Looking to get a feedback, Switzerland based.
#4+ YOE Resume Feedback
lucid trellis
I don't really like having 2 pages but with exp is kinda hard to resume 4 years of stuff
Also the social links will contain the plain text instead of a link
And I might add a better division of skills and technologies used in the projects / exp
cyan lichen
I'm US-based, so take my opinion with a grain of salt - this may or may not be that relevant for you.
I feel like the underlying issue with your resume is that you're underselling yourself - pretty significantly at that. From the work you've done, I can see you have pretty solid experience, and I would like to see you really explore the impact of what you've done. The lack of major business metrics and team leadership in particular is not really conveying the magnitude of your achievements. This can end up downleveling you, or worse, prevent you from passing the initial screening.
Your resume is easy to trim down. I'll start with the smaller nits and go on to the bigger points of feedback.
General
- (US focused) Don't use periods to end your bullet points, it's not common here
- Remove the leadership section
- Avoid self qualifiers in general ("passionate", "significantly") - show (through your metrics), not tell
- Having experience with SDLC should be implied, not said - tailor your summaries to the job application with your motivation, keep it short (e.g., "Seeking opportunities in {specific area}"), so that the recruiter can pick you out
Education
- All points in your education (coursework, GPA) can all be deleted. You may consider adding GPA within the upper line with your degree (see other examples on this channel or on reddit)
- (US focused) Don't include date ranges in your education, just the graduation month and year. In fact, you obtaining your bachelors this year might end up hurting you - this is something you probably need to address in a cover letter. I am curious about the story behind this, what made you explore a degree after being in your role? In the US, you could potentially get screened out due to this, idk how this works in the EU tho
Skills
- (US focused) Languages should go into the bottom of skills, if you decide to include it at all. It's not common here
- When listing your skills, don't use "and"
- You have experience with MySQL and Postgres - why did you not include SQL? Furthermore, you state experience in Nest.js, Kubernetes, Scala, Firebase, Lisp, Prolog - why did you not include these?
- Change "Database Systems" to "Tools", and move the tools/services that you have experience with there (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kubernetes, ...)
- Change "Frameworks, Libraries, and Services" to just be "Frameworks" - consider including the different Spring frameworks if they're significant to the role. Testing can be in either here or in tools
- Change "Programming Languages" to "Languages" if you don't decide to include your speaking languages in skills
- Order your skills by relevance to the job postings you apply to
Also change the formatting of your skills section to be like how it is in your projects - you don't need the bullets
cyan lichen
Projects
- Don't short-sell yourself by saying "simple"
- Make it clearer that Spring Security is an open source contribution (can do this a couple ways - for example:
Spring Security (Open Source): Contributed to...
- What is the purpose of the MVC Framework? What problem does it solve?
- Don't need to clarify what lisp and prolog are - answer the "so what?" How efficient is it compared to existing solutions? What does it do? If it's just a simple problem space, do not include it
- What's the purpose and impact of your movie rating app? Does it have active users? What makes this unique? Are you looking to go into Android development?
- I personally would lean towards removing the last 3 if you can't clarify the technical achievement or the end result. Project 2 needs more clarity for non-technical people - I'd recommend sharing it on Twitter/Reddit/etc to market it and get feedback.
Experience
Role 1:
- I would remove the features ("geo-bounds fetching, custom clustering algorithm, dynamic filtering") - unless you're applying to a team where they work with similar software. Even then, I would focus more on the business value of this project
- Going off that, clarify usage (of what) and conversion rates (for what) - it's best if you can get monetary/user metrics for this (what is the value of your project? how many users?)
- Reword bullet 2: how exactly did you achieve 50% cost reduction (don't say reduction of costs) by running A/B tests? Also don't say switch if it's a migration effort - it undersells it. In fact, if it is a migration effort, you should highlight that as your primary action, not running A/B tests as part of a deployment strategy ("Achieved 50% cost reduction of tile provider services by migrating to Stadia Maps...")
- How much did you reduce customer support calls? If you can't get metrics on this, I would consider removing it entirely
- How much did you reduce build time? In larger orgs, something like this is a major effort because it impacts available engineering hours. You have to have cost analysis on this to be approved in the first place. In other words, I would expect something like this:
Reduced build time by XX% by migrating from Rollup/ASM to Webpack/ESM, saving XXXX developer hours / $X,XXX,XXX in engineering costs (notice how there's no mention of DX - it doesn't need to be stated)
Role2:
- Bullet 1: What's your biggest achievement/highest impact project here? I would highlight that at the top, especially minding any business metrics. Something like Keycloak integration doesn't tell me that you had significant contributions in your 3 years at this place, which really undermines your experience
- Bullet 2: Clarify this, and don't say "refactoring and applying SOLID principles". How did you simplify multi-repository document storage? What's the problem and what's your end impact? At this point, if refactoring is your second biggest highlight during your 3 years here, I'd be concerned as a hiring manager/recruiter
- Bullet 3: This tells me something - but it doesn't explain the problem space or your end result. Is this a migration effort from monolithic architecture to distributed microservices? What was it for? Why was it necessary? See STAR method
- This kind of thing is also usually described as a proof of concept in the US, not an MVP (minimum viable product). Not sure if it means something different there
- Bullet 4: You undersell yourself by making "Developed a VueJS component" the highlight of this bullet. I can't tell what exactly you did, or what this was for. Something like "Developed a dynamic PDF exporter... to..." conveys the feat better
- Bullet 5: What functionalities? This is the first bullet here that demonstrates any sort of impact - I would push this up, because nobody will really see this with the way this resume is structured
Lastly, with 4 years of experience, I expect to see some more soft skills and leadership - you should be at the stage of your career where you're at least mid-level a most companies. Where's your team collaboration? Where's your mentorship? Where's your understanding of the SDLC? Where's your strategic impact? I feel like you're too focused on the technical achievements at hand to really see what will level you up as an engineer in a team.
I recommend looking into engineer competency matrices. Being able to understand where you stand is the first step towards improvement. CircleCI has a really good one here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/131XZCEb8LoXqy79WWrhCX4sBnGhCM1nAIz4feFZJsEo/htmlview
Recommend reviewing this as you go back through your resume - it'll give you some insight on how you may be placed with the competencies you're conveying. Hope this helps!
lucid trellis
@cyan lichen thanks for the detailed feedback and the time spent to write it. That's basically gold.
Anyway yes I kinda already had some team collaboration stuff like organizing Retro ecc but didn't know how much to put into the resume. But I get the points, write more about the impact instead of the technical stuff