Our next session is a week from today, on Juneteenth! Join us on Saturday, June 19 at 9am PST for our best tips on identifying side projects that will have a meaningful number of users, be feasible to build, and help you land your dream tech job. Details to join are in the LinkedIn event.

Given that we have almost 4K people in the event (!!), we'll almost certainly hit the 500 person Zoom meeting capacity, so we're also going to livestream the event on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/rpandey1234). If you don't have a question to ask, feel free to listen to the livestream. Also if you're not already part of our Tech Career Growth Slack, please join us for more interactive discussion.

The last session on May 29 about writing an effective tech resume was a blast! Here are the main points we covered:

Meta Points

1. Remember that a recruiter will be reading a resume. They're usually non-technical and they don’t have a lot of time (7.4 seconds per resume on average).
2. When in doubt, keep your resume simple. Readability is key, so don't be too creative with formatting.

Keep It Short And Focused

1. A single page resume is best. This makes it simple to read and forces you to trim the fat.
2. Have clear divisions between sections (header, work experience, projects, education, skills, awards). Prefer 1 column.
3. Aggressively compress old experience. Don't rate yourself on skills.

Spelling And Grammar Matter

1. Your resume should have 0 obvious spelling/grammar mistakes. This is one of the easiest ways recruiters toss out resumes.
2. You will spend lots of time on your resume to create a short 1 page document. If it looks unprofessional, it is a signal to employers that you're unprofessional.

Show, Don’t Tell

1. This is the concept that people struggle with the most, and it is arguably the most important idea to master.
2. Everybody wants to and can say that they’re a good engineer. In order to stand out, you must show that you’re a good engineer.
3. You do this by capturing the impact of your accomplishments (i.e. what is the delta you produced) and dictating it in a very concise, accessible way.
4. If you can show a number (i.e. metric), you’re probably on the right track. To avoid revealing confidential company information, use public statistics (e.g. # of installs on an app) and deltas (I increased X metric by 10%).
5. Deploy projects to prod and link that - A GitHub repo is meaningless to a recruiter!
6. Avoid brag summary sections with cliches. Don't include personal info like your picture.

Most Practical -> Least Practical

1. Companies want to answer the following question: Can this person ship code in a professional, production environment?
2. Go-to ordering working backwards from this question (after skills overview section):
   1. Prior work experience: Other instances of you shipping code in professional, prod environment
   2. Side projects: You’re still shipping code to prod, just not in a formally professional environment.
   3. Education: Universities are more focused on (outdated) academic exercises instead of shipping code. Bootcamps are more practical side, but the work is often very “tech-demo-ey” so not a real production environment.

Concluding Meta Point

1. These resume tips are the “dressing” around your professional “core”, which is what you have actually accomplished. If your core is weak, you will have a hard time getting job opportunities - No amount of dressing will fix this.
2. If you aren’t getting the job opportunities you want due to a lack of experience or clout from top tech companies on your resume, you should join us on June 19 for how to identify promising side project ideas!
3. A tech company’s purpose is to ship a software product to thousands/millions of users. You can do the exact same thing via side projects. Use the #side-projects channel to your advantage

See you all on June 19!

​Alex + Rahul​

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