Ask HN: 10 years experience, 200 resumes, almost zero responses. Do I give up?

[trade_unionist]

No idea what I'm doing wrong. Nobody is even calling me.

I've had a hard time finding a good long term job. Employment lengths:

1 year 3 years 3.5 years 6 month contract 13 months 3 months

I think that is what's screwing me despite the fact that I actually am a good developer. I asked a recruiter if I had anything obviously wrong on my resume and he said no. He also said software developer hiring has been relatively unaffected by coronavirus.

I've applied locally and for remote positions. I'm getting totally ignored. I'm about to give up and start doing something blue collar.

I'm stuck doing gig work. I could be doing so much more for society than this. I have a product I want to sell but can't scrape up a thousand dollars to get it to market. So instead of innovating or working as a software developer I'm delivering fast food all day long just to survive.

I have experience as a professional full stack developer. I have a bachelor's degree in software development. I'm being ignored by almost everyone.

Do I give up software development? Where else can I go that is better than finding some random blue collar thing on Craigslist?

[mmanulis]

- What kind of software dev do you do and what kind of job are you looking for? - What industries are you looking to work in? - Which part of the world are you looking for a job? - Can you share a link to your resume so people can review it? - Have you tried sites like Vettery or Hired? My xp with them was neutral at best, but doesn't hurt. - Have you done anything on HackerRank? Yes, it sucks with all the algo crud, but that's where things are with the industry.

[trade_unionist]

Mostly C# web development. I've done some Xamarin too but I prefer web development. I live in Cincinnati. I've done very little hackerrank stuff because nobody here seems to care about it.

[mmanulis]

Happy to email you with feedback on your resume, if you'd like?

[dstik]

Have you tried reaching out to former colleagues? Often times, many of these companies have internal referral programs and incentives for employee referrals.

[giantg2]

"I could be doing so much more for society than this."

I'm curious how one measures this. Personally, I don't see my job as a software developer any more beneficial to society than the blue collar jobs I've had (janitor, Lowes, warehouse, etc). If anything, I felt more of an impact and appreciation from dealing with customers directly. Being able to solve a customer's problem and make their lives easier was a great reward.

Posting PM/email on your profile here might also get some responses. What area are you looking in? Open to relocation?

[austincheney]

I feel like there are some details missing here.

* Do you have negative things in your social media?

* How are your soft skills?

* Can you solve problems without superficial tools or frameworks?

* How are your writing skills?

[st1x7]

You mentioned being ignored so the obvious question is - how are you applying for these positions? If it's through something like LinkedIn's EasyApply or a similar system, not getting responses is fairly common especially if your CV is missing some of they key terms in the ad and it gets filtered out before it even reaches a person. Even recruiters do this if they aren't technical - I've had words like "statistics", "forecasting" and "machine learning" in my CV and a recruiter turned me down because I don't have experience with "predictive modeling".

[msadowski]

I’m not involved in any hiring at the moment but feel free to send me your CV with identifiable information redacted and I’ll provide you with some honest feedback. You’ll find my email in my profile

[trade_unionist]

Okay, thanks for taking a look. I'll send it tonight when I get home.

[fortunajs]

Just upload the CV and ask HN for help :) Usually people have very limited attention span so may be you're missing a short summary with your experience and the current goal?

[bigbassroller]

Write blog posts about skills you specialize in with a contact form at the bottom and wait for hiring managers to come to you. This gives you much more leverage and self esteem.

[ApolloRising]

This may help you (not my site) https://www.resumeviking.com/samples/front-end-developer/

A quick glance this seemed to be something you could adapt to your resume.

Get rid of the video, clean up the formatting, and say what you actually achieved at the job not what you did.

[antoineMoPa]

Do you know about /r/cscareerquestions? https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/

I'm sure you will find a lot of helpful advice there.

[kusha]

He will probably be better off in https://old.reddit.com/r/experienceddevs

[dyeje]

You should be at least getting some callbacks. What's your email? Happy to help.

[trade_unionist]

For anyone that's interested here's a link to my resume. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Td1sMpgE53fQn5LIhCA77Hix...

[ev1]

I linked this to a manager friend in SF:

> DeVry (for-profit school drowning in legal issues w/r/t quality and fraud) + non-CS "IT?" degree -- a public state uni would rate higher in general

> probably can drop the helpdesk job, it's a decade ago and has no bearing on CS/SWE/SDE

> can rephrase certain terms like "Used browserstack to check CSS." => "Cross browser + platform testing of CSS and responsiveness with Browserstack"

> seeing requirejs as a skill is very odd. I would not say good or bad, but just "odd", like it feels as if they are just looking for more things to list unnecessarily; in this regard you would want "webpack" or "rollup" in 2013-2014+ as a replacement

> drop the video resume, especially if the majority of it contains pauses and fillers like "uhh, um"

> for the automation developer role, I would be more interested in what CI/CD systems you were using rather than "multiple build steps" - were you running automated browser e2e in gitlab ci?

> your font wildly changes on the helpdesk job - missed copy/paste?

[ac2u]

Hi there,

You're correct to make a note as to why one of your last jobs lasted a few months. However, it might be better to say "Unfortunately this company went out of business". That's all someone screening your resume needs to know for now.

When you mention "mismanaged" it could be misconstrued that you're kissing and telling, and companies interested in reputation-management may pass you by.

The tech breakdown of each role is good, but maybe in delivering the features you talked about you ended up working with a Product/Design/QA department? Worth calling out if so, shows you can work productively with others.

Personally I'd skip the video intro, but that's a personal preference.

[jones1618]

Including a video resume seems like a bad idea. Remember, the purpose of a resume is to get a face-to-face interview (or COVID-19 equivalent). Your video, IMHO, only allows people to form superficial opinions about you without the time commitment or interaction of an interview. They can think "That guy seems hesitant/cocky or older/younger than I expected" and form judgements without any chance for you to react and prove otherwise. I've interviewed plenty of developers who come off unsure of themselves or full of themselves at first impression until you probe them a bit. You're letting people stereotype you (with whatever personal biases they have) without any chance to get passed those biases. Also, you aren't a professional performer (probably, few people are) so what are the chances that your "performance" is an accurate representation of who you really are? Yet, you're being judged by that.

I agree with others that your resume needs to be more accomplishment driven with lots of action verbs and results statements. You want to include a sample (but not a laundry list) of interesting problems you solved and value you delivered. Employers are far more interested in that than who you are and what bag of skills you have. Granted, you need to include buzzwords to be seen by resume filters but your resume should scream "Here's the kind of great stuff I can do for you" in the first few bullet points or so rather than a technical checklist.

[mattmanser]

The skills section seems poorly laid out, lots of old tech, no .net core. If you've not used .net core, go through the few hours of basic tutorials so you can at least answer basic questions about the differences and then add it any way. It's basically the same stuff you've already been doing.

The logical order of your skills makes no sense, why mention patterns like MVVM? Valuable skills such as React should be near the front, not the rear.

Try a skill matrix in a table, a bit like this (but better, I'm typing this on a mobile):

    C#, .Net, .Net Core. 7 years
    JavaScript (inc. React, Knockout, jQuery)  6 years
    SQL, EF   8 years
    Node.js   3 years
    SQL Lite  2 years

Drop all the unimpressive noise like MVVM, REST, IIS. Or add them at the bottom of the skills matrix in a catch-all other skills category. Might be worth it just to catch the right buzzword.

None of the jobs list the tech used or what you actually did, so it's not clear you have actual experience programming. Some of them make you sound like you are an amateur (and I stress sound, not saying you are):

Repaired and upgraded first-tier applications

Collaborated on agile team to successfully add features to the company's website

That's all you've said about several years worth of work. Nothing you've built, nothing you achieved. What features. What did you upgrade. What test beds did you implement as the automation tester?

Those are just general, extremely fuzzy, descriptions. You mention tutoring and teaching so much too, it sounds odd, especially because you're listing so little actual work. Also, you focus on some odd things. Used browserstack to check CSS. How is that relevant on a CV?

Have you tried something more descriptive, like:

Random Company LLC - Senior Software Developer

Working on our internal monitoring tools written in ASP.Net MVC with EF and SQL. Features implemented included:

- Built a BI performance tool allowing management at-a-glance overview of client-facing systems

- Built a quick report tool, allowing team members to add simple SQL files and have them automatically turned into a sortable table with CSV download

- Overhauled performance for 3 key pages struggling with large datasets, reducing avg TTFB times for pages with more than 1000 records from 15 secs to 0.5 seconds

- Part of the team responsible for migrating, championing and training the migration of SVN to git

- Regularly maintained a top 3 bug fix rate within the team

- Mentored the 2 junior developers on the team

That makes it clear the tech, shows what kind of programming you were doing, and still makes it clear you did some mentoring.

With the gaps you have I'd also be tempted to drop the months part of each date, just list 2018-2020. Not 100% on this, maybe some recruiters could explain whether this looks dodgy or not.