Is it the economy? The bubble finally popped? Or am I the stupid one.
Anyone willing to share some tips for someone just starting out in the industry?
[Name redacted resume attached] https://docdro.id/kzogpyB
First, you can view your name in your GitHub. Might want to remove that for HN.
Your GitHub activity is also private. I would just remove the link if you don't want to make it public.
I also don't like your GitHub picture. I would use something else or no picture. Put a BIO in your GitHub if you're going to keep it.
Regarding your resume, I would put the awards near the bottom. Start with any job experience, then education.
Limit your resume to one page.
Regarding experience, I would like for you to expand on the work you have done. This is the most important thing to me. I think this is too light. Be generous with yourself regarding your work. Tell us a little about what you did & what parts most interested you about the tech.
Chinese & English is good. You can probably put this in your header, along with some other highlights. You may even move some awards to your header, as in next to or below your name.
Projects is good, but I really want a list of your proficiencies, and probably even more important, what interests you as a new developer.
Save anything else you want to highlight for your cover letter. Write a really good cover letter. I know. It's super annoying. Keep it to a paragraph or two and be happy with it before you send it. Proofread.
Hiring has slowed down a lot, especially in tech. Startups along with large companies are really just not hiring much.
But, you should still be able to get some interviews. If you're not, you're doing the right thing here - get as much feedback as you can. And follow up with those emails a few times.
About experience, the thing is I don't have any... and I don't know how to get my foot into the door to get some. Any tips?
To do that, you first need to differentiate yourself from the 1000s of other entry level applicants. Some tips:
1. Determine if you want to apply for a specific type of role. As an entry level person who just needs a job, this is hard. But think about the employer. THey want to get Resume from people who could fit into what the employer/team is doing. So lets say you decide to find employers/teams where Java is heavily used. Go apply there.
2. Write a really good Cover Letter and do not send it generically to every employer. A generic Cover Letter is as good as No Cover Letter. Research the team and send them a unique one along with your Resume. Yes, cover letters can work in 2022 at least for entry level people.
3. Go on Linkedin and look for the companies/teams that sell product/service in areas you have interest in. If your skills match their current product/service etc, reach out to someone like "Director of Technology" etc directly. It can never hurt but only help. Be specific. I would say something like
"Hey John, I hope you don't mind me reaching out but I was wondering if there are internship opportunities in your team. I see that you do xyz and I am very interested in this field and have some experience with tools in the area as well. Can I email you my detailed Cover Letter and Resume ?"
Get creative if you want to separate yourself from the others just like you. There are jobs out there but without experience, they are always harder to find because you need to sell yourself more.
I honestly have no clue what to write for a cover letter. Everything that I write just ends up sounding fake / makes it obvious that I just want a job for money's sake (which for me, at the end of the day, is what it comes down to).
I actually received the opposite advice from some others I asked, where they said to just use the shotgun approach and send as many applications as I can. I'm struggling to understand what order of magnitude of openings to apply to, should it be tens? hundreds?
Thanks again for all the help.
For some context, I've been doing this for around 15 years, which might make my thoughts pretty irrelevant since job hunting as a junior now is surely different than job hunting as a junior a decade ago.
Nevertheless, I have not sent 200 job applications in my life. How people manage it is beyond me. My approach is usually to send a very tailored cover letter, and a reasonably tailored CV (when a CV is required - lately they just pull it from LinkedIn... which in my opinion can make a custom cover letter even more impactful when you're actually looking).
For the cover letter, I take points straight from the listed job description. There are usually "must have" and "nice to have" points listed there, both technical and personality traits ("go-getter!", "self-motivated!", whatever).
In my first couple of junior jobs, I started with a brief preamble (name, what I do, etc...) I also include something showing that I did some research on what the _company_ does ("I was very excited to read about Company-X's unique approach to Thing-X"). This was followed by covering each desired point they mentioned in the job description, with a sentence or two about how I meet that requirement. For points I did not fulfill, I mentioned the _closest_ experience I could, and mentioned something hand-wavy about expecting to have no trouble hitting the ground running and learning-thing-x quickly on the job. For junior jobs, I think you can leverage the "passionate, quick learner" thing quite well where needed.
But like I said - I am not sure how relevant this approach is for juniors today. When I applied at a large company years ago, I had one phone screen and one in-person interview before being given an offer. When I interviewed other candidates at the same company a couple of years ago there were multiple rounds of interviews, assignments, discussions with HR, followup panels, etc. I have no idea if I would've been given an offer at the same company if I'd been applying as a junior eight years later.
Should I just look for junior-dev jobs to do while in uni instead?
ps. looking at your resume i would also restructure, not leading with awards and what is "Wrote Software for Upwork " supposed to mean? also a lot of your github repos lack proper readme's. And i don't know what you put in your cover letter but i cannot see what you want to do or learn or what you are burning for.
Also, (and I have suffered for NOT doing this better), reach out to colleagues or even recent UCSD grads from the CS program and ask for referrals. Just be low-key about it - you aren't asking for any "big" favors or nepotism-like stuff, just maybe an internal referral to their company? I think people should do this more often. Employers often offer current employees a bonus for every hired referral so those folks may get something out of it too.
Lastly, submitting resumes online seems to often be a blackhole of nothingness. Because I'm not Mr. Professional Network I have almost always applied using online submissions to jobs and haven't always had a good response rate with that method. But my longest (and current, maybe forever) gig came from a referral from someone in my social network.
[EDIT]: I noticed one of your other comments that implies you could maybe graduate sooner rather than later. This may be a controversial idea but think about taking LONGER. Double major or really think hard about getting into some big name company internship programs.
- Keep it to one page. Not a hard and fast rule, but generally recommended. The times where 2 pages is generally more acceptable is when you're a senior engineer with serious breadth of experience.
- Maximize space on the page. Goes along with the previous point, but your resume can be tight. I personally used a smaller font with less spacing.
- List fewer, but your most prideful projects. Interviewing and reading resumes leads to fatigue fast. When I have to read resumes, I have to read a ton, and they all start to blend in.
Any examples of what would be an impressive junior developer resume? I think I'm lacking a lot of content which is why I added so much filler.
I personally don't care about projects that are listed as class projects, but something that someone went of of their way to explore.
Eventually after your name, you can make a little statement of your motivation, like a personal "mission and vision" but be careful, that can be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing. I wouldn't do that for a junior position.
In your cover letter, keep it also short and simple: make emphasis in your motivation to work there and what you can offer.
The github profile does not add much, tbh.
Last but not least, but that is a very personal preference: I do not like the title "Resume" it is pretty obvious what it is, I prefer the format where your name is there.
Not a huge deal at all but if you're from a decent university then making it standout is important. (This is for inter ships and new grad)
I've been thinking about trying to transfer to one a bit better but I dont know if it's worth the time / money
Then reach out to engineering leaders at growth stage startups. They are always resource constrained. And generally speaking they hire for potential at the entry levels based on demonstrated passion for coding and systems design via Github and/or blogs.
And yes, fix your resume with the other tips in this thread.
I graduated from a really good college, into fairly weak market and had to take PHP jobs that didn't fully cover the bills. I'd suggest just sucking up your pride and taking a low quality job. Just work hard, build connections to others in the industry, and hop on to better work once it recovers.
Or try another field; I graduated with a degree in telecommunications engineering, but the telcos were becoming stagnant. So we rode on the mobile/web dev boom.
There's also the possibility that it may not recover, that FAANG in general peaked and are on a decline.
I work for a smaller company so my approach to resume review might differ from others, but a couple of things stand out:
* As an interviewer, I'm not especially interested in the fact that you took "Modern Physics" or organic chemistry. These might be relevant to a particular role, but in the context of a generic resume they come across as filler.
* Your projects and work experience are grouped by language, rather than chronology or complexity. I'd prefer either of those, since they tell me more about what I should ask you about. By the same token: it's good to list your own "level of proficiency" with each language, so that I can confirm that against my expectations.
I would restructure and reorder your resume entirely: your past experience is a little thin, so start with a personal statement (who you are, what you're interested in doing), summarize your projects and work experience, and list your awards and comments at the end.
Edit: And, to be clear: you aren't stupid. Resume construction and follow through is arguably harder than any junior role you actually end up in will be.