[codingdave]

You may have missed their point - if I'm hiring, I don't care what books you have read, how many internet points you have, or what online tests you have done well on. Those simply are not relevant to the actual question at hand which is: What can you accomplish if I bring you in to work with me?

So my worry would be that someone who comes in telling me about books and stack overflow street cred, even if that speak well to their tech knowledge, is not skilled enough to understand what is relevant.

[gymbeaux]

How do you aim to answer the question at hand?

These things are on my resume, but I'm not "telling" interviewers about it. I go through their interview process same as everyone else.

[codingdave]

Honestly, I'd take them off your resume. The github link is fine, but I don't call people back if they list details that don't impact the job. Again, nothing wrong with the details but this isn't the place for them, and your resume needs to reflect that you understand where your value comes from.

Your resume serves two purposes - don't give them a reason to throw it out. And do give them a reason to call you. Every piece of information will do one of those things, so think carefully and put as little info in a resume as possible while still making someone know you can contribute. This is not a job application, it is a teaser - make them want to call you and ask questions.

To that end, you do what everyone says - fill it with descriptions of your accomplishments supported by what measurable impact they had on the business. Sprinkle tech details in only as needed to explain what skills were used to make those impacts, and to keep your resume in the mix when people are searching for keywords.

If you are earlier in your career, those impacts may be less impressive, but the resume will still be stronger if you say something measurable. As a made-up example: "Fixed 87 bugs in our React front-end" vs. "Maintained the web app." Ideally, that same bug-fixing work could be described more like: "Improved customer CSAT scores from 67 to 83 due to improved quality achieved via a bug-fixing effort that resolved 87 customer concerns."

Once you get to the interview, continue to focus the discussion on how you help the business. Using that same bug-fixing example, if they ask you about it, don't dive deep into the hardest bug to fix or how you troubleshoot - talk about the customer problems that drove you to the decision to spend time on bugs in the first place, what you hoped to accomplish, a brief overview of the types of bugs you worked on, the results, and practices you put in place to prevent falling back into a buggy customer experience.

Because as you said - you go through their interview process the same as everyone else. I'd tell you to stop doing that. Because many of my jobs have come when the conversation took the interview process in new directions... I've had multiple interviews (and offers from them) where the interviewer tells me that we derailed their own process, had different discussions, and they really could tell we could work together well. That is the impression you want to leave people with - "This person is really someone I want to work with."

[gymbeaux]

Thank you for the detailed response. I think there are lots of good tips in there. I don't know that I "list details that don't impact the job"- could you elaborate or give an example?

One thing I certainly struggle with in 2024 that I have not struggled with in previous job hunts is that nowadays I rarely hear back from a company after applying. Sometimes I get the automated rejection email weeks later. It is rare that I talk to a human. I try to combat this by optimizing my resume's ATS score to the job postings, but what I often find is that my ATS score is less than 80-100 because it is missing keywords like "OOP" and "debugging" which are keywords that obviously should not need specifying on a SWE's resume. Is the issue that the job poster made a lousy job description? And is the solution to "play the game" and throw dumb keywords on my resume like "OOP"?

I do not know if what has changed is that my resume isn't making it past automated screening, and for all I know companies are using LLMs to screen resumes rather than ATS, which may be better, but could be worse for all we know...