Comment by throwaway892238 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway892238 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway892238

Your resume tells a story. What story does yours tell? If you haven't stayed very long at jobs, red flag. If you have done a lot of different things that don't relate to the job you're applying for, yellow flag. FAANG salary? Red flag. Mid-20s? Yellow flag (sorry, ageism is real: if they're looking for senior/leadership/etc that's unlikely to be found in someone in their 20s). Pay for a professional resume review and fix any problems they find, whether you agree or not. Keeping multiple resumes is best practice, and always write a good cover letter.

Focus on your professional network. Most of your jobs should be coming from referrals from coworkers, not cold-calls on a jobs board. This is the only way to continuously get hired regardless of the job market, and is very important as you get older (again: ageism is real).

Personal projects count for a lot for a software developer. Make sure you have at least a couple small projects that you maintain regularly. Contributing to open source is nice, but unless you're a major contributor, it isn't a big factor the way owning a project is. Make it really shiny: good docs, clean code, linting, testing, CI/CD. Using the latest tech is encouraging.

You're applying during a time when hundreds of thousands have been layed off at the beginning of an economic recession. It's gonna be hard for anyone but the most qualified candidates to land a job now. Just look for the jobs you're a shoe-in for, get employed, wait for a better role.

> always write a good cover letter.

The importance of this can't be overstated. This is just my opinion based on years of interviewing and hiring devs, but...

The resume tells you the "what". What is the candidate's experience, what is their skillset, etc. Resumes get a once-over, mostly to see if the candidate is in the ballpark for the position.

The cover letter tells you the "why". Why should I hire this candidate over the others? Why does the candidate want to work here? etc.

The cover letter is the more important of the two. Assuming a candidate has the technical skills required, the things an interviewer really wants to know are softer: will they fit in with the team? Will they be happy in this role? And so forth. This is what the cover letter should be talking about.

I've participated in hiring for dozens of positions. I don't read cover letters.

I've never read or written a cover letter and I have a single-page resume.

I've got two sentences at the top of my resume explaining who I am and what I do.

I use much more flowery language but I basically say:

    I'm team lead.
    I care about communication.
    I want to know your business and customers. 
    I want to work with stakeholders and help them solve problems.

The rest of my resume backs this up. And at the bottom, I describe all of the business skills I learned over 4 years of running a furry convention. It's written just like all of the other jobs.

It's worked pretty well for me. I don't get calls from people who dislike furries and the first two sentences got me my current job.

Anecdotally, I've never read a cover letter as someone who's interviewed a good chunk of engineers, but not nearly as many as a lot of the folks on HN. I have however had a much better initial response experience from companies that I added a cover letter for. I think some larger companies that have a resume and cover letter upload on their site just might prioritize those who wrote a cover letter as well. That's just a guess though.

Cover letter importance varies by industry and company, and it hasn't been valuable for me in tech. Even in roles where prose writing is the primary job requirement!

Do you have or could point to a good example of a software engineer's cover letter?

I don't have any handy. I was just searching the web for a good example and -- hoo boy! -- there are so many terrible examples out there.

All I can offer you is general guidance, then. This is just my opinion, of course, and there are plenty of disagreeing opinions out there. So take that as you will.

To me, a good cover letter conveys four things:

1) That the candidate has at least some knowledge of the company they're applying to and what sorts of problems the company is likely to need solved.

2) Why you want to work for that company in particular. Highlight how what the company does ties into your personal interests.

3) Summarize and contextualize your experience in a way that explains clearly how your experience will benefit the company. This is your chance to call out any special skills that may be particularly relevant to the position, but aren't clearly called out in the resume.

3) Explain anything in your resume that might not look that great. Did you do a lot of job-hopping? Address that. Does it look like the position you're applying for is a bit outside your normal experience? Explain why. That sort of thing.

A cover letter shouldn't reiterate what the resume says. The resume should speak for itself. A cover letter is just that -- a letter from one person to another. It's where you show who you are and what special value you offer to the company.

You don't need an example if you care about the job and what the company is doing. Just speak from your heart, and tell them why they should hire you. Why do you want the job? Why do you care about the company? What do you want to achieve there? What experience do you bring that you think will help them with their mission? Show them you aren't just submitting the 351st application for a job. Show them you want to work there, for them, that you're the right person for the job. ...And then bring it down a few notches so it sounds 'professional' (confident without being needy or arrogant).

Huh, I can’t remember the last time I’ve written a cover letter, or been asked to read one when interviewing in my 10 year long career. I feel like all these sorts of things happen better over a phone screen or an in person meetup and the resume step is for weeding out noise.

Especially in tech where you get fantastic ESL engineers who might struggle to write flowery prose about their skills but can document their code very well in English.

There are a lot of comments against your advice here so I'm going to speak up in agreement.

(1) Cover letters are very rare. Out of the last ten interviews, I've received two.

(2) It's the one place you can reveal some of your personality. Focus your message to answer this question: "What is it about this role/company/job that you find exciting?"

I have a PDF file with a cover letter on the front and a page or two of resume. Five minutes before the meeting, I'm opening up that PDF, again ... the first thing I see is that cover letter and a candidate that's excited about the job. It puts them on the right footing before the video camera fires up.

I also know that "your resume was produced, once, and probably fired off to several companies in that exact form". While (assuming it was done correctly) "your cover letter was written to me, about this job."

If you've provided it, I'm going to pay more attention to the words on that page than probably any others. So while a cover letter is not required and a resume (often) is, if you include it, it's not controversial to say "it's more important than your resume" as far as its impact on my opinion of you prior to an interview.

Cover letters are a waste of time. You‘ll spend lots of effort writing to 10 companies or so and then they will just ghost you. Applying for a job is a numbers game. Send 50 resumes and get 1 phone call. Or maybe use your network if you have one. Nobody reads cover letters.

That's not my experience. I get ghosted too, of course -- that's just part of how things currently work -- but my ratio is much better than yours. I get a response from about 15% of the applications I make.

Perhaps the difference is because I write cover letters?

> Nobody reads cover letters.

This is demonstrably untrue. But if you said "not everyone reads cover letters," you'd be correct. But that's not a reason to not put in the effort to write them.

Twice in my career I've had recruiters call out my cover letter

Granted, one admitted "usually they're cookie cutter and I don't read them" before praising mine... but I like writing real cover letters because it's a second chance to consider why/how badly I want to work somewhere

I craft them to the company/problem space, call out specific areas of interest. And sometimes halfway in I realize I don't care what they do enough to continue writing, so I save everyone involved's time

I have to say I usually don't read the cover letter either, and wouldn't care too much if they didn't have one, except for new graduates, or where this is their 2nd job where I would like to see a modicum of research on their part.

But usually a cover letter encourages the writer to tell me what they _think_ I want to hear, but not what I really want to know - which the CV usually does much better.

Which means they are often sycophantic and a bit embarrassing - and I usually have too much respect for the people I want to interview to expose them to that :)

> Your resume tells a story. What story does yours tell?

This is actually a huge problem for me right now, and I’m not sure how to solve it.

My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech.

There’s all sorts of things I’ve done and worked on. In both my professional career and as a hobbyist I’ve hacked around with stuff, learned interesting skills that have helped solved all sorts of odd problems, picked up a lot of knowledge about different software and it’s internal workings, but it was tangential to my job at best and would feel out of place in a resume, but it’s a lot of stuff over the years.

I’ve experimented with putting some of my open source contributions in there (partly to fill space since I don’t have any education to add). To be honest, it feels like embellishment, given how small it was in reality, but it is something that looks impressive on paper. Unfortunately, it’s just not very relevant to the sort of work done in my professional career and at best it’s gotten me a jaded “that’s interesting” during a final round of interviews. More recently though, I’m just not getting any interviews.

> My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech.

Reframe: successful companies, practical projects, mature and reliable tech.

I have a third person intro at the top of my resume. I feel it helps alot, and makes me stand out. It's only a ~4 sentences, but it says what I like to work on, how I'm passionate about it, and what unique things I can bring.

Think of it like a resume pitch on a resume.

> It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech.

It should be possible to write those up in such a way as to be less boring. But the other reality is that 90% of all the jobs out there appear to be with "boring" companies, have "boring" projects, and use "boring" tech. Companies generally avoid things that are too exciting -- exciting has risky as its partner, and companies prefer to minimize risk.

However, it's also very common that there's really interesting stuff in all that boredom. If I told you what company I work for, the project I was working on, and the tech stack I was using, you'd very likely yawn. But the work is actually very interesting and exciting when you dig into it. When I put this on my resume, I will focus on telling what was interesting about it, because that will also tell what my contribution was.

First, go hire a professional resume editor, right now. It is literally their job to improve what you are describing. Don't cheap out either; this is an investment in your future.

Second, be honest. In your cover letter, tell your prospective employer that you feel like your resume seems boring. Tell them the exciting things you've worked on, and how it has helped you at work. Tell them how you're excited to learn new things and take on new projects, in addition to just getting better at doing the boring things. Express your interests, your passions, things about you that you think would make you a great co-worker.

Let the hiring manager EXPERIENCE your success by telling a story, a little vignette of each career or project stage. What challenge did you see, how did you overcome, and what was the outcome?

For example, turn this: - experience with imbedded i/o in C for mobile equipment

into this: - "Team needed a 1-10ma vehicle sensor input using the NXP Semiconductor AN4731 so I prepared a POC demo board with C code in 7 days allowing continued progress and delivered the finished code 14 days later after peer review and unit testing. No changes were made to the final deliverable"

This version shows the challenge, how you approached it with urgency and an understanding of how your work impacted the downstream efforts. Finally, this story reveals your knowledge of quality process development and final delivery.

Writing these stories takes more time: the challenge, what you did, how it was superior

Tight, cohesive insight into telling your story requires practice and reflection so don't expect success the first time without some editing or proofreading from others

Once you begin this process, you maintain this portfolio forever by adding adventure summaries each year

I was very impressed with a recent post regarding the storytelling structure from Dan Harmon and it may offer a great starting place for laying each out before condensing it into that golden nugget: I came, I saw, I conquered.

Original Article: https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe...

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34576085

Could you elaborate on what you mean by FAANG salary? I’ve always heard the prevailing wisdom is that if you’ve got one of those names on your resume you’re basically set.

It means they assume you want to keep that high salary, and won't waste their time calling you back if their target compensation isn't competitive with FAANG, because going through an interview process only to have the candidate reject the offer isn't productive for anyone.

One more reason companies should post the salary range. If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.

> If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.

Close but not quite. It's more like:

> If someone with FAANG is still applying, it appears they're willing to work for that range.

When I'm willing to go through the job interview process and say no to an offer I don't like, I completely ignore the salary range. I'll get the interviewer and team to love me and then just decline if they won't go above their range. Or I'll take it because they've convinced me the job will be enjoyable enough to offset the lower salary.

Plenty of things in life are flexible if you ask. But plenty of things aren't flexible even when you ask. Sometimes, I'm willing to waste my time to find out which is which.

Sure, but the recruiter isn't willing to waste their time to find out if you deem their role good enough to accept something lower, or if you are going to make them go to bat to spend more money on you. It is better for their goals to move on to someone who is actually seeking something within the target compensation's budget.

Yes, except my comment and the comment I replied to had nothing to do with your point.

I replied to:

> If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.

Oh you would be surprised what people think. They think you will change your ability to pay almost just as frequently.

> If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.

But even that doesn't mean as much as you might think. Someone might be willing to take a pay cut because they're in dire need of work. But will they be happy with that pay rate in a year or two?

It just means they're trying to get a counter offer to improve their negotiating ability.

From the point of view of someone who has had to hire in the past, here's how it would go in my head:

Oh, this person has worked at Google (for example). Our compensation is good, but not Google-good. I could look that the rest of this resume, if this person is a good fit, have an initial 40-minutes meeting with them to discuss compensation, start the hiring process, and then they will reject us because we're lower than they are accustomed to, or because they have found something that pays more.

Or I could move this resume to the reject pile and move on to the next candidate.

Oh my, look at the time.

This.

Also, there's the issue of fit. Plenty of companies don't operate like FAANG companies do. If a candidate is FAANG-heavy, it raises a serious question about whether or not they'd fit into a non-FAANG company.

Any resume including a recent Microsoft QA position is an automatic reject for me. Microsoft does not hire technical people, they hire robots who need their tests written for them.

The nice thing about this thread is it seems there are lots of little gems that help decide where I'd definitely like to not work in the future.

Yes, this, and I know the problems we're solving are not as interesting as what anyone at Google is doing, so I assume they would be bored and only stay until they find something more interesting. So, pass. FAANG kind of traps you - you can drop out of that world into a scrappy startup, but not boring stable corporate dev.

It means you're set for a very specific type of job in a very specific industry. If I'm launching a start up and you showed up to be employee #4, unless you were #4 at the FAANG or are in your late 30's or older, I'm probably not going to hire you.

The fact is that FAANGs do things in a very particular manner and on small, focused teams. That's the opposite of how start ups work and applying most of the managerial "skills" that are in place at FAANGs are a good way to apply a ton of unnecessary bureaucracy to a company that doesn't even have an HR department yet.

"Founder is formerly Google and Facebook!" makes me stay very very far away from the company because outside of the VC world the reason those words have power are red flags.

> or are in your late 30's or older, I'm probably not going to hire you.

This sounds illegal in the US.

(Also, it's the opposite of the usual illegal ageism we see in post-dotcom tech companies.)

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act forbids only discrimination against workers over age 40 in the US. It does not prohibit age-based discrimination against a worker who is under 40. Nor does it prohibit discriminating in favor of a worker over 40.

More generally, discrimination in employment is legal by default, unless a specific protected class is created by a specific law. Many classes of discrimination are legal, such as against smokers or obesity.

States and localities may have more restrictions than at the federal level, of course.

To my knowledge in the US "40 and older" is a protected class but "under 40" is not.

Ageism is a weird one from a discrimination standpoint. My understanding is that it's specifically defined (in the US) to prevent discrimination against those over 40

As an engineer in my 50s I've never personally been on the receiving end of ageism, but I've definitely seen extremely smart young engineers passed over for opportunities because they were deemed too young/inexperienced

And a lot of times that can be true, being young and gifted is amazing, but doesn't overcome years of experience in the trenches. Sure you may be able to work a 24 year old brilliant dev 80 hours a week and the 54 year old may want to leave by 6 every day, but if you hire right you'll get the same amount of work out of them, the 54 year old will just need a lot less effort to get to the same place.

I'm using age as a level of experience here. There may be 28 year olds I'd look at but only if they've been in management for multiple years with multiple teams under their belt, not just a single dev group that they got shuffled around on.

Discriminating against how old someone is is illegal, not usually how young, but this isn't discrimination because of an uncontrollable attribute, it's requiring experience outside of what being a team lead at a FAANG would normally afford you.

Length of stay seems like a hit or miss metric. A lot of contract work is done in 1-2 year engagements.

True, and it's not that having a bunch of short-term engagements is automatically a bad thing. But it's a thing that requires explanation, because it can speak to fit.

Some people are only really good for a couple of years at a position. After that, they get bored and move on. If you need to fill a position with someone who will last longer than that, seeing a bunch of 1-2 year engagements on your resume is a strong hint that you might not be a good match for the needs of the position.

If you don't care so much about longevity, then it may be a non-issue, or even a positive thing.

> Personal projects count for a lot for a software developer

This has not been my experience. I have zero personal projects on my resume (despite actually having some) and have no issue getting interviews. A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO.

> FAANG salary? Red flag.

Completely not my experience. I am constantly being poked and prodded by recruiters and have to play hard to get until they reveal salary as it's usually too low. SO many times they try to convince me to do an interview loop first and reveal comp afterwards ("it depends on how you're leveled in the interview").

I think it's 90% relevance of your actual job experiences. Fix up your resume/linkedin to really sell yourself better. Put any and all technologies/languages you've used - recruiters have that stupid a heuristic.

> A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO.

_Any_ reasonable experience nullifies personal projects. The myth that a personal github account full of open source personal project activity is the only way to go should die already.

Once I had some good volunteer experience outside of work, I listed those like they were jobs and dropped projects and GitHub from my resume.

Hasn't been a problem.

It is not the only way to go. However, for people starting out, with no experience, then you have to have something else to show for it.

> This has not been my experience.

The claim is that personal projects can help. You don't have any personal projects (so they haven't helped you) but that isn't evidence personal projects aren't helpful, only that they are not strictly necessary.

I’ve been in this racket for a decade now. I change jobs every 18 months give or take. I’ve applied to hundreds of jobs over my career. I can count on my hands how many actually did click the link to my personal projects showcase (not a link to my GH although it’s also there, but an actual page in my website presenting the projects and linking to the code) and wanted to talk about any of the ten or so featured projects.

It’s a very very good filter for better culture (according to my personal criteria anyway), but it’s exceedingly rare as to be insignificant.

If you want a job you’re better off doing a couple projects if you’re a junior and then spending your time learning todays new hot framework + buzzwords instead of actual projects. If you’re more senior don’t even bother (unless you want to)

25 years in.. you are at this tipping point where those 18 month position look suspect and people will expect 5 years. Not having a personal project means you might have know how to code the modern wat.. having a popular project changes this. No one visits your website if they do only to see the design.

I hope I’ll be out of the game well before I have 25 years of experience honestly.

I'll concede it's a useful crutch for those 1-2y out of a bootcamp. I even used it to get internships in university. And it's the advice I give to my friends in that position. But not OPs situation here.

> > FAANG salary? Red flag.

> Completely not my experience.

Whether more than a little experience at a FAANG company helps or hurts you depends entirely on which companies you're applying to. With many, it really is a red flag. With others, it's almost a guarantee that you're going to round 2.

It's a wash and entirely up to whomever is reading your resume. Does the reader hate Facebook and find it morally reprehensible? Great, your 3 years at Facebook won't be viewed positively. Does the reader think that FAANG means you have 3 years experience shipping at massive scale? Cool, they'll think you're qualified.

Right. It's a harmful bias to have as a recruiter/hiring manager. At their own peril, I guess! But honestly I've never heard of it outside this thread.

It universally seen as at least "this person passed a very high hiring bar elsewhere". If you were at the staff/principal level at FAANG there's not even technical/design interviews, or they are an underhand pitch and mostly a conversation.

No one thinks this person passed a hard hiring bar and we need google to filter candidates. They wonder if this person was so good why did google let them go? Why are they not working there now? Could they not cut it? The other question is how much are they expecting? Will they bolt for another faang if opportunity presents itself.

It's like hiring someone with a phd. Expensive and often the skills are not a fit

Reply on news.ycombinator.com