I have seen over a thousand resumes, conducted 100+ interviews and get regular dms for referrals and career interests. Every time I see someone in their early career opening with their passion for technologies with not much substance to back it up, I’m just disappointed. Passion is cheap. Your intro should be concise, powerful and should show proof of work. You’re passionate about engineering? Great, what have you built? No, your TODO app in MERN stack is not going to 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.
A lot of folks also talk about them being quick learner, and can get up to speed quickly if given the opportunity. I get the sentiment but the evidence required for quick learning has a much higher bar than say learning redux in a week. Can you build redux if needed? What about a distributed, replicated and eventually consistent redux like store? How well do you know about build tooling? How do I know you can write beautiful, performant apps? Have you ever profiled a sluggish web app or delved deep into TypeScript server traces? Do you understand concurrency and parallelism? Or ACID, CAP theorem, 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? Building non-trivial applications with fast, delightful user experiences is hard. It’s not just a matter of going through a list of todos, reality has a surprising amount of detail. I’m not expecting one to know all of this, but I’m definitely expecting there are some signals of you being able to learn and adapt quickly with minimal handholding when the time comes.
The tech world doesn’t need more enthusiasts; it needs 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.