Keep your resume in the stack

You have until the fold¹ to get my attention

Take 30 seconds to skim this resume. What impression does it leave?

Alternate text for Buzzword Central Resume

They seem like a software engineer or manager? They’re at least tech adjacent?

Who knows—I don’t have enough time for this, and I am absolutely not going to send this nonsense to anyone else

I would burn your resume, but that may subject someone else to the horrors within

If you printed out your resume and lit it on fire, there is a small chance [it lights] your curtains on fire. … [The] fireman … saw that you had VSCode … open, and they go “Oh wow, you know how to code! My brother’s cousin’s uncle works at this company downtown, and they’ve been looking for an engineer for the past two months
– Leon Noel²

Instead, I’ll take the safer route and atomize it

Don’t waste my time with fluff

If you write “Detail Oriented” on your resume. I will subconsciously look for spelling and formatting mistakes, I will find one, and I will judge you for it. I know it doesn’t matter, but I don’t care

If you write “trustworthy”—I don’t believe you. Take it off your resume and add a bullet that proves I can trust you

“Results-oriented?” I don’t see any results, and trust me, I’ve been blankly staring at the page for at least 4-and-a-half minutes

You “successfully” implemented a feature? I’d hope so. Is everything else on your resume a failed attempt?

How are you different?

If your resume fits anyone in your field, you don’t have a resume—you have job description

How are you different from other software engineers? How are you different from engineers in your company or team?

Developed features to enhance the reliability, usability, and accessibility of Classroom’s Originality Reporter

This sounds like a group effort. What features did you develop? How did you enhance reliability, usability, and accessibility?

Google Classroom Originality Reporter Subject Matter Expert

• Oversaw releases and worked with other teams to divide resources between flex pools
• Expanded usability by extending language support and file type compatibility
• Addressed accessibility bugs related to screen readers, keyboard navigation, and focus, adhering to Google’s standards

Nice! It was a group effort, but you were the SME and had a good amount of ownership over the project

Be more specific

Investigated client issues related to Docker container performance

Who are these clients, and why are they using Docker?

Streamlined security research operations by creating secure virtual environments as well as diagnosing and resolving performance issues with Kubernetes

Okay! These are security researchers—you must know quite a bit about cybersecurity to isolate these containers from host machines

But I haven’t worked in tech yet!

I got you!

Built site with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using semantic structure

Amazing, you are a web developer! So why should I hire you over the 97828390829 other web developers from the stack of Junior Engineer resumes to my right?

I don’t need earth-shattering impact, just something to set you apart. What’s the coolest or most difficult thing you’ve done so far?

Improved mobile user experience through creating web components such as animated overflow menus

Great—now we’re talking!

What’s the scale?

Collaborated with open-source contributors to successfully implement a calendar system in our internal tool set, streamlining scheduling and enhancing team coordination for more efficient project management

This bullet reads to me like the candidate worked in open-source as a non-technical contributor. The team could have designed it from scratch or used an off-the-shelf solution like Calendly or Cal³. I can only assume it’s the latter

Led open-source initiative to design and develop a calendar with React, Express, and MongoDB, consolidating community events and meetings for over 1,500 users

You led a project to build a custom calendar, and it has users? Well why didn’t you say so!

You don’t need statistics for everything

I don’t need to know how many lines of code you write a day or how many tests you wrote

I’ve seen a bullet similar to the following far too many times

Reduced bugs by 56% by implementing tests

How many bugs were there before? How did you possibly measure this?

Pushing for testing is great, but please don’t make up statistics⁴ for the sake of having impact for every bullet. The result is implied—we both know why testing is helpful

Qualify impressive results. If you save customers 2 months a year and don’t back it up, I’ll be suspicious, and I will ask you about it in the interview

Please don’t write your resume with ChatGPT

I’m begging you

If you’ve paid a sliver of attention, you’d know that I don’t like fluff and want to know your achievements. ChatGPT cannot possibly know what you did and will fill your resume to the brim with buzzwords

The burden is still on you to distill your most impressive work. Keep a brag doc or journal, then hand it over to ChatGPT if you must

The Fold¹

Make it easy for everyone involved in the hiring process to know you are the best candidate for the job

For a front end software engineering role, the title at the top of your resume better say “Front End Software Engineer.” Move relevant experience above the fold

Use accents effectively. If you have a bold, bright green date, that will be the focal point. Bold technologies in the job description and accent important headings

If I don’t know what you do in 30 seconds, I will atomize your resume, and I won’t feel bad

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This blog was inspired by Nikhil Suresh’s amazingly intense blog, with great titles such as I Will Fucking Dropkick You If You Use That Spreadsheet and Most Tech Jobs Are Jokes And I Am Not Laughing. I can only hope to one day be filled with as much disdain as he 🧡

I needed something to stand out from the piles of “How to make a good resume” articles. I didn’t want to be clickbaity and say “How to get a 10k a month tech job,” so I went with resume atomization instead! It communicates my annoyances while also giving actionable advice and is just passive-aggressive enough to be fun!

Footnotes

1. “The fold” is around 3 inches down the page. If I don’t find what I’m looking for in this section, good luck next time. “The 6 second rule” is another valuable guideline. Take 6 seconds to skim your resume. How far did you get? Would you give yourself a chance? ↩ ↩²

2. Become A Software Engineer For Free (Class 01) - 100Devs ↩

3. If you haven’t tried Cal, it’s great! Open-source, free hosting for personal use, integrated video conferencing. I couldn’t connect Outlook with Calendly, so I shopped around for alternatives. Many paywalled Calendly features are free on Cal ↩

4. Don’t make up anything I can easily verify for that matter ↩