I’ve reviewed over a thousand resumes, conducted 100+ interviews, and regularly receive DMs requesting referrals and career advice. Every time I see someone early in their career opening with generic statements about passion for technology without substantial evidence to back it up, I’m disappointed. Passion is cheap. Your introduction should be concise, powerful, and show proof of work. You’re passionate about engineering? Great - what have you built? No, your TODO app in the MERN stack won’t cut it.
It’s about high agency and getting things done. Hit me with your open source contributions. Send me the most complex project you built, or the most intricate PR you had submitted. Link me to your technical blogs which offer fresh insights, tackle complex problems or even just talk about something you learned. Walk me through your favorite research paper.
Many candidates emphasize being quick learners who can ramp up rapidly. While I appreciate the sentiment, the evidence bar for this claim is high. Learning Redux in a day isn’t proof. Can you build Redux from scratch if needed? What about a distributed, replicated and eventually consistent Redux like store? Have you optimized build tooling configurations? How do I know you can write beautiful, performant apps? Have you ever profiled a sluggish web app or dived deep into TypeScript server traces? Do you understand concurrency vs parallelism? ACID vs CAP theorem? Or observability, security, syncing data in real-time? Do you know that cache and queue are not the answers to all scaling problems? Do you know common latency numbers? Or how to debug a memory leak in production?
Building non-trivial applications with fast, delightful UX is hard. It’s not just a matter of going through a list of todos, reality has a surprising amount of detail. I don’t expect mastery of all these areas, but I need clear signals that you can learn and adapt with minimal handholding.
The tech industry needs fewer enthusiasts and more doers, creators, and problem-solvers. Build things, show evidence that you can take on complex problems and deliver them, you’ll be miles ahead of the crowd.