Ask HN: Path to Become the developer that companies want to hire | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Path to Become the developer that companies want to hire

14 pointsamazingmoron5 comments

Hi

first of all I would like to thank you the HN community for taking time and helping others, whenever I'm not sure about what to do next I come to HN and there is already someone with great advice/resource to guide me so thank you folks for everything.

I am a front-end developer with 4 Years of experience ( living in India ) recently due to covid-19 situation I wanted to make a switch and applied in multiple companies ( mostly based in Europe and some top tier company in India ) but none of them selected my resume to proceed with interview

at this point I am quite lost in terms of what should I do next, how to prepare myself and what to study/build

like there are Algo and DS, opensource-contributions, personal-projects, blogs, backend stuff, or even maybe new language/field

I feel like I am quite good in front-end stuff but I don't have anything cool to show in my resume

on stack overflow I went from 800 points to 2.5K in just 2 weeks of activity by answering question ( maybe I am ok or above average problem solver )

also I am not good at designing/Architecting stuff

At this point what I can do to improve myself as a great software engineer that companies want to hire.??

Thanks again folks

Maybe not totally related to your skill set, but more of a formal thing (which might be my personal view only, but I could see others agreeing here as well)

If your resume contains any typos and you are a software developer, I would assume this is the same way you develop software and are not careful enough to proofread it yourself and have another person “code review” your resume.

Compared to other resumes which don’t have typos this would be a first red flag for me.

Also if you have 4 years of experience and you cramp every technology in there you have ever done and are an expert in everything this is also a red flag for me as I can’t imagine this to be true and would come across as a lie. A rather selected list of technologies which fit the job description with a more fine grained indication whether you are an expert, are a professional or have basic knowledge feels more honest to me as I can see that you self-reflect on your capabilities.

So don’t take this feedback personally as these were random thoughts on how my brain processes resumes. I am just saying that there might be ways for your resume to gain more traction when optimizing it for the job description at hand. Also if the resume looks like it is just a generic copy which you send out to every company without personalization it looks like you did not even want to invest time for this one company you apply for. Then, when I were to see typos I am asking why should I invest time in continuing reading a bulk resume with typos.

From the interview side as well: I would rather have somebody who honestly says that she/he does not know a thing and that is ok.

Again don’t take this personal. I am also talking about my own mistakes I made when I looked for a job.

And please ignore any typos ;)

those are indeed very important points I will keep in mind from now on

thanks for pointing them out

Yeah, the typos and poor grammar stand out immediately. I've dealt with so many developers who can't tell the difference between "profilePic", "profile_pic", and "profillepic" and this has been extremely frustrating to deal with. Same with syntax. I've wasted weeks of meetings on this. I've had people who can pass tough coding tests, hack servers together in hours, but still end up delaying a project a month late because of trivial things like typos.

Most developers can learn and switch any language or framework within a month, but if you can't figure out punctuation after years of formal education, that's a hard rejection.

I've received a lot of value from doing practice interviews on interviewing.io to improve how I perform. I also got two referrals out of the five mock interviews I did.

thanks will definitely try it

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