting a recession in 2023.

The economy is weird now.


> The economy is weird now.

Or the economy was weird before and is recovering now.


> It’s not you. Nobody is hiring.

Such a simple statement, but it does help. Thanks. :)


I was looking for 8 months until I found something. Most of the time, I wasn’t even making it to a tech screen.

Similar to you, I chatted to companies who were looking for concrete experience doing exactly the one thing they were currently working through. And the rug was pulled out from underneath me a few times.

It’s brutal out there, and it will fill anyone with self doubt. The only positive thing I can say is that interviewing for my new role felt normal and nice—the way I thought it’d be. That at least made me feel a lot better about myself.


> I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used <x> technology and worked in <y> domain, they don't want to even speak to you. They'd almost rather higher a new grad who happened to work in <x> than someone with experience in many languages and domains. It's really weird. I've been thinking a lot about how to make my own path, because it's exhausting trying to apply and work for myopic places.

Exactly why I left this industry permanently.


This is definitely why I am thinking about leaving the industry, if and when current gig ends.

Even with a resume tailored exactly to requirements, crickets.

Some copium going around - "it's just interest rates", "thinks will pick up soon". Nope. This is what the end of the industry looks like, at least for a great many developers.


I have definitely thought about it. It wasn't my "dream", if there's such a thing any more when it comes to careers, and I didn't even study it in school. I always say I fell into software, which is true. But I have also considered doing things with software that make me happy in a way that I could make a living from it. I haven't come across something yet, but I have a few ideas in mind that could work with a lot of initial work.


What did you move to?


Nothing yet. Just studying things that interest me.

But I have to figure out something in the near future. It just can't be software development.


What interests?


Maths stuff. Pattern recognition and machine learning by Bishop.


Been in those shoes before.

Had 3 offers, chose 1 but denied 2 while trying to say "let's stay in touch" because you never know. That time came after 2 years - got canned with many others due to financial reasons, got back in touch with company that had sent me an offer previously and, damn, if it didn't feel like those dry responses you get from your ex after dropping that "wyd?" texts at late evening - simply rejected with no seeming continuation for this potential business relationship.

All in all, not a great time to lose a job. Been digging for about last 4 months and there's nothing really out there - a lot of rejections for fitting jobs and only getting interviews from places that need senior level coders for chump change. Some even have the nerve to pay too little and step back from the mutual agreement of not needing for me to come to office.


If there is a surplus of talent, a company would rather hire someone who has background in the current stack and can jump right in.

If there is a lack of talent, companies hire whatever is even close and trains the new stuff.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.


> If there is a lack of talent, companies hire whatever is even close and trains the new stuff.

I've been an engineer for 9 years and not once have I gotten so much as an acknowledgement or a call back on a job that didn't use a very similar tech stack to what I had on my resume.


I live in a small town. When I hired a developer locally, I basically posted it as:

* 2-3 years in Vue, React, Angular, or any modern JS framework

When I posted it for remote only I advertised

* 2-3 years of Vue experience

Had you emailed me in the first one with react? Cool, interview. But if you emailed me in the second, I would have skipped over. The bigger the pool, the more picky I can be.


It is very short term thinking, which doesn't seem straightforward to me.


Why is it short term? Are employees less familiar with the technology they’re using day to day more likely to stick around? I’d guess the opposite?


It's short term because you will filter out intelligent and experienced candidates simply because they have happened to not use <x> extensively in their career. It's short term because such a candidate will have used a plethora of other things and would likely come in with a fresh perspective given their experience. It just might take them slightly longer to ramp up on the language and its associated tooling and ecosystem.


I live in a small town. When I hired a developer locally, I basically posted it as:

* 2-3 years in Vue, React, Angular, or any modern JS framework

When I posted it for remote only I advertised

* 2-3 years of Vue experience

There are _SO_ many applicants for a remote job (1000s), that I can be picky. So I will cut to the 500 that have the language I want, vs a slog through 5,000 that can maybe someday do what I want.

When you run a business and hire, you can totally do it different.


As an employer I totally get you. I don't think that most people get that your goal is to reduce the number of interviews by any filter necessary. You could limit by height and you would still get too many applicants.

Once you are not filtering for location, other filters are necessary. You can't interview 1000 people.

I totally get that from an employee perspective, skills and domain knowledge are valuable and transferable. They absolutely would be perfect for your position. Vue experience is arbitrarily irrelevant.

What they don't get us that you don't want to interview 1000 people to find the "best one". You want to interview 5, and pick the best of those.

The trick (for hopefuls) is being one of the 5. -thats- the problem they have to creatively solve. Relying on your CV is the -least possible way of standing out-.

So I say this to all you bright folks looking for work - show some creativity, do something different, make my hiring easy. You can be great? Cool - prove it. Because there are thousands in line with you, and a CV is the least you can do.


Then you have to rely on getting the job by other means than sending your CV. In other words networking.

Personally I don't apply to public job listings any more, even when I match all requirements. They are a waste of everyone's time. But networking has its limits.


It kinda depends on the candidate. Someone who already has experience may not stick around long because they aren't learning new skills, where as someone who isn't familiar with a particular technology will have added satisfaction and reason to stay from developing mastery of a new tech


My guess is that the company's aim is to improve short-term profitability with little regard for the future.


> I am finding that more and more people are looking for extremely specific and narrow experience. Like, if you haven't used <x> technology and worked in <y> domain, they don't want to even speak to you.

That was my experience as well. If a candidate doesn't claim to have over 5 years of experience in a specific tech stack then recruiters just downrank of completely eliminate them from their short list of candidates.

And I won't even start on the hard skills screening process.

I believe this is a reflection of low-level HR technicians with zero tech background taking over the hiring process of some companies. Their work is to filter out unsuited candidates and present a short list of best fits. Thus they follow a pattern matching strategy with the candidate's CV, otherwise they have no way to tell if someone is even competent.


I am finding a bit of a different outlook. I have had several people let me know that if I didn't have experience in their particular technology within the last 2 years, they were not interested in my experiance.


I do hiring in the US not the UK, but I'm only (I'm guessing) a few years older than you so you probably had the "keep it to one page" rule pounded into your head.

I get a lot of resumes, and that is definitely not the case anymore. Two to three pages is perfectly fine. I would suggest:

1. Add a list of skills and/or technologies you're particularly good in. You can include stuff you've used but aren't current in, but make sure it's annotated as such

2. Add a high-level summary that hits the aggregated highlights of your career. Especially important for making sure that the resume reader quickly understands your specialties and focus, depth and breadth. Your Blender work is badass and should def show up in that summary

3. If you have education, I'd add a small thing about that at the bottom. For smaller orgs it doesn't matter but bigger ones it will make a difference. Ditto if you have any certifications

Overall though, I heartily agree that it's a vicious hiring market right now so don't take it personally. You look like a fascinating candidate! If we had open slots and our markets lined up more, I'd be shooting you an email. I'm a little weird in this regard, but I am particularly impressed by open source work that people do. It shows passion, motivation, and a willingness to make the world a better place, which are three things I really appreciate.


This is good advice no matter what country you're in. Best advice I ever got is two things:

1. Make it easy for someone reading your CV to quickly know your core skills and experience (i.e. your points 1 and 2).

2. Don't just say you did the job, that's a given. Talk about specific points for each role you are particularly proud of. These will become talking points in an interview.

Saying something like "worked on front end and back end systems" tells me almost nothing about you. What did you do on them? Anything interesting about it, any tricky technical or business problems you solved?


Yes but this is misleading and missing the point: there is nothing really wrong with this person's resume/CV. There is nothing about it which is off-putting and it does the job of communicating that this person is a very experienced software engineer who can communicate clearly, and has enough attention to detail and care to produce a nicely formatted CV and that they're obviously a reasonable candidate for pretty much any programming job that's close to their centre of gravity wrt the technologies required for the job.

I also don't really understand why some people with decent CVs are getting literally no bites at all. Has the number of incoming resumes increased a lot in the last year or two? Is it because everyone across the country is applying for the same remote jobs?


I was laid off in june. Ive been applying since August (except through december to now). Ive had bites and good talks but in the end, donuts. I obviously have no real evidence, but there have been a few times now where the recruiter has said:

- "We got literally thousands of resumes for this position"

- "We have had so many bad resumes, its been hard to find the good ones"

Truth is, right now the tech job market is fucked. Theres been too many layoffs without enough places for others to go. Add to that, that the large companies are laying people off too, and the smaller companies would salivate at having an exgoogler or some other in their ranks


salivate - or possibly not.

signed,

xoogler having just as much trouble as the rest of y'all


FWIW, I asked my last boss (a CISO) about taking advantage of the layoffs to staff up and his response was that he couldn't afford Meta and Google talent. I think this is a common perception among tech's less privileged - the manufacturers and insurance companies and such of the world.

I don't know how to convey that you don't need Google-grade RSUs just because you're a xoogler, without looking desperate, but I wish I did because it would be handy for everybody about now.


> Yes but this is misleading and missing the point: there is nothing really wrong with this person's resume/CV. There is nothing about it which is off-putting and it does the job of communicating that this person is a very experienced software engineer who can communicate clearly, and has enough attention to detail and care to produce a nicely formatted CV and that they're obviously a reasonable candidate for pretty much any programming job that's close to their centre of gravity wrt the technologies required for the job.

I agree there's nothing wrong, but (respectfully, truly) I think you're actually missing the point, possibly the is/ought fallacy? The point isn't to have "nothing wrong" with your CV/resume (which I agree OP has nothing wrong), the point is to get noticed. Generally speaking for most people, the whole point of a resume is to get you an interview. When you're competing against dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other resumes, standing out is hard, and failure to do so usually means no interview, which means no job, even when you are the most qualified candidate.


Exactly. A CV is a marketing tool to get you to an interview. These days you probably have to make sure all the right keywords are in there too so you don't get filtered out by a machine, as well as getting noticed by a human.

I've reviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of CVs in my time. This CV, while not absolutely terrible, is most definitely not great, and I'd go so far as to say below average.

It does not help the person reading it make a positive decision.

* It's hard to figure out what the skills and experience are. If I have to read the entire thing work to even know if you might be a fit, there's a good chance of just going on the rejection pile.

* It's not clear what kind of role the person wants. Do you want to do front end? Mobile? Back end? Full stack? This can be tailored of course to a particular role if needed.

* It's extremely passive. Saying "worked on X" is about as interesting as watching paint dry.

* One page is not enough for a technical role. I know some people say keep it to one page, but to me, 2 (and sometimes 3) pages is OK if it's not horrid to read and I have reasonable confidence there might be a fit there (not if I have to read the whole thing though to figure out if there might be a fit).

* There is absolutely nothing in it to make me think "ooh, would be good to talk to this person."

Fundamentally, this CV says "I have built some different software for people. I have nothing interesting to say about it. I dont care if I waste your time reading it.".

In a strong market that might be enough. In a weak market it will be straight to the reject pile.


Having #1 and #2 on the first page seems to work well for my resume.

I added a bullet point list of groups of related technologies, each group paired with a number of years of experience. I had feedback from several headhunters that this list had really helped them promote my resume.


Beware the comments here from the US that don't apply to UK CVs - which are a different style. Personal intros are not important.

I can't see any job titles - which is frankly more important than the company and makes it easier to skim sections of experience

Definitely go into more detail than just "Worked on" and "Used" - anything on stuff the company uses in the CV is not confidential and you can put on your CV.

Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.


> Finally put months on your CV - it's not clear if your most recent role was 12 months or 1.

I've stopped doing that because it gets tiring why I changed so frequently in recent years. It's not my fault places go bankrupt, startups do layoffs, or teams just up and dissolve after you join, and it gets tiring explaining that rather than discussing my experience, skills, and interests and the role at hand. It was a total mistake to enter into the startup world.


At least you got the CHANCE to explain before. Now you can't even do that because your resume is not passing the screen.

You're handicapping yourself with the lack of transparency. It just comes across as shady. Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market?

You need to suck it up and share this information. Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").

Edit: spelling.


It's not shady at all. And there's a lot of things that describe me, but untransparent is not one of them. In fact, my transparency often gets me into trouble, in a sense, because people are not used to it and it seemingly weirds them out.

> Briefly explain each situation on the resume (i.e. "fixed contract ended" or "startup shut down due to loss of largest customer").

There's not room, and it's ultimately irrelevant to my experience and skills.


It's relevant to the decision-makers: the people reviewing your resume.


> Why are you worth the risk compared to the overflow of excellent candidates in this market?

Because your resume is better?

You really saving time by filtering those to whom it's important. Those who contact you would mind less about those missing months.

Yes, when you need every possible contact, you might be interested to approach things differently, but the question isn't how to match best the screening algorithms. And it's very sad thing to have to explain those months.


I can't speak to his skills - but in the eyes of a Hiring Manager reviewing his resume, it's worse than the majority. There is too much great laid-off talent out there.

It's not fair, but it's true.


I've had way too many ATS's that require day of month. Like WTF.

My automatic response there when filling out is "start date is always first of month, end date is always last of month".


(UK CTO) I'd disagree with the "Personal intros are not important" bit, I use that a lot when filtering but the rest of this is good advice. It's also missing a list of skills you consider yourself to have, what you like doing with those skills, things you maybe do in your off-time - personality basically.

The other thing I'd suggest is tailoring your CV to the roles you're going for - the last time I had to write my own I had a two page appendix of the awards won by my projects as that's the sort of thing the hirers I was targeting would be looking for. And as someone hiring now I'm far more likely to interview someone who's CV shows some interest in the kind of work we do and who we do it for.


The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout and the second item the "University of Bedfordshire"

A lazy recruiter will see that as a watermark as your education and assume the rest is amateur stuff. This makes it look like you have less than one year experience.

For some companies/recruiters they often like to see month and year for each position. It can be a red flag as it looks like hiding of career gaps.

Lack of personal statement is a lesser problem. Recruiters won't necessarily care, but it makes a hiring managers job harder. The job positions should be seen as supporting evidence for the claims in that statement.

That said, despite these problems, the jobs market is at the slowest it's been for years. Particular for more senior roles.

My company has a hiring freeze despite being profitable and growing and we're cutting costs to avoid making people redundant.

I'm UK based and have reviewed hundreds if not thousands of CVs.


> The worst thing about your CV is the non-chronological layout

CVs used to have a choice of layouts, you write in a form you prefer. What's wrong with non-chronologicals now?


I have over 200 resumes to go over this week for an open position. If I have to decipher your narrative it's going in the 'no' pile. Effective communication is a critical skill and evaluating that starts here.

I'm not calling anything "wrong" but I definitely don't have time to have tea with your branding or whatever.


The whole web stands on each and every website being uniquely designed, however hard it is to learn how to navigate. If you want efficiency, work with databases, not people.


Not me - if I don't want like a website's design, I am going to close the tab.

Similarly, as a hiring manager (mainly software engineers), I come across some very "unique" resumes which I do look through out of curiosity but the maverick-factor is quite high with these candidates, and they usually are a disruption with their constant "unique" approaches to working with the team.

They would want to rewrite large modules your way and take forever to do it, then never actually contribute any productive code in any area...we made some hiring mistakes like that, and rather than wasting just that one engineer, these mishires ended up wasting other people's time, which is much worse.

Sometimes, it helps to be conformant (another brick in the wall, so to speak) to the standard protocol/format to have maximum compatibility.


Lol, the entitlement. Nobody owes you a job, or their time for that matter.

And websites are not at all randomly designed. They share common concepts and design language. Buttons, dropdowns, hamburger menus, icons etc.

Just like a CV is typically chronological, because that’s what the reader cares about.


If you are applying for a job you owe it to your potential employer to communicate clearly why you are a fit for the role.


This. I was a bit confused by the layout, and I thought the university was OP's undgrad uni.


Loved your Hapland games as a kid.

Besides the standard callouts of “it’s an anomalously hard job market right now due to a recent layoffs flooding dev supply of interviewees, due to a post-covid hiring frenzy hangover, due to anticipated US tax code changes discouraging hiring, and due to high interest rates in the US currently discouraging risks including hiring” the thing that may be actually in your control is I notice is a lack of quantification of project deliverables and accomplishments on individual projects.

Looking at the first point as one example, it could be summarized “created app”. Especially as your most recent work, I’d want to see you go more into the experiences the app enabled - perhaps the user counts who were using it, what the experience was for them, any metrics you might have that you moved the needle on, or what your changes enabled people at the installation to do. Quantifying the impact of your work with each work item I think would go a long way towards making the CV better.


Hey, thanks for the response.

I'm in the UK so not sure how much the US situation is contributing, though there might be knock-on effects.

I appreciate your feedback about what details to add and about that most recent point. I agree, and will spend some time rewriting.

Again, thanks so much for responding and I'm happy to hear you enjoyed those games. Cheers!


It's the same in Canada btw


We're currently going through the largest tech downturn since the dot com bubble. It's not you, it's the market. Tough for everybody who is looking right now.

For the first time in 20 years there are more applicants than jobs again.


> For the first time in 20 years there are more applicants than jobs again.

I'd argue that happened during 2008 and 2009.

Source: I graduated and had to get a first job during that time. For every 100 positions I applied for, I got a call for 5, and had on site interviews for 1. Sounds like that may be the case again.


I had absolutely NO problem finding employment during that time period.

First jobs are usually the "first" to go FYI.

I'm a senior dev, and even back then I had a ton of experience.

I agree with OP. This is easily the biggest down cycle since the dot com bubble.

Just remember, things will recover. Eventually.


That's all well and good, but "eventually" doesn't pay the bills right now.


Which is a lesson to not blow your money (I know this doesn't help those that are CURRENTLY in this situation). Tech people tend to think money grows on trees, they're paid far more than the median wage and that means they feel things like inflation and cost of living pressures less, but it does tend to result in an attitude that there will always be more money so why save.


Same here. However I do not believe things will recover, at least in a reasonable time frame for my own career. My thinking is now if this current job ends I need to think about exiting the industry and doing something else.

Oh well, tech is a nice hobby at least.


That was my experience pre-2023, now it's 100 applications and maybe one response, except there aren't 100 positions, all of them are the highest possible level of seniority and require 10 y.o.e plus a masters degree, and nobody responds to messages.


If this may offer any comfort, even people with all those skills aren't getting many interviews right now.


This.

I'm in the UK. Strong skills. Good CV. Ghosted constantly.

Half the jobs you're applying for ( or more ) are fake, and the recruiters are just trying to collect CVs to drum up future business.


Indeed, the market is readjusting - thresholds are a tad higher but not impossible like some make it seem.


You aren't.

The economy is absolute garbage right now.

I'm in the US and the situation is similar here. I've never had an issue finding a job before either, but I've been unemployed since the middle of 2023.

Assuming you aren't under financial hardship, my advice is to spend more time on your hobbies and check back in around July/August. That is when the layoffs are projected to drop and hiring is expected to keep up.


Every time I bring up this uneasy feeling of everything feeling like it's going to crumble soon, I get employment data hurtled at me and the stock market thrown in my face.

Maybe Canada is worse due to how insane housing is but for the average person life does not feel anywhere like it used to pre pandemic at least.


Numbers are very easy to manipulate, and are almost never predictive when removed from the original context.

Low unemployment means nothing without also referencing workforce participation rates. Economic data is also effectively useless if, for example, inflation data excludes common expenses like groceries, housing, used cars, etc.

I don't think this was always the case, but economic data today is so easily gamed that its little more than political theater.


While the numbers for the macro economy may be pretty good - for the tech sector they're terrible.


Recently surfaced here: https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/08/700_it_jobs_us/

Basically, USA probably has much more new graduates of CS a year than net jobs in tech added last year. Many would say it's like a statistical error; anyway, it's a low number.


40% of the US population is inactive. Unemployment rate has been made useless, I don't think any software developer contributes to it. The rate now is more about desperate people in critical situation than people who didn't find a job.


job market for tech workers != broader economy. blue collar wages in percentage terms have been increasing faster than white collar.

i think many orgs overinvested in tech during the pandemic. we've swung too far, so it's time to work out the excesses.


I truly do not mean this in a snarky way - who is projecting that layoffs are projected to drop and hiring is expected to pick up around July/August?


Interviewing.io compared public data to their internal data and make a compelling argument for hiring to pick up in Q2 [0], though I don't know if the recent spate of 2024 layoffs change this calculus.

[0] https://interviewing.io/blog/when-is-hiring-coming-back-pred...


Jan layoffs are "normal" (cant lay off people in holidays and new financial planning for new year) and tech isnt particularly affected (city group laid off 20k people, mostly finance), whereas most tech layoffs were in the hundreds by company and were in Companies who didnt make a profit (Twitch and Unity after their controversy)

So i believe that things are getting better as data showed December '23 being the best month of 23 for tech job growth.


the "perfectly rational markets" expect the central banks to lower interest rates. which actually assumes that something economically worse happens in the meantime because as it is now, the fed is _not_ lowering.


core CPI is dropping and most of the growth in December was real-state (which is on a downward trend)

Some consumer prices deflated last month

Wider economy job data is not as hot (december was 40k higher than expected but 70k jobs were erased from octo and november payroll so its cooling)

while the fed may not cut in march i think its likely they will cut at least once or twice in '24


yes that sounds rational. central bankers are humans with a target on their back though.


The fact that feds have signaled interest rates are going to drop this year.


I have zero faith that it is going to pick up again. There is no evidence this is going to be the case. Your time would be better spent retraining for another industry, if that is practical for you.


>That is when the layoffs are projected to drop and hiring is expected to keep up.

Or this could be the new normal.


It isn't you. I have a solid resume (I know because I've interviewed hundreds of people in my career), but the market is just much slower. In 2020-2022 I was getting 5-10 recruiters reaching out every week. If I thought something was interesting, I'd respond saying that I'm not really looking for anything new, but I'm open to a conversation. People would still be thrilled to speak to me, even though I was upfront that I'd only leave for something perfect.

Lately, I get maybe one person reaching out every month. I responded to one last week, even though I'm not looking, just to see what the job market is like. I was ghosted.

I think we're just not in a hiring frenzy right now. People don't want to leave their jobs and risk it on something new. Some companies are laying off. For the companies that are hiring, they are probably seeing many more applicants and a higher conversion rate.

Things will come around.


A bit of a different take, but given the amount of experience you have, I wouldn't put as much weight on using a CV at all.

With an updated LinkedIn you can reach out to past bosses, coworkers, and friends for introductions to other people in industry (whether they're hiring or not) – and follow that chain until you find something you're interested in.


I would agree. Applying to every public job posting out there is a waste of time.

Either the postings are fake (there for legal reasons, or to make the company look like they are healthy and growing) or they will be spammed by so many applicants that even if your resume is a perfect match it will just get lost in the noise.


Your CV doesn't tell me anything you accomplished, it just lists things you did. Hiring managers want to know the impact of your work, not a page of bullets that all say: "I did a thing."

Picking one at random: "Worked on frontend and backend systems for this health tech company." OK... and what impact did your work have? Can you cite a qualitative improvement on the business due to your work? If not, can you at least cite quantitative facts like: "Released 6 updates to the product."

I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds negative, but is intended to help you realize if your bullet points read well or not -- For each one, imagine a hiring manager at an interview asking you, "So what?". Then throw out your original bullet point and instead type in your answer to that question.


Why do hiring managers like such claims? They're all fake.


Ultimately, people are hired to create an impact. People who can identify and communicate that impact are typically a step ahead of people who just do a skill. I always prefer the person who is less technically skilled but understands why and how they're making an impact. Better to have an B+ technical person working on the right problem, than to have an A+ technical person working on the wrong problem.

> They're all fake.

Sure, but they are semi-based in reality and give insight to the scope of your work.

* "Perfectly implemented [some feature] on [some project], resulting in perfect launch". Definitely an IC. Maybe not even senior.

* "Led organization-wide effort across 100+ engineers to migrate from X to Y". Might be an IC. Might be a manager. In either case, you don't do this type of work below senior level.


Because if you can or are willing to BS to make yourself look good, then you can or are willing to BS to make your manager look good.


Your job isn’t to help the company make more money, it’s to convince people that you help the company make more money.

Your boss / hiring manager / everyone else has the same job.


This is the best advice here. You want to be able to say, “during the time I worked here, I did X and the company’s revenue increased by Y.” Swap in whatever metrics are particularly relevant to the job you’re applying for.


Not saying you are wrong, but when does management even know exactly which specific X caused how much increase in revenue, let alone a software developer.


It's not about saying you directly caused the specific increase in revenue, it's more about highlighting the value you can bring to a future organization – at least so you can talk about it in an interview. Remember, this game is not about determining if that increase was purely attributable to your work, it's about convincing an employer that you can add value.

For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year. Sure, there were probably other factors that helped, but when you can point at specific things and back them up with metrics, it's 100% better than just listing a bunch of skills and jobs.


Sure that's ideal but honestly I've worked on a bunch of stuff at several different companies but have yet to land in a place where I was able to collect these sorts of statistics that everyone is always going on about putting in your resume.


Numbers are ideal, and I'd think carefully on if there is a metric you can tie to a data point, but it doesn't have to be all about numbers. Example: maybe you streamlined a common app flow making it significantly easier for users to accomplish a task, or implemented accessibility best practices across your product making it usable by a wider range of people. Both of these have more pop if there is a statistic you can cite with them, but even without they speak to impact not just "worked on Python web application".


I have £19m to £75m revenue in approx 20 months bootstrapped start-up CTO on my CV.

In the UK market folks aren't particularly receptive to that sort of thing.


In that case, I wonder if that makes you seem overqualified?


I think it's a combination of the market and assumptions.

- Some think I'm no longer technical enough because I've done managerial stuff, despite recent work being hands on.

- Some think I'm not managerial enough because I still do technical stuff.

- Some think I've somehow failed because the specific role was only ~20 months ( it was actually equity shenanigans )

- Some think I'm too senior and won't stick around ( despite the role being top of the market pay wise )

Mostly, I don't really know, because when going through the front door, they typically don't respond, and in actual fact the only leads I get are the ones that contact me.

But I think our specific culture focuses on reasons to say no, rather than reasons to say yes, and the current market only helps compound this, even if the outcome is worse.

Of course, I might just be shit, but they also likely don't know that by not speaking with me. :)


If you don't have specific data, you can still frame your work in a way that is more compelling than, "I can code in Python and I worked at XYZ company for 3 years." Whatever value you were adding, put that first, even if it's just "built new products that increased company's sales and helped expand to X new markets."


Not only that, it shows that you understand and care about what matters (the success of the company).


> For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year.

Even if I did, it was probably someone else's idea, someone else decided it would be worth adding to the product, someone else made a UX and UI design, I wrote the code, someone else tested it, maybe there were some iterations of those. It's all team work.

Someone claiming such a increase as their personal achievement is spouting BS and would not get an invitation here.


It was a simplified example. Obviously on a real world resume you would say “was a part of a team that did X.”


Oh. You were "part of a team?" But what did you do? What? You mean your team added 20% more users with this feature, not you?

SMH.


Yeah, that’s not how real people actually communicate in real life, so your criticism is pretty baseless here.


It's about signaling to hiring managers that you are willing to play along with their bullshit.

None of the companies I worked at disclosed to the engineers what features led to what results. So I made shit up and nobody called me out on it.


I read resumes and that "bs" gets one negative point. Another negative point and resume goes to trash bin.


Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.


It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit.

"Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team".

There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, because... they were dumb moves. Do you put that on there? Or do you just put what you did, minus the impact?


I haven't worked on a successful product since 2017. But I have absolutely supported leadership who wanted to give an idea an honest chance by delivering the product they asked for. Their failure to find a market does not mean that my technical delivery was sub-par. So my work still offers value. So I say exactly what I did - "Delivered a new SaaS app.", "Modernized a legacy system to a new tech stack", etc. I did deliver what was expected of my role, and I can claim that regardless of the market success.

Now, would it sound better if those products succeeded? Of course! But there is still something that can be said for my work.


The OP was saying "don't just say what you did - say what the impact was!" (in so many words). Well... the impact was that this thing I delivered went way over budget, and the division shut down because we ran out of money.

Or... what if the impact is "user subscriptions decreased, cancellations increased, revenue declined"?

I was pointing out that "impact" isn't always positive - adding it to a resume might not be all that useful.

This happened to me. Was told to convert a lot of stuff to an XML database, which... no one had any experience with. But the owner wanted to be in the XML space. They sold a deal which was based on the XML database tech, but it was so bad, and so slow, and didn't actually take customer needs in to account, that we burned over $1m over 6 months, and half the company was laid off.

So, yes, I can put "XML database conversion" on a resume, but there's no positive outcomes to add to it. This is what the OP was being told to do - add positive outcomes. They don't always exist, and yes, it's outside your control.


It's also often outside of your knowledge. You just too often don't have anything close to useful statistics which you can refer to. Say, replacing one message queue solution with another, because the first was considered - you may not know or agree with all the details - too slow or too unreliable. How does it help if you don't have enough knowledge about how often the previous one failed? The new one has better performance, but you don't have enough traffic to feel the difference - then what? All you see on the justification side is several logs where the error is present and maybe some obscure post on the Internet complaining about similar issues, and then you have a decision from above. And such situation could be quite typical.


this. in one job as developers we never got to see any data from production side. we were just told what features to implement or what bugs to fix, without any feedback on their impact.


Welcome to marketing :-).

But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about?

There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead demonstrating your skills with something where you delivered value.

It's also worth noting that even where X flopped, you still hopefully contributed something positive. In your own example, you delivered X some (months?) early. That alone saves $.

I was once part of a Salesforce (god help me) implementation where we were moving all our analytics into this new Salesforce platform with the idea that it would be the central hub for all employees. When all was said and done, it flopped. It tried to do too much at once, be everything to everyone, and was useless for most. 80% of employees only logged in once. It was exactly as you describe, where from the beginning, I warned we were on the wrong path.

It doesn't usually land on my resume because, I mean, it's fucking Salesforce, but if it does, or if it comes up in an interview, I can talk about how I replaced our contractor's ETL with a custom one that ingested the data in 10% of the time making it possible for us to actually keep our data up-to-date, or how I was able to refactor the data model to take proper advantage of compression and save us around $30k/month in storage costs (Salesforce cloud storage is stupid expensive).

Sure, the whole thing was a major screw-up that literally cost the company millions, yet I can still talk about how I made that situation a little better.


The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures.

Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.


Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance."

It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say something about you. Looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, why would I want to talk to the guy who "built data analytics tools with SQL Server", vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers". I've got 100 resumes with SQL Server experience. The first one had a job; maybe they were good at it, perhaps they weren't, I don't know. I have literally nothing to go on. The second at least accomplished something (or is a liar; yes, I'm aware of this possibility). If you don't give me a reason to speak to you, specifically, you are just hoping you win the lottery and happen to be one of the ones I call in.

> but the OP was told to add the outcomes

Outcomes don't have to be the final outcome of the whole project. The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.


> The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.

How did you learn about that number? Where did you pull it from?


By taking the space I saved and multiplying it by the price per gig.

If your asking how I knew the cost, I asked.


> vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers".

I reduced a 25 hour process down to 30 minutes. Someone else at the company took that 30 minutes and reduced it to 25 and put "15% reduction in import processing time!" on his resumé. But... he was also the one who was insistent that there was nothing to be done about the 25 hours in the first place. It was "impossible" to get it faster, supposedly.

In the past, I've put that 25 hour reference on my resume, and I had a couple recruiter folks tell me it smelled of bullshit, advising me I'm not supposed to exaggerate that much. What do I do? It's the truth, and if I explained it to someone who understood the state of the art at that time, the 'fix' would make a lot of sense (not magic, just... a deep understanding of what the tech stack is doing under the hood).

Last year I fixed a report screen that took 50 seconds to load up; brought it down to .5 seconds. But the company had already told the client it would require a big rewrite to 'fix'. And I 'fixed' it without the big rewrite. FWIW, the rewrite wasn't necessarily wrong, but also wasn't necessary. Or at least the ordering could have been reversed - give short term saving up front to keep users happy, then provide the rest of the support for that shortcut in the rewrite ('refactor').

Anecdotes like this can get you filtered out of some places that think it's BS. And... it might not hurt to avoid those places in the first place, but... you can't always know ahead of time.


Because the relationship between individual things in what a developer do and financial results is not so easily measured.

There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to claim credit alone.


If you don't know, hiring managers won't know the number either.

Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume.

To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.


Yeah. I see your point, and you're right. But is fucking hard to me force myself to actually do this. My parents were that old style working class folks that had this belief in a inherently fair world (no matter how much that same world fucked them over and over till their deaths).

Rationally I know how things work. But emotionally I am still the same as my parents and this is a fucking wall I am so far unable to cross.

Maybe I should consider therapy. Which would be kind of funny: Making therapy to become more of a sociopath and survive and thrive in a sociopathic society.


How do you prove that X and only X cause the company's revenue or some other metrics increased by Y? And let's say you can just for sake of it, how does that metric gives you any idea how good an engineer is? When I read a resume, anything that is beyond his skills (soft & tech) and experience is just sugar coating. A little is acceptable, too much and it gives me a bad feel for the candidate.


As I said above, an interview isn’t about trying to determine if you were solely responsible for the outcome at your previous job. Obviously any intelligent person knows that it’s a complex situation, and that it may not translate directly to the new company.

The point is to convey that you’re capable of providing some value to the company, should you be hired. It’s like being on a championship football team: sure, you weren’t solely responsible for winning. But being apart of winning team is certainly a lot more impressive than just listing your dribbling and passing skills.

I think you are taking this entirely too literally and missing the forest for the trees. The simple point being made is that communicating your value is easier when you go beyond the basic Skills and Experience CV that every average candidate slavishly sticks to. It doesn’t need to be an exact calculation, it just needs to convey that you’ve achieved something.


We're engineers, not MBAs. That's a good thing, and it should stay that way.


then you are just the labour force and disposable.


Great advice, not negative at all. Thanks so much!


Not the OP, but yes - your CV should convey impact, not just you reliably showed up for work.


This is like saying your CV should be an equivalent of a million dollars which you could literally exchange in a bank for money.

In other words, it would be good to clearly show impact - it would be so useful for the reader to have the final result without having to figure that out himself - but unfortunately it's usually hard enough to find good data for such claims, so anybody actually putting them there is automatically suspicious.

Unless, of course, there's a plausible algorithm for getting such data which I'd like to hear.


The impact, from your words, is also important to determine what you enjoy doing.

Perhaps Gomde UK had you there just to drive the tractor (absurd example to get point across), but you really loved working with sqlite and you went on to create an event management system from back to front and received good feedback. How you interpret your value tells a lot, share it!


how am i supposed to measure my impact when i am one of several team members in a 50 people company all working on issues for a huge website the company is maintaining for a customer.

when we are all working together to push the work forward, no individual contribution has a chance to stand out.


You don't need to measure your impact. It's enough to describe it. "Helped a large client improving their web presence for achieving increased conversion rates." Of course, you were part of a team and of course, you can't show precise statistics. But if they existed, would those stats be worth anything to a recruiter? Your next job will be different in many aspects. No recruiter will read some stats and say, "oh, that person's work increased the company's revenue by 1.5%, so we expect the same result at our company."

In a CV, the impact you made is a story to tell, not a number to calculate.


i was not very clear. as a lowly developer i am so far removed from the outcome that i have no clue what the impact of my work is supposed to be. i don't know if the bug i fixed affects 1% or 90% of the user base, or if the feature, like that new credit card processing service brings in a few new users, or thousands or none at all.

if there is a story to tell, it doesn't reach our team.


I've hired a maybe 10 devs in the last couple of years at a variety of levels, and this CV doesn't help much - it might get to a maybe pile, but there are a bunch of relatively small changes that I think would help:

1. Where are you? You should at least have your town or city on the CV unless you're in transit -- we're open to candidates that are moving, but local candidates usually get bonus points as things are just easier.

2. The CV is so compact it's hard to pick a career progression - it all looks static, and I'm not seeing any evidence of moving from entry level coder to picking up SW design skills to mentoring - it's all just 'created'. Some position titles might help here, plus some little details on how the role worked, not just the technologies (which I'd incorporate into each bullet point, rather that list at the end).

3. A summary that says in 25 words or less what sort of person you are, and what sort of role you're looking for - you might need a couple of variants for creative vs square jobs.

4. From 2 & 3 above, I'm not getting a sense of your personality and how you'd fit into a team.

I'd go for a 2 page CV with a little more room for extra things.


Plus - I don't know about your area, but every so often I try to staff a Django project, and people with more than superficial knowledge are like hens' teeth, so maybe lean into that.


That's funny, as I apply to Django jobs with plenty of experience and just get ghosted, to the point I'm moving away from Django as it feels more and more like a dead end (though what in tech other than buzzword-du-jour is not a dead end at this point?)


I think one of the problems with your CV could be that I can't really tell who you are and what kind of a job you are really looking for, unless I read the whole thing (and even then it's a wild guess!). Sadly, "software developer" is not really a thing anymore. You'd probably want to mention that you are full-stack, have X years of experience in Python (backend), and Y years of experience in Javascript (frontend). Databases (SQL / Postgres) Z years. Looking for full-stack roles, preferably contract (etc).

And I have to concur with those who mention that you don't list titles next to your job assignments. Not sure why, but it looks... strange.

Finally, where are you based? Are you looking for remote stuff, or onsite?... And be sure to include a phone number when you send it to anyone, especially agencies - they LOVE to start conversations on the phone, in fact, I don't know any serious agent whose first step is not to call you and have a 10 min chat, to prove that you are not some kind of weirdo. (Ignore this if you just removed your number for the post.)


Another note with this, the job titles look worse or less impressive with increasing time. There may not be much you can do about the impressiveness, yet rearranging to emphasize other work / skills may help.

"Worked on industry-leading tools" -> "Worked on a research project" -> "Created a 3D experience" (which like others have mentioned sounds like "wrote an app")


My 2 cents: You have awesome 3D Graphics/Games development experience. The best way to leverage that would be to market yourself as a 3D Graphics SW Developer/3D Game developer (you may need to deep dive a bit into 3D Graphics principles, OpenGL). Almost every semi company (Arm, QC, BC, Intel etc) and even FAANG's have openings for 3D Graphics SW engineers and you are actually well qualified for those as background in games is highly valued for these roles. Note: you will miss working with GFX apps in these roles, but you will not miss the pay!!!

The problem as I see it is: are you a games/3D Graphics developer, full stack developer or AI/ML engineer? The lack of clarity in this difficult market may be one of the reasons.


Hey, this feels like a valuable insight. Thank you.

The CV would be a lot shorter with only the 3D graphics stuff, but maybe that's not a problem? I'll try creating a separate graphics developer CV and see what happens.

I've heard the horror stories about games industry conditions so hadn't really pushed in that direction but will definitely start looking for non-gaming 3D jobs.

Thanks again, much appreciated.


>> I've heard the horror stories about games industry conditions

Yes, they are unfortunately true more often than not. My suggestion is to leverage your prior Game Dev related profile/experience to get into lower level of graphics tools stack (sorry that didn't come through). These exist in semi and FAANG's (but be prepared to play a bit of the leetcode game as well). Just check F and fruit company with 3D Graphics as keyword!


I'm not sure about hiring in 3D graphics but my resume has two somewhat different paths on it and I've always made 2 separate resumes just by switching around the focus/how I frame things. Like the main header would have the most relevant roles with greater detail, but I still mention highlights from other work under a second header, because I don't think it's entirely irrelevant either.

Also, I think the process of doing this makes me consider more carefully what I'm trying to convey about each role, and what parts of the resume I want to draw the most immediate focus to for a given type of job app.


Because we have gone from a feast to a famine.

I took some time off my normal job/contracting roles in 2022 to create and launch an app idea I had. Then, I only started looking again last year (UK) and it was tumbleweed. I only got a decent contract this December.

I also had a brief snazzy 1 page CV and a long 3 page buzzword CV, as PDFs only. But when I did a CV workshop with a recruiter he gave me several good advice.

First, recruiters hate PDFs, especially contract ones that need to add their template headers to etc. If yours is too much effort, they will just discard it. So I have both PDF and Word versions available.

Second the top half of the first page is what matters. They will glance to see if you are relevant. So highlight what you can do. But do not give them a wall of text.

Thirdly they only really care what you have done in the last couple of years. I used to detail great roles I had a decade ago. It is in fact for the recruiter nearly irrelevant. So I made the older ones very terse and expanded the recent ones. But not too much.

I still have my 1 pager https://eray.uk/cv/ivar/short/ but recruiters now get a new 2 page CV and mostly as a word doc.

In a famine, they may get 20 or even 50 CVs/resumes per role. They will only glance at a fraction of those. Make yours stand out. But most importantly call them repeatedly to remind them who you are so that yours get added to the relevant pile.


It's possible the University of Bedfordshire role at the top makes it look like you're a student - to a lazy recruiter who doesn't read. The first bullet point "as part of a research project" again suggests you might be back in college - again to a recruiter who doesn't read.

I may be wrong - just a suggestion.


I think is partly because he's omitted any job titles.


And partly because he omitted education. I recognize that aging yourself or revealing a lack of technical degree (despite work history) may do you a disfavor under some circumstances, but it's also one of the first things a non-technical (read: HR) reviewer is going to look for and round-file if not found.


Yeah that's a good shout, thank you! I hadn't considered that.


I’d suggest using a standard linear format. On first glance, it looked like there was a gap of 5 years in your experience from 2010-2015 (there isn’t, but it took me a minute).

As others have noted, you need to emphasize what you’ve done. I’d eliminate every “worked on” statement with something like “solved X bugs, launched Y product, lead z engineers, improved K metric, owned B area, used d,I,g technologies of interest”

Anecdotally I’ve observed a shift away from LC style hiring to a blend of resume+SYS design/code review. I’d credit the shift with dual efforts to find cost effective engineers and a fear that LC has been overfit by interviewees.


Seconded. I initially thought there were a lot of gaps in work history. In today's tech hiring climate, if I were reviewing this resume along with a pile of others, I'd see the gaps (regardless of if they are really gaps), disqualify, and quickly move to the next resume.


Thing is, there have been gaps. I've sometimes taken weeks or months between jobs to travel, work on personal projects, play music, etc. Does this mean I'm bad at programming?


Gaps aren't automatically bad!

Maybe in some horrible organisations they do immediately disqualify you, but working with people that have gaps is often interesting and fulfilling.

Also, whatever you learned about life in the gaps can be very useful to your employer!

Maybe those gap-experiences make it easier to build relationships with coworkers and customers? Or gave you the confidence in life to reach out when a coworker is having a rough time personally? Or allows you to dare side-step hierarchy and get stuff that is important to customers done instead of getting bogged-down in endless meetings? Or allows you to bring a healthy culture of work-life balance to your employer?

All these things could have a big positive financial impact on the business.

I would include gaps on your CV and highlight what you learned or enjoyed during this time of your life.

Finally, if you tick the tech-checkboxes, recruiters probably unconsciously prioritize candidates that have an interesting life-story to talk about. I would rather talk about your gaps that all human beings can relate to, rather than about some random tech I'm not really all that familiar with.

Good luck!


As unfair as this may seem, your problem may be UX, rather than content. There is no focal point and ironically the shear volume of experience makes it hard to get a quick picture of who you are. I’d recommend a punchy executive summary at the top.

In my experience the 1 page constraint is less important so long as it’s easy to get a good picture of you on the first page.


I agree with this. I glanced at it and had a hard time following.

Simplify it to be all black text, single column, with underlines under each section heading. In other words, make it look like the most brutalist traditional resume.

Other comments in this thread also have good substantive suggestions, but just nailing the formatting can make a big difference.


Yes. There is no other way to figure out what OP specializes in and worked on besides reading all bullets carefully. A summary and job titles would help a lot.


Your C.V. isn't well laid out. In <10 secs I can't really figure out what you've done and what your primary skillset is.

Refactor it to more clearly lay out your specific skillset, roles, and what you achieved in them (improving business metrics).


It's not just you. It's not even just tech. The economists are wrong. By all indications the economy is strong, profits are up, overall employment numbers are the lowest they've been in a while. But here in the US, companies regardless of their bottom line, are laying off huge chunks of their employees. Some to correct overhiring in previous years, some to show Wall Street they've met their numbers, and some are still hedging against a downturn that was projected but did not come. Rates are not coming down, so companies are not borrowing cash to cover growing head count, and the ones who are hiring are drawing out the process. Our org for example, only added 4 new developers across our entire global footprint in 2023. We needed a lot more, especially backend devs, but were not allowed to add headcount. Every quarter we are being asked to do more with less.


Quick scan of your resume as someone who interviews 20-40 people/year (although not so much lately) ... I couldn't figure what you're actually great at. Strengths, passion and project type gravitation?

FYI, your resume is shallow but still better than a lot I see each year. For someone like me to decide who to interview and spend that 1 hour on, comes down to info presented on resume intended towards the people reading the resume and fit feel to the job description.

Tips:

- Post resume in "doc" format and not "pdf" this is because most recruiters and HR feed resumes to parsing engines that match content of resume to job description for keyword matching.

- Recruiters have a DB of thousands and thousands of resumes, for each job posting, they can only refer top 3. They only get paid if the candidate is hired and bonus if they stay more than a year! So know who your target audience is.

- Interviewers hate doing interviews too! Resume is easiest way to get a feel and reject allocating the interview slot time.


I would advise against using Word doc format instead of PDF. I feel quite strongly about this.

1. PDF will render more consistently across platforms.

2. PDF can be opened in a web browser. Lots of orgs these days use cloud tools, you can't count on MS Office being universal any more. Also on a phone without additional apps, which is surprisingly common too.

3. Default PDF exports from most tools will include fonts, default Word exports don't. This makes opening Word docs annoying on machines with different fonts (or restricts you to "safe" fonts, which is probably a good thing, but this post is about formats not CV design)

4. Opening PDFs, there's less "junk". Opening Word docs in Word, you see all the squiggles under technical terms and non-Western names, draggable icons on tables, tooltips, etc. When I open someone's CV and Word throws up a bunch of popups about the document containing macros, "objects", fonts I don't have, it puts me in a bad mood for the next few minutes.

5. PDF can certainly be read by CV parsing engines. No question.

6. Having been on the receiving end, in my experience PDF is simply more common. Make the reader's job easier.

And you shouldn't use "doc" anyway, modern versions of Word use docx.


I hate word docs, and used to insist my CV as PDF only. I have turned up to interviews only to see the other side having a completely mangled CV in front of them...

But intermediate recruiters love them as they need to add their header to it. They can export and import etc a PDF but it is much more effort so in a famine market like now a PDF is likely to be discarded for the 50 word doc CVs they also received for the same role...


No way you are the author of Hapland, thank you I had lot of fun.

I don't have anything more to say than what has already been said in this thread, I would just recommend modernizing your CV by using Canva [1] , the site has lots of free themes and they are generally well done.

[1] - https://www.canva.com/


I'd be careful with any modernization that impacts ATS software's ability to parse it.

Recruiters work through ATS systems and will rarely read a resume unless it shows up at the top of some filter.

Use something like jobscan.com to validate how the resume parses and avoid any cool graphics and stuff.


Oh I forgot about this soulless aspect of job finding, thank you for link


Jobscan really killed any spark left in me when it dinged my resume for not having useless vague phrases copy/pasted from job descriptions like “business solutions”.


I couldn't find "Resumes" on that site, and it seems to be for things with lots of graphics?


Hmm that's weird, when searching for "Resumes" and "CV" I find the templates on the website


The main thing is the "work from home" movement. At first employers hated the idea of employees working from home. But then employers got used to it, and then they realized that they could outsource most work to a Third World country. Because once work leaves the office, there is no reason for the work to remain in the USA or Europe. It might as well as go some place cheap, like Brazil or India or Vietnam. Mentally, it took employers several years to fully adjust their mindset, but now that they've committed to being "remote first" they are realizing that they can outsource much more work than they ever did in the past.


I think there should be strict laws around outsourcing. Maybe companies that pay X amount of taxes (related to their earnings) have to ensure Z amount of their employees are nationals.

It just doesn’t seem fair that they get to take advantage of their home countries infrastructure while providing employment to other countries.

I was laid off due to outsourcing.


I think it's a culmination of things:

- Like you said: once work leaves the office, there is no reason for the work to remain in the USA or Europe. I witnessed this at a company I was working at in 2019-2021. I was managing a small team, my team and others were drowning, the workload was so absurd we had several people quit over the span of a couple of months (making the problem even worse!) I finally got a 1-1 with a VP asking what the hell we were going to do about the situation. They told me, in confidence that they'd just let most of the developers quit on their own and start outsourcing all the projects to a company in another country (I want to say somewhere in South America.) They had been in talks with this company for months...

- Ghost jobs. The company I work for has a couple of jobs on their careers page that I know with certainty we're not actually hiring for. I looked at my old company, and same thing there (still have friends that work there and know they're not hiring for those roles.)

- Tons of people seeing the salary of folks in tech and pivoting into it (and a fair amount of them are just not well suited for it.) Software, Networking, Infrastructure, etc just aren't for everyone. Just like how cutting open a human on an operating table is not for me! We've all worked with that one person that just couldn't code themselves out of a wet paper bag and they've all tried to hop on the hot tech bandwagon when everything went remote due to COVID.

- Years (decades?) of VC backed companies that have hemorrhaged money since exception and gasp actually need to make a profit, and can't are going belly up.

- AI, hype or not definitely having an impact and mixing things up. Maybe not entirely in tech but I see AI generated artwork everywhere I look now.

- We thought it would be a good idea to shutdown the country (due to covid), but then had to print and pump money into the economy to get it started again, now we're paying the price for it.

- The R&D tax credit going away.


There are a couple of lines of commercially interesting experience hidden away in your CV but it took a while to find them.

I would hire someone to rewrite, edit and reprioritise the whole thing.


Well I have recently found myself unemployed after mass layoffs at my company. Perhaps January isn't the best month, but it doesn't look overly positive in the US job market right now. I think even a good CV won't help too much because the market itself feels fairly cold. I would say you should try to rely on any network you have. That's what my plan is going to be, although my network in software engineering is considerably smaller than my network in accounting, but I don't see blindly firing resumes as a viable option. So while there is likely room for you to improve your resume, I think the job market itself is likely the bigger culprit here.

It's a shame there isn't an effective way on here to connect viable engineers who are talented and clearly care about the quality of their code to land work. Even the work at a yc startup site feels like it falls to the same shortcomings. If I could get a software engineering license similar to my CPA, I think that would be an effective way to quickly establish ability and reduce the hiring friction.


Take this with a grain of salt, but I don’t see any cloud experience, I see lots of “used” which tells me very little about how proficient you are. It’s hard to tell if you’re a junior/senior, you don’t demonstrate you have good knowledge of best practices or design patterns or show team leadership skills, DevOps? Agile? Kubernetes? Not to say you don’t posses those skills but your cv doesn’t demonstrate it that well… that’s to say the 1st page didn’t and I have a stack to get through and all this work I’m still expected to complete by close of business because I’m tech lead AND hiring manager, next.


We live in a world of techno-fuedalism, you are not alone. Every company wants an MIT graduate. They want someone "sexy" like a "rock star." One company's I looked at asked me "what is the most impressive thing you've worked on?" Like that really indicates the quality of my work.


> One company's I looked at asked me "what is the most impressive thing you've worked on?"

I get this one a good bit and I despise it because the answer is always something I did outside of work.


The vast majority of people work to earn a living and put food on the table, and did not have a chance to work on something large at work - with this question, they are basically ranking prospective employees by the opportunities they had!


Some quick feedback: It’s hard to parse your CV quickly because there are no actual job titles. I have to dig into the bullet points to get some idea of what your role was.


> Lots of coding experience; bosses have always been happy with my work. I've written stuff about programming online that has been well-received. Several personal projects under my belt, and plenty of OSS contributions too.

That’s the problem, you know too much. People in charge of hiring don’t want to be outshined.


No one likes the truth, buddy.


Damn. I recognized your domain name... I absolutely love your games, and got so much playtime out of them. I wish I could help, but I'm in a similar boat today.


Maybe add your Github profile. I'm based in London and noticed the same a few years ago when I was looking, and decided to stop applying to UK companies, I find it pretentious and a big waste of time; for me, it was mostly the 4 or 5 interview stages that seemed ridiculous, also take-home tests that took 2 to 3 days, etc. Processes that took weeks of hard work. I can imagine it just got worse now. I've interviewed some people in the last 12 months, and seen a lot of CVs. When investigating, I found a lot of people lying. It seems that LinkedIn/twitter/TikTok are important for recruiters. I don't use it myself, but I've seen people asking for LinkedIn and Twitter for some reason.

Good luck with everything, it's not your skills!


Thank you! Github is at the top-right but could be more prominent.

How did you manage to find non-UK companies that will hire UK people? I find most remote US roles say "remote (US only)", and similar for other countries.


There are opportunities, but you have to spend the whole day looking; a good start is the monthly hacker news who's hiring thread.


You need to connect the dots between your employment history, your capabilities, and your interests. I could not do this any more when I lost my job last year and had to change to something new.

In my case I was a 15 year full time JavaScript developer. After years of frustration watching children run the daycare crying about needing more frameworks, not knowing how to program, and hyper insecurity I could not go back to that kind of work. I largely made myself unemployable. If AI eliminates the need for framework junkies who cannot be bothered to write original code maybe I will give it another shot. In the meantime I am entry level data science and enterprise API management now.


I’d also suggest losing the “old guy arrogance” before giving it another shot.


What would you suggest instead?


Rather than expressing frustration at the less experienced developers you are working with... as a hiring manager I would prefer to hear something more constructive, like that you are able to understand the common pitfalls a team of less experienced developers are likely to run into and proactively lead/wrangle/herd them towards success.


Stop the madness. If you are the manager then it is up to you to set the pace, tone, and direction of the team. If you are in charge then take charge. Don’t pawn that off on some powerless senior developer and cry about optimism, because you are setting that senior developer up as a center of animosity for junior developers who need to redirect attention away from their own failures.

If you want a strong team that optimistically works well together then set supremely high standards with risk of failure. When risk of failure to deliver becomes probable spread the tragedy across all team members. This is when your senior developers will step up to guide the juniors. Failure to do so results in whiners who throw each other under the bus.


Since you asked, based solely on your earlier comment, I would suggest being more open, humble, and respectful. I recognize the downsides of relying on frameworks, but I can also see good reasons for using them. I wouldn't refer to colleagues using frameworks the way you did.


Why wouldn’t you call it as you see it? When you have lost your job and are no longer seeking that employment you can afford to become a bit more honest. Fearing that someone likely under qualified for their job might be offended by the mere mention of such sounds like a first world problem.


They're just telling you how you're coming across in these comments. You sound a tad resentful and like someone who maybe has a bit of chip on his shoulder with respect to more junior Java engineers. If that's how you want to come across (because you feel that's your authentic self, or feel you're telling it like it is), then no change is needed. If you feel that doesn't reflect who you truly are and you would like to come across differently, you may wish to course correct with how you present your Java dev years.

I'm not trying to criticize you. You don't sound like a bad person or anything. But you do sound a bit resentful and dismissive of more junior engineers and their desire to use Java frameworks.


I am extremely resentful. I wasted 15 years in a line of work stuffed with mostly unqualified entitled people that whine about unnecessary conveniences instead of maturing to any true potential. The blame can be directed in any direction, but it’s water under the bridge and I have moved on.

Look, software has a very real people problem. Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead) thought as much when he wrote Office Space. If you to see how widely this is viewed by other senior developers read the comments in this other recent thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38958789


I actually don't disagree with anything you're saying. I've gone through my own periods of frustration similar to what you describe. I was never a Java engineer, but I followed the evolution of your field (going back to the advent of Java in the 90s) because some of my work was adjacent, so I am generally aware of what you're talking about. When I wrote the comment yesterday, I was thinking "this person is asking for feedback but I'm not sure if he's really hearing it." When I re-read my comment today, I wonder if it's sort of slyly hostile or argumentative, and think perhaps I should not have posted it. I'm sorry if I attacked you unwittingly due to my own insecurities or frustrations. As I said yesterday, you really don't sound like a bad or mean spirited person, but I do believe that the way you were writing your posts yesterday might cause some people to interpret you that way. I think that was what I was hoping to convey.

Yes, the subject of declining quality of tech workers is an interesting one. I first noticed it around 2014, but I think the root of it may go back into the late 2000s. It seems like a lot of people in that era started hearing that they should major in CS because it's a high paying field, and they took that advice regardless of whether they really had any inherent interest in computing or the magic of computers. This resulted in more and more people coming into the industry who seemed like they didn't quite fit, although as a manager you want to welcome everyone on your team and get them to be their most productive, so obviously you don't want to discourage anyone. I think it may be related to what you're talking about.

On the other hand, I would say that with each new generation that comes up, they are confronting a new world with increasingly high level tools, and I don't think we should disparage these folks. It isn't like I grew up on Charles Babbage's Difference Engine; I just took the field as it was at the time I happened to be a teenager.

Like in your situation, you probably started with Java when frameworks like Spring did not exist yet or were not widely used. But as those things evolved and got better, it's what the newer people would have been taught or done in previous jobs, so I don't really buy that that in and of itself makes them lesser engineers. They may just be doing the most reasonable thing with the tools that were popular at the time that they learned. Is it possible you are conflating some specific not-so-great engineers with whom you worked, with the broader trend in that period (and today) toward increasingly high level constructs as the underlying silicon gets faster and more powerful? Not sure, just offering it to you as an idea.

I'm really sorry that you wasted 15 years! I've wasted a lot of my time on the earth as well, and I think most people feel that way about some period in their life. But it sounds like you came into some ideas and insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had, even if the experience itself was frustrating. Maybe that's just the reality of life?


Yeah so I have many recruiters and recruitment company owners in my network. I get as many emails asking if I am hiring as I did asking if I am looking for work.

The UK tech job market is dead.

And there is more than one reason. One being brexit and an exodus of talent which was followed by jobs. Second is the increased restrictions of IR35. Third is an influx of visa bound cheap labour. I kept telling people that EU workers with equal rights increase overall pay, while visa bound people will decrease it. I know because I was at the some of the tables where this topic has been discussed and desired.

And finally, the economy. The UK is in a heavy recession and it’s not just anecdotes it’s statistics too. Poverty is at all time high with millions of people unable to pay energy bills or afford food. Sometimes these stats leak in the press. There’s a good reason why some people say it’s worse than in east europe.

None of this has a reflection on _you_. It’s merely a numbers game and identifying growth areas. Data engineering is growing and data engineers lack software development practices. Perhaps explore that area. Software security is another - there will be much more trashware written, particularly using prose generators. It will also go up in demand.


currently looking for work in the uk for the first time in 2 years and having the exact same thing. 100% of the recruiters i speak to call me because they found my CV, tell me about a job, ask me if i'm interested, i say yes, they say "great, i'll send over the job spec now" and then i never hear from them again. out of curiosity i picked one recruiter and repeatedly called him back every time he said he would send it and didn't, at first he kept saying he forgot, and then pivoted to saying that he did send it and to check my spam folder etc. it can't be anything i'm saying to them because even the ones who contact me by email and ask if they can call me never respond to me when i say something along the lines of "Good morning, yes I am very interested in this role and would love to know more about it, my number is XXXXXXXXXXX."

i don't know what they get out of this but i'm getting pretty fucking tired of being interrupted by 10 minute phone calls 5-6 times a day when the recruiters have zero intention of following through on any of it in the first place.


As others have said, rewrite the CV. It's not clear to me who you are and what kind of role would best suit you. Put a summary at the top making clear what you are best at and what kind of role you are looking for. Summarize your skills and achievments. Consider using simple graphics. eg List of tech skills rated with slide bar from expert to familiar understanding.


General advice, make at least a slightly different resume for each group / organization / company that you're applying to that are targeted to their hiring spiel and filtering forms.

The concept is not that bad, as you can break up the resume into blocks of info, and then just rearrange based on whatever the job posting really wants to emphasize.

Even just rearranging the primary skills (languages, frameworks, ect..) around into a feature block targeted toward the specific recruiter may help. Some people are diligent about reading through resumes and trying to give each a chance. However, when the tragedy of the commons gets bad enough, and people can just LLM-spam responses, the interest in "give each a chance" probably goes down.

Ex: UK.Indeed has 3100 software engineer jobs in the last 2 weeks listed. https://uk.indeed.com/jobs?q=software+engineer&fromage=14&vj...

A GitHub, Inc job has: "React experience on a senior level. 3+ years of hands-on experience in modern web stacks." Your resume has a listing for React, yet its not clear if that was a major component, or just some minor detail. "Worked on backend and frontend systems for this fashion retailer" And the description sounds like a lazy highschooler. To get the job you would have to tell them why you actually have web-stack skill GitHub would care about.

J.P. Morgan job has: "Proficient in coding in React, TypeScript, JavaScript" You have those, they're just mostly buried and not emphasized. The job also has "Familiarity with Investment Banking, FinTech, or Financial Markets" You (appear) to have those. "Worked on industry-leading tools used by cinema chains to manage their estates." However, it is in no way emphasized and if it was just sent out shotgun, would probably be ignored in favor of a resume that emphasized the React, Typescript and FinTech work.


You've gotten tons of great feedback already, so I'm going to keep it very brief:

1. As some others have mentioned, I had trouble extracting a career progression from the non-chronological format. I'll actually read a resume that crosses my desk, but, if you make me work too hard, I'll just move on to the next one. You're making me work too hard.

2. The design sense in the document is good, except that the typeface for the main text is fairly thin. Again, it's not that I don't like it, it's just that you're making me work too hard to get what I want out of this document. Go for a heavier weight typeface when you redo it.

That's all I've got for now. Good luck!


I get looped in on hiring quite a bit and the feedback I have:

1. Job titles. I need to understand where you were in the hierarchy. Its dumb but I do, for the same reason as

2. Salary Expectation. How much do you cost.

This is because the good hiring managers are job sizing. They want to consult their table of skills and responsibilities and justify paying you money. You have plainly declared your skills, but not your responsibilities or your cost.

Its one thing to hire a dev, but do you mentor other developers? Manage a team? "Worked On" doesn't give us a good view of your place in the team. Was there even a team? Are you a SENIOR developer, or just taking junior tasks?

If I have lots of applicants, and your resume wont feed cleanly into my job size matrix, then you arent getting an interview.


I've never heard of putting your salary expectations in your resume. It actually feels kinda inappropriate to me simply for the fact that when I get looped in on hiring I'm supposed to be assessing someones skills and not where they fit into the company budget.

And it would almost undoubtedly lead those not involved in the financial aspect of hiring to have inaccurate expectations around what their coworkers are getting paid. Potential jealousy in the hiring room?

It's totally fine for an employer to expect that info upfront but if you expect it then you should have a segment in your online application for it. Especialy because it feels like the kind of info that should be stripped out of a resume for deidentification/anonymization purposes before handing that resume around to the rest of the company.

Also because my resume is my resume. I'll tailor it for a job but it's more or less static. Just my 2 cents but I think a CV letter is probably a more appropriate place to put something that is so specific to a particular job opening.

Edit: I'm US based, if that makes a difference


Don't do that with a US resume, applying to a US company. That whole "first one to say a number loses" bit isn't 100% true, but it is generally true the more information you volunteer, the more you put yourself at a disadvantage.

OP is in the UK, presumably applying to UK companies. It's different over there.


One PSA - Please file for unemployment! The government won't be as incentivized to help you until you're their liability ;) In the US we've seen labor force participation decline which allows governments to claim unemployment is lower than it is.


Getting Universal Credit in the UK is a miserable experience that you don't want to go through unless you're basically starving and desperate. It doesn't sound like OP is at that stage.


I was in this boat in October. The market was brutal back then. The contract market is pretty much dead now except for fintech. Sent out probably more than 100 applications, and didn’t hear back from almost every single one. One of the recruiters has said it’s picked up a little since then, so fingers crossed

I don’t see anything especially wrong with your CV. Maybe add a few sentences at the top about who you are, what you’re looking for etc.

How was Arts Alliance Media? I was going to go there as my first job after uni - but they pulled the offer literally one working day before I was meant to start


You have an impressing background!

I think folks reading this are seeing that you are too technical and lack of business acumen (while maybe not true).

For the work that you have done in each company they may be interested in the results of you creating these not that you created those. Did you ever find out what was the impact of your software development on the actual business?

Make sure to include numbers, people love data and lifts in sales, reach, clicks, awareness, revenue, etc.

You can save so much space by summarizing your language skills elsewhere instead of in each company. It also sounds redundant to say Used X, Y, Z because of course you needed to Use some programming language to achieve that. Group all of those elsewhere for those that you feel you are an expert with.

Best of luck!


Thanks for the reply!

I'm definitely guilty of thinking like a dev. Built what the PM wanted, they liked it, I did good, right? D'oh. I guess I should have been keeping notes of those business figures all this time. I'll definitely do that when I find a job again. Of course, even if sales improved while I was there, I'd feel a bit silly claiming it was because of me, but maybe I should anyway. Thank you!

About summarizing those skills, you're probably right. I did it this way because I had a recruiter say it needed to be clear what tech was used in which job, but I guess people are always going to have different expectations. I'll try it the other way for a bit. Cheers!


I had a quick glance through the unusually formatted resume, and saw big glaring gaps in employment. Also, seems like you just graduated from University a couple of years ago ?

Those 2 things would just make me close out the tab and onto the next resume tab.

Looking again, I see the gaps are "filled" in other random spots on that resume, like initially, it looked like before 2015-2016, you worked only in 2008-2010 - thats a big 5 year unemployed gap ! Then, I found the missing parts on the left side, in arbitrary order.


It doesn’t sound like you’re applying online, so this might not apply but: Write the most fragile resume parser you can. Now make it so your resume can be parsed by it. This made a world of difference for me last go around.


I went from being contacted 4 times a week to once a month, maybe.

There's too many devs and too few jobs imho, so it's tougher.

Market will rebalance, and we need to cope with this new reality of jobs being harder to find.


There's a lot of great advice here already on improving your résumé - I agree with pretty much all of it.

Something that hasn't been mentioned yet though is the typo quite close to the start - 'impariments'. That'd be a red flag for me regarding attention to detail.

In this highly competitive market, résumé optimisation matters more than ever. Mine's certainly not perfect.

Like you, I'm struggling to find a new job too; but as a Senior Ruby Developer in Australia. Godspeed in landing something.


1. List your skills separately as well in a small box somewhere. I shouldn't have to read your entire CV to find out.

2. You didn't mention your educational background. Please list if possible.


1. Thanks! Will do.

2. University of life. Never been much of an issue, but maybe that's changing?


I'd echo what some of the other people have said in that "worked on" is doing a lot of work in your CV. I get that you want to be brief, but you could go to 2 pages and add in the necessary detail.

EG instead of "Worked on" have something like "Was responsible for module that did XX. Optimised the code to serve an additional YYY customers per day on same spec hardware" i.e. more detail on exactly what you did.


I have had some success with this CV so feel free to take inspiration or copy bits: https://cv.gushogg-blake.com/

The main difference is I have a short para at the top as an intro. Also you can click each position for more details.

Code for it is on gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gushogg-blake/svelte-cv


Jonathan Blow predicted the collapse of web jobs about a year back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTkRPwnzE4w

Basically get out of web dev if you can. Do real programming and try and tackle harder problems.

Or even step into entrepreneurship. A talented programmer should be able to create a fast growing company within 2 years if they really applied themselves.


…what?

Your last sentence flies right in the face of every statistic around new business failure rates. You might get a nice side project going, but no sentence like that should imply it’s that simplified.

And to be clear I support the idea that programmers should be open to walking the path of entrepreneurship but we owe it to our fellow people to not paint a false picture.


Blow has a ton of bad takes even if he's a very knowledgeable game programmer. I don't think you should use this to try and explain the broader macroeconomic conditions we're currently facing. The much more reasonable explanation is we're moving from an economic regime where borrowing money was cheap to one where it's expensive and there are a lot of experienced developers in the labor market after a year that had hundreds of thousands of layoffs rather than a general collapse of the web development space.


Ah yes, the 2024 version of the old Hackernews "any programmer who's any good should be able to quit their job Friday and walk into a new role the following Wednesday".

Still not true.


The last statement is complete bullshit. To build a cash flow positive company requires a lot sales, marketing, PR etc and probably more than 1 engineer.


As someone enrolled in a bachelors program for computer science, this terrifies me.

Makes me wonder if I’m wasting my time and should be perusing something else.


You’ve still got 3 or 4 years. It’ll probably be better then


make sure to expand your social circle and connect with peers and professors.


It's not your CV, you clearly are an attractive candidate.

Btw so many people here have reviewed your CV and no-one has pointed out the typo ("impariment")!


Firstly, I know nothing of the industry and am just speculating so don't take my question the wrong way...

Wouldn't the the sudden cascade of layoff announcements at big tech employers be interpreted as a leading indicator by employers industry-wide? Like especially considering the way the news cycle has basically amplified each successive announcement?

Again, just a question because my input is admittedly of no value.


Do not listen to these CV nazis too much, your resume is fine. I am having the exact similar experience to you. Star employee for a decade and suddenly unemployable (a year now). I am pretty sure a lot of us are out there, they just do not want to expose their unemployment status publicly like you and me (and I understand that). The answer by ath3nd might sound "conspiracy theory" but it is closer to the truth. The thing affecting you and me is mostly because of (macro) games played much high above us.


I really don't want this to come across as snarky, and things are very tough out there right now, but if you think the OP's CV is fine and yours is similar to his then that might explain some of your own difficulties.

It's no good being a "star" employee if you can't communicate that fact to other people.


Thank you I needed to hear this, but I also detest self propaganda. Maybe I need to find a middle ground. Or just reach out to one of my old employers ... which again, I am not a big fan of :)


I think as someone else said - be authentic.

We can have a tendency to underplay what we have done. Often in tech we pull amazing rabbits out of hats - and then when people say how great it is, we'll respond with how it was nothing and anyone could have done it. It's nothing special...

Someone gave me some advice a few years back which was - if you don't feel mildly embarrassed when you read your CV you are probably underselling yourself.

On the reaching out to old employers - unless you left on really bad terms - drop them a line. You are a known quantity, it's a low effort hire that won't cost them anything (apart from your salary).


Work on your social skills. Past a certain technical competence threshold, social skills are 60-75% of the job. Companies no longer want good programmers; they want redundant arrays of average programmers, which means that if you are an average engineer who is oriented toward collaboration and communication you are on the fast track to success in this field.


As someone else said, forget the one-page rule, you're cutting content that it takes some experience and good will to infer from what you wrote. Screeners receive a lot of resumes, and you don't want them to be left wondering if your experience is relevant or not, at least not on this market.

2 to 3 pages for someone with a few years of experience is perfectly acceptable in software development.


When I’m hiring if still prefer 1, and give negative points to anyone that goes longer.


Why?


Not being able to get you resume down to a single page, shows a lack of attention to detail. You can't tell which of these 120 bullet points are the most important? You are just blasting me with info and hope I figure it out? I bet your code is way too verbose as well :)

Now if I am hiring a CEO with 30 years of experience, you can have a second page. But never actually hired for something like this, so maybe I would see the same trend and still prefer 1 page.


Nice. I don't have anything for you but maybe this will be useful:

My two cents: o Learn machine learning, artificial intelligence - fast.ai

o Learn Rust, Rust, Rust and some Go

o Scala is good. Keep it. All the stuff you learnt whilst using Scala and Python will be useful in _Rust_.

o SDE is huge. Try something other can webdev and gamedev.

No matter what others may say next frontier will be roughly these: - Artifical Intelligence - Quantum Computing

Get good at these. Now, is the right time.


There are barely any Rust jobs outside of crypto stuff at the moment. Not sure if this is good advice.

While I agree that getting the basics of machines learning under your belt is a good idea, the "AI" field is pretty hype driven so one should also have plans for another Ai Winter and not solely rely on it. I don't think hype chasing is is good career advice.


Hmm. There are "plenty" of Rust jobs outside of crypto stuff. They are:

- Your typical service driven stuff (aka full-stack/backend/microservice et. al)

- Tons and tons of opensource projects from AWS (investing), Microsoft (investing) and Google (yes, investing) to name a few off the top of my head.

- Startups have so to speak started embracing Rust https://corrode.dev/podcast/

- Embedded Systems <- C/C++/ASM's bread and butter traditionally.

- Rust ecosystem is maturing faster than anything I have seen in the past (ok, maybe Go's ecosystem was fast as well).

Regarding AI and ML stuffs: While I do agree that chasing such hype may be intangible in the very short to short time frame. No doubt, the AI winter may follow a typical curve and follow up with a AI "summer". _Every_ major technology in the past 20-30 years has followed a V curve. AI/ML probably won't be an exception.

I understand that the OP may have hobbies outside of "learning" but making a dedicated time outside of it will yield by leaps and bounds. Always be learning (make time for it) - that's the gist in short without going into the nitty gritties.


What resources do you recommend for learning QC?


Whilst being Microsoft platform, still the katas are great https://quantum.microsoft.com/en-us/experience/quantum-katas

If you want go deep, you will need to refresh/learn few key mathematical foundations that form the basis of QC. They are definitely not hard IMHO. If so, then read Michael Nielsen and Isaac Chuang excellent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quantu...


https://github.com/microsoft/QuantumKatas (this one can be run locally for learning purposes using Jupter notebooks)


It's not you. It's high interest rate. In a bid to get the inflation down, the fed has been increasing the interest rates. Currently, they are at a 22 years high. Unemployment rate is at 3.7%. Most of the big tech companies have been doing a mass layoff last and this year. The job market has to absorb them too.


Did any of you laid of web devs try making a CV site for laid off software engineers? Seems like the time is now. Here is an example. The frontpage contains a form to fill out (a CV template), and a login registration interface (similar to Hacker News). Once the form is filled out, website/your-username.pdf is the generated CV, that you can share only by linking.


Find a recruiter and and offer lunch or £ for a CV refresh. I read some good advice in the comments here but we are not your target audience


I too have had a lot of issues. Not sure if AI is filtering my resume. One thing is I do think I am Aging out. 5-10 years ago I was getting i terviews with my tech companies now nothing, even with more degrees and experience.

The other thing that’s killed me is short tenured jobs. Like it’s probably better to have a gap than a job less than a year.


It's not you, companies are squeezing candidates right now. Either through unreal requirements or really low offers.

I've been to a few final rounds where the hiring manager was already discussing specifics of what I'd be doing and then simply got ghosted by recruiters. Zero replies, not even the canned response saying they have chosen someone else.


Your 2022 work experience is so well written and impressive, which is partly why last year you had no trouble finding employment. Now, contrast that with the 2 bullet points in 2023; "Used C#, Unity." is an uninspiring way to describe your year of work. In 2024, your 2023 section will weight more than your 2022 section.


it has gotten extremely bad compared to 2023 or any other year in my career memory. and I am the same person. no: I'm better and more skilled and accomplished than ever before, with new achievements and attractive evidence (in public view) added to my CV this last fall. in any sane and objective world I'd be treated better than before

no


The UK job market is rough at the moment. It's not just you.

I posted a comment here a few days ago linking to this, check out the graph for London: https://hnhiring.com/trends

Not are there now fewer open positions, there are more people applying due to layoffs.


I am looking at your CV and have some feedback:

- You missed your work goals objective paragraph! Why are you looking to a job? What is your interest? LinkedIn and Internet in general are full of examples. Why do I need to hire you beyond your specific skills? How are you as a human? as a team player? How do you contribute to organizations beyond your formal work?

- I will not separate between full time work and independent, OSS, volunter. I will follow the typical reverse chronological order for work in a single column.

- Put a summary of your skills somewhere (Python, C++) and learn and experiment with Rust if you want to increase your chances!

If you ask me I would pay a few hours of someone to help you with your CV. It could be an average recruiter that has the hiring filters always present on his/her head.


Thanks very much for taking a look!

I appreciate the suggestion of adding more "soft" human bits about me. As a dev my natural reaction to team-player stuff on CVs is "anyone can say they're a team player, who cares?" but maybe recruiters see it differently.

I've gone back and forth on separating the volunteer work. Having it all in one column I felt it looked like I was trying to pad out "real" paid experience with unpaid "filler", but again, appreciate the different perspective and will try chronological again for a bit.

I like Rust; done some OSS contributions in it. I'll try adding a section about that. Thanks!

Will also consider professional help (of the CV kind).

Thanks again for responding!


No problem. One more thing:labot "anyone can say..." you should be and sound genuine, use your own voice, not a copy and paste of the typical bully promoting its work working in teams.


> - You missed your work goals objective paragraph! Why are you looking to a job? What is your interest? LinkedIn and Internet in general are full of examples. Why do I need to hire you beyond your specific skills? How are you as a human? as a team player? How do you contribute to organizations beyond your formal work?

This generally doesn't exist on UK CVs


Things have definitely changed and I would expect to see something on CVs that come across my desk now.


You might want to talk about the output like impact more and reduce input. Big companies care about that a lot


I don’t have information that explains your experience but I can give you concrete resume advice based on my own experience as a hiring manager: https://www.cenizal.com/resume-advice-for-engineers/


Just in case: putting your value proposition on top of your resume, in very concise terms, helps. At least it worked for my resume [1], which employers and recruiters praise from time to time.

[1]: https://dmitry.cheryasov.info/resume/


I recommend including quantitative data, i.e. the feature I worked on increased user engagement by 15%.


I’m hitting the same thing with first round technical interviews, which prior to the end of 2022 almost always used to lead to further rounds, now I’m getting summarily rejected at that early stage.

There’s so many reasons coming to a confluence which are causing the higher bar.


You've clearly got an array of interesting skills and you could expose them more readily, perhaps at the top so people don't have to scan through the whole thing to get a gist of your skill set? Seem pretty interesting to me but it could use some polish.


During an economic downturn, businesses often struggle to find areas of growth. As a result, they tend to focus on hiring candidates with very specific skills and at a lower paycheck, with the sole aim of maintaining their current market share.


I realize it’s cliche at this point but are you considering that many big corporate IT shops are heading towards a “Let’s see if AI advances enough in the next six months to be able to crunch out that code before we hire someone” mode?


Not seeing anything fundamental wrong.

Perhaps your python focus is a current issue in the UK market?


Your name is fairly common, so I would advice you to include explicit links to social media profiles to minimise confusion by (automated) HR profile builders/analyzers.


I would not say it is you, it is the general market right now. Companies are uncertain about the economic outlook.


Hapland was a favorite of mine back in the day. I still search it up every few years! Good luck with your search.


I DISAGREE THAT IT IS SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR RESUME.

You said it yourself: You got lots of pings, resume or not. The resume is secondary to the state of the market.

Going through same. This is like 2007-2008 or 2000. You need a playbook here.

1. You are a media-related programmer, you better be stacking skills in Generative AI, showing your work, and becoming proficient in generative AI tools across all stacks. It hasn't happened yet, but Generative AI + your skills will be in serious demand (AI technologist / AI generalist developer or Creator). It hasn't happened yet and won't happen until the layoffs are done. Don't get caught off-sides when the hiring market resumes and suddenly everyone is demanding Unity + Generative AI skills.

2. Sometimes there is literally nothing you can do but wait

I have been in same position the last six months or so. Absolutely nothing is moving. I have been through multiple interviews, companies pretend to be wanting to hire (they actually arent). There is ZERO urgency in this hiring market, companies are in full on scale-down mode and pivot. We are still in waves of layoffs. After / during the layoffs and restructuring, companies must THEN reconsider a NEW direction to go on.

A new set of skills will go into vogue and suddenly everyone starts hiring in that direction. Unfortunately, you cannot control the timelines. It could take months or years before companies decide which direction to take next. AI is going to obviously be the #1 skill. Ability to show you can supercharge what you are doing by augmenting via AI and Generative AI will be in the most demand imo. But that is a strategy decision and companies are still winding down and moving out of their prior strategies they used the last decade.

3. This is the end of the old cycle and start of a new cycle

Expect it to take time to ramp the new cycle. Skills that were super valuable before are now less valuable. Companies are more focused on shutting down the old strategy than hiring the new strategy.This is a very uncomfortable in-between period and it could last another 6-18 months. The best you can do is focus on predicting the market and getting "into position."

The market may suck for longer than you think, you have to "wait well" and stack skills and networks. Unfortunately there may not be anything other than to wait, and let the market work itself out.

Gaming has been getting annihilated as a market.In a downturn, the shakiest stuff gets thrashed out first. Crypto, gaming are "nice to haves" from the perspective of the market.The market is going to contract down to only the essentials. Stuff people absolutely need to spend money on. All the "nice to have and fun" stuff is getting defunded.

Follow the money. It will flood into generative AI and AI productivity tools.


CV is now doing a 404 - happy to have a look - email is in my profile.


Hm, not sure what's up with that. Anyway, thank you! Sent you an email.


Seems to work now.

Here's what I emailed you - putting it here as all general advice that might be useful.

---

First impressions are that for 13 years experience you CV is a bit short. I would not be concerned about letting your CV go onto multiple pages, there's nothing wrong with a long CV when you have sufficient experience to fill the space.

You don't have anything about who you are on the CV - just a few paragraphs to give the reader a broad brush about what it is you do and what you are bringing to the table can really help.

For each company I generally include something brief about what the company (or the part of the company I'm working in) does - you want the reader to think "That's an interesting business - I bet this guy learnt a thing or two there". People are trying to pattern match against what they are looking for. So anything you can do that will trigger thoughts like "I bet this guy has seen the same problems we have" or "We're going to hit similar things to what this guy has seen" etc..

What's the impact what you've done had on the business and users? For example the recent work you've done sounds like pretty important stuff - rather than listing it as a bunch of technical achievements try and reframe it as impacts on the business and users. E.g.

"Created a set of user friendly administration tools for trial staff that allowed them to easily monitor participants’ progress, and generate statistical data. This allowed them to focus on blah blah blah blah..."

Think about why you were hired for each role - what is it about you that made them pick you and then try and express that in the CV along with how you met those needs. e.g. in the recent University job you were probably hired because of your expertise in software engineering and you probably brought a lot of experience to the role on how to leverage technology to get the job done.

I always try and remember that the person doing the initial read of the CV is not going to be technical - you need to get someone excited about the problems you can solve in the business.

Everyone has a list of technologies they've used on their CV - so you need to stand out from them.


This was my first impression as well. Additionally, by using multiple columns to avoid a second page, OP makes the document harder to read and thereby obscures his full work history.

I recommend, following any rework, handing this to a few friends (preferably non-technical), in person, for feedback on readability and appeal.


Let me make a completely unrelated and orthogonal observation that has nothing to do with this post.

You see the url that is in the OP? This one. https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pdf

Copy that url, paste it into a new tab, but remove the f at the end. *BRIGHT LIGHTS AND SEIZURE WARNING*

EDIT - Oh wait, the result is different depending on the browser. On one browser (Firefox), I get a creepy looking 404 error. On another (Tor, which is also Firefox), I got a giant strobe light effect with a bunch of diagonal lines.

In the Tor browser, this message gets spammed a million times in the console tab.

"Blocked https://foon.uk/robin-allen-cv.pd from extracting canvas data because no user input was detected."

The strobing effect corresponds to the number of times this message gets spammed (~50 times a second).


Dude, you made Hapland!

Hapland aside, out of 5 conventional sections - Executive summary, Education, Skills, Work Experience, Miscellania - you have only one. It's not clear what you are looking for, what it is that you know and at what level. Single page is a good format, but it's secondary to the info presented and it's incomplete.


up your network mojo (not the tcp/ip kind).


how should he go about doing that?


Why are you not freelancing in the interim?


how would that be any easier?


It won't be easier but pays some $ while finding a job + sometimes these freelance things can turn into a job.


Because a bunch of obscenely rich people decided they want to use 'macroeconomic factors' as an excuse to rank in even more profits and bump up their stock prices, while throwing workers under the bus, tanking the industry and destroying our individual bargaining positions.

Oh, they also can't take a blame for overhiring during the pandemic, they were simply following the same 'macroeconomic factors' that are the reason for the mass layoffs now.

You'd think that the economy is some kind of terrorist with demands holding the gun to the CEOs' head. They just have to follow these demands and the economy simply happens upon them, absolving them of any moral and ethical responsibility for their lack of foresight and accountability.

Basically they are all mere automata that bows down to and is animated only by the overpowerful economy.

It's the same old in capitalist world, just this time software engineers are the ones affected.

The system is beyond fixing now, as you have always been treated as an expensive but totally expendable cog in their money making machines. We should have organized into unions and elected government that cares about humans (and nature), and not for the GDP and their own bottom lines.

Thank Elon and the FAANGs for starting the wave that flooded the market thousands of qualified good engineers as soon as they realized they need actual sustained revenue rather than the nebulous promise of never ending cancerous growth. When the market is that flooded with good people, of course our wages stagnate and our employability is in question.

It's called 'end-stage capitalism' for a reason, because the diagnosis is simple: there is nothing coming after it.


I agree with many of your points, but the comical levels of unadulterated doomerism make it hard to take very seriously. The world isn’t over because a company decided some unnecessary backend employees didn’t need to work there anymore.

Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.


Agree


Capitalism is like a sleight of hand trick, a cheap con designed to distract with stupid toys and distractions while it robs you blind.

It pretending that it's creating value, while never showing where the value comes from. Often it comes from extraction from other places. What the OP is experiencing is merely one of the many ugly heads of the very much real process of extracting value in pursuit of profit. There are many other sides:

- Your cheap t-shirts are often created with child labor, and at tremendous cost to the environment.

- Their cigarettes and pain relievers are your addiction and your death.

- Your meat-for-everybody-everyday comes at the expenses of destruction of native habitat, immense animal suffering, toxic runoff and deforestation.

- Your consumer electronics come at the cost of toxic levels of PFAs in your and your children's blood.

- Your convenient transport comes at expense of choking cities, rising sea levels, and dying habitats.

- Your ChatGPT/Dall-E convenience robs hundreds if not thousands of people from their livelihood, and has been trained of others' work without their permission or consent, and the electricity and pollution bill will astound you.

- Coca cola and their plastic producing friends and its convenient packaging created an obesity epidemic and an island of garbage in the pacific.

- Teflon and 3M and their amazing, revolutionary non-stick surfaces created our future cancers.

What's happening with the layoffs in the industry is just another facet of extracting $$$ without looking where the "extraction" comes from, yet another logical level of "optimizing", disguising the fact that it's all a race to the bottom. Yet another group is going to be replaced by automation or less workers doing more work for less pay, simply in pursuit of "value".

> Standards of living have never been higher, worldwide poverty has never been lower, all hand-delivered to each of us via capitalism.

Yes, it's the excess before the imminent end, it's the idea you can infinitely grow in a finite world with finite resources. This idea is mirrored by the corps and their gambles on the stock market, pretending to create a value in the millions more than they actually do create. It's unhinged, unstoppable, unsupported by reality, grotesque growth, very much like cancer.

You can disagree, protest and twist and shake your logic like an eel trying to deny the undeniable: the only thing capitalism is hand-delivering is the collapse of society, the mass extinction of nature, and the end of a livable Earth.

The fact that the OP, a more than talanted dev, can't find a job easily atm is very much connected to the extraction of value, and the insidious exploitative character of capitalism. Take your growth and keep it to yourself.


It sounds like you've been out of work for a year and you've fallen into a state of anger and despair. It's understandable and you're hardly the first person that has happened to, but I'd really encourage you to rethink how you're looking at life. Just in a practical sense, even if you can 90% hide your rage in a work setting, the other 10% is still going to be enough to discourage anyone from hiring you. People are just going to be scared to work with you and hiring managers won't want to take the chance. Just my two cents, friend.


it sounds like you are projecting your own insecurities my friend. how about you try to dismantle ath3nd's take with counter argument instead of going for ad hominem attack.


It actually was not meant to be an attack, although perhaps you are right that I am projecting my own insecurities in some way. If you care to say more about why you saw my message that way, you might help me with your feedback.

My honest motivation for writing the message was that I understood (maybe misunderstood) ath3nd to be saying that they had lost a job one year ago, and then I saw a very long list of political grievances. It matched a pattern I have observed in my career where a person on the team seems to have very strident political opinions, but when you talk to that person it becomes clear that the person is angry about something in their own life and is using political discourse as a way of being angry all the time without acknowledging to themselves the issue in their own lives.

I put these two things together and thought perhaps I could help a fellow engineer who may have fallen into a pit of despair. Based on ath3nd's response, it doesn't sound like that's their situation. Maybe my comment helped another person who was reading the thread. Maybe it helped no one. I'll never know.

I'm not going to going to offer counterarguments because it was never my intention to engage ath3nd on any political matters. I don't necessarily even disagree with the person, but I also don't think HN is at its best when people use it for political debates.

My comment was posted with a good heart on the theory that it might or might not help someone else. That does not preclude the possibility that my comment reflects my own insecurities or failings. I think almost anything you do or say is in some way a reflection of who you are, and like anyone else I surely do have various insecurities and flaws.


> It sounds like you've been out of work for a year and you've fallen into a state of anger and despair.

I've had non-stop employment for the last 17 years.

I think you get the wrong idea. I am happily employed for the moment. I am lucky to be in a very senior (VP of Eng) position in a company that I helped start. I am also able to hire and retain engineers for my teams so, luckily, I am not at the mercy of risk-averse hiring managers "scared to work with me". My point is that not everybody is that lucky, and that now even great people with great skills like the OP are struggling to find employment, and it's not their fault, but it's the system's.

One of capitalism's great ploys is the: "suck it all up and grid, it all depends on you" attitude where all emphasis is on you and your skills, but no emphasis on the problems of the system iself. It's like lottery, somebody got rich playing it, so you must be doing it wrong.

- If you didn't make it, you didn't grind/hustle hard enough. Must be something wrong with you

- There is a great garbage island in the Pacific ocean. Must be that you, the consumer didn't recycle well enough. Totally nothing to do with the corps created non-recyclable materials that are cheaper to throw away than reuse.

- The cities are choking with air pollution. Must be YOUR fault for not using a bike, and not the government which didn't make the infrastructure for biking or quick and efficient public transport, nor the corps which didn't invest in alternative fuels when it was the time.

It's always the individual person's fault in capitalism, and all attempts to question the system are explained away with the individual sucking at it. Even individuals within the system are likely to turn on other and say: "oh, if you just did this harder or better, you'd be richer". There is a lot of survivor bias there and not understanding that success in that system is often based on pure luck, where you were born, and who your parents were. In reality, for the majority of people, unless you are very rich, or live in a country with at least some amount of social security (i.e not the US), they are one chronic condition or long sickness away from homelessness.

We shouldn't close our eyes and see how the world is for others, and realize that we are one of the few lucky ones. But we could easily, as you said, have been out of a job, despite a very impressive amount of skills, similar to the OP.

And while there are for sure things that they can do to get some employment, the fact that the OP is actually a legend in some communities but is still struggling to find a job, that should be ringing alarm bells for all of us. Because I don't think all of us here have the same or comparable accolades as the OP.


ath3nd, I responded to a sibling post to this one, but it's largely the same as what I would say in response to this post. It sounds like I misinterpreted you and misunderstood your situation. I pattern matched to a situation I have seen where a person has very strident political or adjacent opinions not really because they care that much about changing public policy, but as a way of coping with a problem in their own life. Obviously, on an anonymous message board, I'm shooting in the dark trying to guess what someone's situation might be and whether my response is likely to be of any help. Sounds like it did not help you.


Read more on this: https://text.npr.org/1227326215

> "They're getting away with it because everybody is doing it. And they're getting away with it because now it's the new normal," he said. "Workers are more comfortable with it, stock investors are appreciating it, and so I think we'll see it continue for some time."

> Interest rates, sitting around 5.5%, are far from the near-zero rates of the pandemic. And some tech companies are reshuffling staff to prioritize new investments in generative AI. But experts say those factors do not sufficiently explain this month's layoff frenzy.

They are simply bumping up their stock price. They were hiring and growing like little malignant cancers when that was the signal of "success", and now they are "streamlining", which is the new signal of "success".


The fact someone so skilled can't find work sets off so many alarm bells for me.


404


a hot take, fwiw:

pedantic: not a fan. why "some", why not all of them? > "Converted some Flash games to a custom..."

eh? you wrote the article there? odd phrasing > "I wrote an article about this project here"

left-right independent chronological ordering is weird and makes it hard to digest. suggest top to bottom single column would be easier to understand. you could make the OSS stuff a separate section or interleave.

Since 2010, you've worked at 3-4 different places for only a couple years each and worked on "frontend and backend systems", oh and did a bunch of OSS/volunteer work stuff. If I had to summarize the CV into one sentence that's what I get. I don't really see what skills you have, but you "used" Python, Django, Postgres, Typescript, Node.js, HTML Canvas, Websockets, etc. Well, every internet user "uses" those.

It just sounds ... weird ... and fishy. What actual skills are you purporting to have? Why so much time not getting paid? Were you unemployable? Or much worse - very successful independently? (sarcasm, but sadly too true)

Personally, I'll always give the benefit of the doubt and talk to a person to see what's up. But this CV/Resume in it's current form isn't helping you.

I'm not going to lie, we may not be typical, but where I'm at, when you are young and bounce around every couple years for a couple jobs, I don't see so much of an issue. But when you are mid-senior career, you don't look right. Way too many short shallow gigs.


Lots of folks will have opinions on this; adding mine just to give you an additional data point. Specifically not looking at other comments so that I can give you my direct take; I'm sure others may disagree and that's fine. :) I'm a hiring manager at a small company that recently hired two .NET developers.

* You're not alone. There are a lot of people looking for work right now, and less work to go around, it seems. I recently had 60+ applications for 2 developer roles without using a recruiter or anything but word of mouth through communities I participate in. From a pure numbers standpoint, this means applicants have to work harder to stand out, which sucks for applicants and also because it leads to people gaming the system.

* So much of the hiring process has been enshittified. Tools doing keyword scans have replaced a lot of human judgment, and resumes have started to adapt to keep up. I abhor the practice, but: you may want to have a separate resume for places that may use these products, so that you get past auto-screening.

* Your resume is nicely laid out. However, I fear it will likely get you auto-rejected as lots of screening tools can't parse it for roles. You may want to have a version that avoids the multi-column layout. Again, this will be a guess as to whether companies are using that kind of software or not.

* I highly recommend adding your role or the equivalent role to the subtitle, e.g. "Senior Developer (Contract)" or ".NET Developer (Contract)" . It gives a quick overview of what type of work you've been doing, which is helpful when I'm scanning 60 resumes. I would go so far as to suggest You make the role a part of the heading and keep the employer & date below. E.g. "Senior .NET Developer" up top and "Technically Creative (contract) | Oct 2021 - Dev 2023" below.

* Suggest adding start/end dates including Month & Year (e.g. "Oct 2021 - Dec 2022"). It gives a sense of timing.

* There's another tough choice you face: whether to share unemployment status. It's a double-edged sword for candidates. For me, people who state their situation get respect for the authenticity, and those who try to hide it make me suspicious. But I also respect that people are biased against unemployed people even though they shouldn't be, so I would suggest making that a per-application decision.

* I already get a decent sense of this, but you may want to tweak your bullet points to reflect accomplishments/impact some more. Shows that you understand business value (which I believe you do).

* Technology under each bullet point makes me as a reviewer do extra work. Some kind of summary of technology you're proficient in will be a good addition. Should you have to? Probably not. Would I still read this CV? Of course. Will lots of folks glaze over and move on when they have to do extra work while reviewing hundreds of applicants? Yes.

* I like that you include your GitHub. I definitely look at those and it never counts against an applicant (for me. Again, double-edged sword).

* I think the one-page resume is working against you here. With your experience since '05 I think moving to 2 pages and expanding on some of the suggestions above will work in your favor.

* The title at the top of your resume, "Software Developer", could probably do with a tweak. It's one of the first things I see. "Senior Software Developer", "[Stack of Job You're Targeting] Developer", etc. may go a long way. I recently gave someone an interview because they had "Systems Integration Developer" in their title and I was looking for integration work. It would be an effective technique IMO.

* Find your local & global communities on Twitter, Mastodon, Slack, LinkedIn, Discord, etc. -- many often times have jobs channels where things will pop up. Coming from a community comes across as a sort of implicit reference in terms of places you may participate. And there's usually little downside as you learn things, participate in discussions, and build relationships there that are nice either way.

I wish you the best of luck finding your next opportunity!


Welcome to the desert of the real.


While people are right to point out the down market, I think they're ignoring the obvious corollary. My theory is that you've been getting by with the weaknesses in your resume because the tech market hasn't seen a major downturn for awhile. From skimming your blog, it doesn't seem like you're an unskilled developer, but that's how your resume presents you.

Others pointed out that you don't mention impact, just responsibilities, and this is 100% the thing you need to fix. Apologies for the handwaving with somewhere (read this on my phone, replying on my desktop), but somewhere you said you were thinking like a dev and someone else backed you with a "we're not MBAs". I strongly encourage you to drop this dichotomy from your mental model. You should be curious about the impact of your work, whether it's to benefit the business, your coworkers, or some technical process. Your resume reads like that of someone who did what they were told and not a lick more. I've worked with people like that and I cannot give them ownership over projects. You're selling yourself as a liability.

But there's good news, judging from your blog you have had impact, so it just comes down to figuring out how to sell it. (sidebar: everyone is in sales, in this case you are selling yourself, this shouldn't make you uncomfortable, just think of it of making it easier for hiring managers to say "yes, I would like to take to this person / take a chance on them / think they will do well on the team).

Taking an example from your resume: "Wrote a server for participants to connect to and be given challenges to solve collaboratively in real time." How many participants? How much compute did you need to process this? What was the server response time? How would anyone look at this line and know you did a good job? Not just "well, they did the job, but was it good?".

Writing resumes for this approach is a skill. I'm guessing you will be a little unpracticed, but that's fine. I first switched my mindset on this about a decade ago and took 3 - 4 hours to learn the basics of LaTeX (I was tired of formatting in MS Word) and followed the advice laid out here: https://careercup.com/resume. You probably have enough experience where 2 pages might actually be fine. (it doesn't have to be LaTeX, I just gave it a try, found that I liked the end results, and have been slowly adding to my knowledge here or there)

Also, your GitHub profile is a mess. You're not putting a consistent good foot forward in your popular repositories. libtweak is pretty strong (imo, README could serve to have a "here's where I used it" section because I assume you used it for your games) but github-code-reviews is a much smaller scoped project. Pick your most impressive ones and figure out how to show just those. I've also found the advice listed here to be helpful: https://blog.boot.dev/jobs/build-github-profile/.

IMO, the two column layout has to go. Also, I'd separately call out your personal homepage and your GH profile. Expecting busy recruiters to click through GH and see your personal page is not a strategy for success.

tl;dr; you're presenting what appears to be good experience poorly, but the good news is that this is easier to fix than getting the experience in the first place


Amazing reply, thanks so much!

Re: GitHub, you're right, it is kind of bad. I'm proud of some contributions I've made to other people's projects but you can't pin a PR. My own repositories are largely old or experimental. I'd consider not putting the Github link in at all, but I've had recruiters say it was vital to have it. I might make some private projects public just so I can show them off.

Also much appreciate the advice re. focusing on impact. Difficult to add hard figures retrospectively but I'll see what I can do.

Thanks again for taking the time to give all that advice.


Re: hard figures retrospectively. I've been in this boat before. Here's what I did. I would tell the recruiter / hiring manager / etc that I made a little c conservative estimate from my notes. While it probably is less impressive than the actual number, I wanted to err on the side of correctness over unearned praise for when I couldn't get the exact number.

This also led to me updating my resume about 1x / quarter, which I am currently behind so time to take my own advice and do that this evening. But the goal here is to regularly update so you can find the hard numbers if you need to. Plus, the market being what it is, you'll never know when layoffs will come a-knocking.

(edit: typo)




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: