How to Write a Great Software Engineer Resume

so you guys are probably thinking hey what's up why are you here talking about resumes instead of helping us get better at software engineering right well here's why with millions of job applications to top tech companies each year your resume is one of the very few tools you have that will help you get noticed but multiple eye tracking studies have shown that a recruiter on average only spends about six seconds looking at a resume yep you heard that right that is just six seconds and that is how long you have to catch their attention if you don't there is no phone screen there is no interview and there is no dream job you may be great at interviewing but if you can't get the interview it doesn't really matter so now look at your resume and ask yourself do you have a resume that will catch a recruiter's attention in about six seconds if the answer is yes you're all set congratulations but if the answer is no or you're not sure then watch on in this video i will give you tips on how to write a solid resume and then put your resumes through the six second test not only that i will also provide actionable feedback on those resumes and thank you to all of you who submitted your resumes for this video i got over 100 submissions from 14 different countries in just 24 hours that's amazing all right let's begin [Music] before we begin i have some quick channel updates but if you don't care for the updates and want to go straight to the resume stuff feel free to jump ahead timestamps are in the description below first going forward this channel will solely be focused on software engineering content things like tutorials courses career advice and interview prep and for that reason it also went through a major rebranding as you can see the channel is now called engineering with utsav instead of utsavaised second the channel utsavaris will be my lifestyle channel that will have a lot of tech cars travel music food coffee and of course my dog so if you are into that kind of stuff link to that channel is in the description below but if you're here only for the engineering content that's cool subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell icon so you don't miss videos like this and if you have any questions leave them in the comments below or message me on instagram as most of you already know i try to respond to every single one of your comments and instagram messages with that said let's get started the first advice i have for you is not to get too creative with your resume don't take me wrong i'm all about creative ideas and out of the box thinking but your resume is probably not the place to express yourselves very creatively i'll give you an example to help you understand why so in most countries you have to be a certain age to enter a bar right in the u.s that is 21 in many other places around the world it is probably 18. so there's usually a person outside the door of a bar checking your ids to make sure you're old enough to enter their job is to check as many ids as possible and keep the line moving that is the reason why most ids are of standardized format and size where you have your name picture your address and date of birth that way they can quickly scan the id verify that it's you and whether you're old enough and that's all now imagine if each individual had a different form of id some were the size of a letter others were the size of an sd card some pretty standard where others were full of glitters and unicorns wouldn't it be incredibly difficult for the bouncer to do their job this exact thing applies to recruiters their first and top priority is to screen you in or out do you have the right skill set and are you qualified for the position and they need to do that as fast as possible so the more standardized your resume is the faster and more effectively they can do their job also please keep your resume within one page only in extremely rare cases do you ever need to go more than one page you'll understand what i mean when we look at some real resumes later so when i say don't be too creative with your resume i don't mean make it devoid of personality because once your resume has passed the initial screen it gets a lot of attention from the recruiter as well as the interviewer and at that stage reflecting some of your personality in your resume will help you become memorable and stand out from the rest of the competition for example if you have traveled to say more than 30 countries in the past five years mention it because as an interviewer that is not only interesting but if i love traveling as well you'll immediately strike a court don't take this as getting a free pass though it does not matter how many countries you have traveled to if you cannot do well in the interview but if you did do well on your interview and then you have something interesting to show you stand out from the rest in other words be humble but brag about your achievements see your resume is no place to be super humble after all it is your resume not your team's resume not your mentor's resume and not your manager's resume it is yours so talk about what you did yeah sure there are many things that you do as a team so do mention those when an entire team was part of it teamwork is a crucial aspect of being a successful engineer but don't forget to mention what you do if everything on your resume is about what your team did as a hiring manager or an interviewer i don't get a signal into what your capabilities are that being said please don't claim that you're an expert on anything period your resume as a whole should be enough to indicate that you have a lot of experience in something there is absolutely no reason to explicitly announce that you're an expert because one it is really difficult for anyone to be an expert in anything in computer science and two if your interviewer is also extremely well versed in what you're claiming to be an expert in you could get into a lot of trouble for example c-sharp is one of my favorite languages i've used it for over a decade on many different projects now if i'm interviewing you and you claim to be an expert in c sharp i will be expecting you to teach me a thing or two about c sharp because i don't think i'm an expert in c-sharp and please don't lie in your resume this should be common sense but you'll be surprised at how many resumes i've come across where candidates have blatantly lied about their accomplishments lying may get you through to the initial screen but when you actually end up in your resume you will get caught and it's not good for anybody nobody wins and everybody's time is wasted so just don't lie this point is often the hardest one for me to explain a majority of resumes that i look at simply look like they copy-pasted the job description instead of showcasing what they achieved and this is the easiest to understand if you look at the real example okay so let's find a random job listing from say microsoft for a senior software engineer okay so let's look at the qualifications section so it says here six plus years of proven track record for building and shipping production software demonstrated ability and experience in the entire services deployment cycle design implementation deployment and live site okay experience with c-sharp c plus plus java or equivalent is required okay experience with docker vsts akamai is an asset experience with modern web technology like react redox grunt webpack is an asset experience with cloud deployments and management is an asset like azure and aws and finally experience with combined engineering teams with owned testing and deployment is preferred bachelor's or master's degree in computer science or equivalent industry experience okay that's pretty straightforward now let me change this up a bit so imagine if this were someone's resume so we have some name over here summary is six plus years of industry experience in c sharp and a proven track record of building and shipping production software okay that's a good summary and for education they've got a bachelor's degree in some university at some date cool and then as part of their work experience they're a senior software engineer at xyz company at some city some country from say jan 2010 to jan 2020. so this looks like a pretty common resume that you come across a lot so now help me figure out what else does this resume tell me about this candidate that the job description does not in behavioral interviews there is a technique called star that you use to frame your answers star basically stands for situation task action and results so my advice to you guys is that you use the same technique for your resumes for each position that you have held think of what was the situation you were involved in what task did you have to do what was the action did you take and what was the result now let's reframe the same example from above and look at it from the star perspective so the situation we have is a senior software engineer working at xyz company working on some project the task is that they're responsible for leading a team of six people tasked at improving the front-end deployments that weren't very agile and taking up hours each time the deployments happened the action here is lead re-architecting of the cicd pipeline removed unnecessary dependencies containerized deployment packages for isolation and easier bug tracing and utilized serverless azure functions to streamline the whole process and the result improved deployment speed by 85 percent lower deployment bugs and issues count by 37 and since vms were replaced by serverless technology saved 42 on operational costs of course this is just a fictional example but i hope you get the difference between simply copy pasting a job description and actually listing out your accomplishments this will also be much more clear when we look at some real examples in a bit the final advice i have for you is to prioritize the sections of your resume and keep the tone of the entire resume consistent by that i mean make sure the important things are at the top if you're a student your education and project should be on the top if you are a beginner you already have a little bit of experience your current work experience and your education can still go at the top and if you're experienced your skills and experience should go at the top and your education falls below and finally keep the tone consistent and by this i don't mean the literal tone what i mean by tone is what your resume tells about you if you are into machine learning your resume should clearly give that feel if you're a software engineer i should clearly know that you're into software engineering after i read your resume if you list out your experience as a barista then your experience building some cool software then your work as a graphics designer and then your work as a social worker where you also build some website i don't really get a feel for what you're looking for so make sure to be clear and consistent of what you want your resume to tell about you it's okay to drop some work experience and projects in favor of some consistency remember quality is always better than quantity alright that's all the tips i have now let's look at some of your resumes i will put each of your resumes through the same six second rule that i mentioned in the beginning of the video and tell you whether it passes the test or not and i'll also go through them quickly to mention what they did well and where they can improve i'll go through them fast because that's how resumes are looked at so if it's too fast for you you can pause or slow down the video and i want to thank you guys again for sending me your resumes you guys were so generous if i sound a little bit harsh in some of the resumes please don't take it personally i'm only trying to show you how it would be in a real life situation where interviewers and recruiters have to look at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of resumes sometimes in one day so they really are quick fast and don't have that much patience with a lot of things that you guys may think that they will give a lot of time into so that's all um again don't take it personally it's just me trying to teach you guys how it is and that's all right with that said let's get to the resumes all right guys let's look at the first resume here and put it through the six second rule so at a glance this is too cluttered for me and i know the candidate probably wanted to stand out and had all the right intentions he's using a different typeface lots of bold uppercasing lowercasing and from a graphical standpoint it actually looks pretty decent but from the perspective of a resume and especially a resume being scanned in less than eight seconds this is too cluttered i can quickly see that there's a skills section here but then there's a skills development section here there's a lot of certificates and that's good but it's seriously competing now with this space which is seems like his projects um so that's a lot of projects and i think he is i i'm looking for his education and i can't find his education okay it's here it's kind of hidden here small little space so he just recently graduated so his technical projects are probably the most critical thing here and the education so i would expect that to be up top somewhere here but i had to literally as you can see scan for it and look for it for a good 30 seconds before i could find it um so for that reason the eight second scan this this definitely fails i would have passed on it already because i need to go through more resume but let's actually look at the details of this and what what he did good and what he could improve on so he listed his technical skills that's good i like the fact that differentiated between proficient and familiar with uh so that he's being honest and upfront saying that hey i'm proficient in these things but i'm only familiar with these other things he's listed all his links to github medium linkedin and that's good i would love to see this up top because that's a more important thing i would also love to see a gpa here that kind of shows off that you're a good student i like the skills development that he listed and shows that he's a self-starter and he does a lot of things on his own without anybody telling him um but the problem with this skills development section over here is that it's seriously competing against this guy over here right and your technical projects tend to be more important especially for a fresh graduate so let's look at the last project over here built a minimal college information inquiry chat bot from scratch in python that's good but i kind of don't get any information about what sort of inquiry it is it is just your yes or no inquiry or are you asking for complex like mapping situations and let's look at the other one i actually like this guy because he's classified nepalese news articles into 16 categories using the svm he's mentioned the vector machines there and then the accuracy as well so which is really good because he's indicated numbers but the thing that i'm missing here is what was the volume of articles right like so did you classify 100 articles or did you classify million articles like how many right this is a problem right like satisfiable result what what is satisfiable right pixel perfect who decides if it's pixel perfect you or the customer or someone else pixel perfect is not quantifiable if you if you know what i mean the problem i have here is what was the impact here okay you you implemented that but did it solve the problem was there a problem tracking migrants in the border how did it improve it how did it solve it did you actually start it and then someone took over it and now it's being worked on i have no clue really it just shows and again this is the star method that i was talking about i don't i don't know the results here so let's look at the last one here i'm not going to be too picky on this one because he just started it's november 2020. so he hasn't probably had that much time to work on it but it says working on an in-house machine learning product that deals with natural language processing it can it get more vague than that like what the hell does this mean right like i have no clue like okay in-house machine learning product i mean it says that you're a machine learning engineer so no wonder you're working on machine learning but that also deals with natural language processing well yeah and i'll usually deal with that but what did you do like i'm interested in that so this line doesn't tell me any information about what you did and then responsibilities include performing research model creation training implements and that's what ml engineers do but what did you do like what was the impact again back to the star method over here so yeah these are the things you could improve again don't don't be too hard on yourself i mean you've just graduated i'm just probably being more critical than i need to but it's good to learn about little things that you can improve and how you can make this better going forward so right off the bat this one's way cleaner languages and technologies or his skill set is written right above there is very clear super nice looks like he has exposure from all the way to the front end to the back end entire stack at a glance now i'm interested to read his resume more right like so he's caught my attention especially if i'm looking for something related to csharp.net someone who's got exposure to the cloud a little bit of asynchronous processing containers you know like some nosql databases that's very cool like he's got my attention so the six second rule pass so he says he's a software developer here and then if you quickly glance through what's what he's doing here right like software engineer primary system administrator for a mission critical application with 2000 user 27 24 7 availability okay three application support for mission critical applications used by someone okay again support solve 300 plus tickets per calendar year with client satisfaction in 97 what does salt mean i don't know did you fix bugs or did you just sign the tickets um satisfaction percentage is kind of kind of high and good but i don't know what solving means modify ssrs packages so then you're talking about integration services there so maybe it's like a database kind of thing so it looks like maybe some devops or interfacing kind of activity happening there and then support ever growing databases through maintenance upgrades okay that's the seams again support work so if you know what i'm picking on is like the software developer kind of doesn't jive with what the description says this looks like a support role to me more like a tech support maybe a more advanced tech support but i didn't see anything a software developer would do like none of the things that is mentioned here is what a software engineer does or developer does so i don't know anything about his code quality what kind of things he builds as a software developer this would have been passed here i wouldn't read any further because this resume gets even more confusing where now the software developer role switches to field application engineer and then this has nothing to do with development at all it's very um go to the field you know provide support test out like almost like manufacturing stuff and then you go further down it's component and reliability engineer so as you can see if this came to me it's a good resume when i scan through it it had all the right things it started off well so it caught my attention but as i read through it the consistency wasn't there this is clearly not a software engineer or a software developer resume at least in my mind or maybe his it's more like a application engineer support engineer maybe he needs to change these titles over to that then it would be more consistent that would be more like hey i'm a support or applications engineer with some development experience okay that works that that makes this a very strong resume right but um if it's a software engineer software developer resume i don't see anything here that would make me believe that this is a strong candidate right so i hope that makes sense let's move on to the next one at a glance six seconds this is well structured i see where the work experience is he's done research and projects important for a fresh graduate which i already saw because education is at the top he's mentioned is skill i can clearly see he's listed his certifications and extra course work which is kind of good for a new software engineer awards as well and then a little bit of extra this is the personality bit i was talking about he included volunteering you may include some interesting fact about yourself or something like that but it's categorized well he's prioritized all the important things up top and then kind of snuck in the little extra bits if you were to read further like this is excellent organization this is good cluster 10 000 research papers see how the number is important if he had just said clustered research proposal documents using k-means algorithm i wouldn't really know what volume is he talking about but 10 000 for someone who's doing as a project is a decent number wrote python script to scrape it there's a spelling mistake here probably script um wrote python scripts to script hundred images which is not a lot but he's mentioning and that also shows honesty right he's not claiming anything more than he's done 100 images from universities live cam and two and five second intervals and created ten thousand and forty thousand tiles for each images good he's not claiming anything more anything less maybe that's impressive maybe that is not he's being honest so that he can answer follow-up questions for what he's done for the next experience organize meetings to gather customer requirements i mean organized meeting is not a big thing for a machine learning engineer even though you did it i probably wouldn't include here but overall this is this is good it's a good resume the my only feedback here is to mention more impact because it looks like you have worked a good amount of time on this guy so if you could mention what you achieved out there i think this is a this is a solid resume all right right off the bat six second rule technical skills right here is very good and a lot of his projects are here all of them are into machine learning type things so awesome this is good six second rule pass i'm interested let me read further develop sentiment model to classify industry related news and positive negative and neutral okay it tells me that you've used industry related news but then no volume no impact so i don't really know what the result of your work was or how complicated the project was if you don't mention those to me i know that you did that and you're familiar with it but it would be nice to know the size and the impact of the project all right let's look at the software engineer experience here so like the first one is already interesting right designed graphql java service to prevent over or under fetching of data so that's already telling me why that was done right uh some sort of interaction api gateway improved performance by 13 of use case that is awesome so there was some over under fetching of data happened and then he wrote the interfacing uh he wrote the api gateway and then improved performance by 13 good introduced tool for dynamic graphql schema generation cache results with gaba cash and to further reduce latency so at least he's mentioned why is done that i would have loved to see what the reduction in latency numbers were like a lot of people mentioned testing and test coverage utilized unit testing frameworks to reach 100 test coverage excellent but how much how much code was there that needed test coverage like did you write one function and then created 100 test coverage that's not that impressive uh maybe it was thousands and maybe millions of lines of code i don't know so quantify again yeah this is pretty solid probably one of the best so far all right let's move on right off the bat you can see this is a little bit more verbose and a lot of text but he still managed to consistently format it and display it in a manner where i know where the experience is all right these are the experiences okay software projects now i'm immediately thinking did this person graduate recently and then i scroll down okay that's education right here and then yep they sort of graduated recently so they're not like a fresh graduate it's been a year but recently enough where inclusion of projects are still a valid thing to do and i would still i would even move the education above but that's fine he's got enough experience to cover that up and then skills he's mentioned that normally i suggest to put skills up top but i will show you here that he's done something pretty interesting um where for each position he's mentioned um what knowledge he leveraged really which is pretty interesting too that that's if you have space in your resume you can do that that's a really good way but overall i'll quickly scan built a similarity search ml model which improved accuracy from 84 to 95 and then that's the improvement by catching manipulated duplicate images by pixel difference so you see he's even telling you how he did it awesome built a cost-effective face detection model which saved 250 000 per year for the company by replacing a third-party service used for face detection and blurring technique by using ensemble technique of building multiple ml model and achieved accuracy of 92 with less false positive rate of around five percent that is awesome like what else do you need to know about what this person has done right phenomenal so that's how you write sentences that's that's achievements right there he's also he's not only telling you what he did but why he did it how he did it and what was the impact star right situation task action result uh so i'm not going to go through this entire resume line by line but you can see this theme throughout the resume boosted productivity of administrative work by 20 by building pipeline of using which analyzes pdf automatically and generates table of content and also deactivate hyperlinks using regex this is officially the best one so far alright so this one is a little bit more experienced person as you can see they clearly have around 10 years of experience so one of the things that stands out right away is quick scan the summary is like about the page so that's a lot and then previous experience we were already running out of space then company it's like three pages except for the first one which was from nepal the rest of them have been from us or maybe canada this one is i think from india so i don't know if it's acceptable in india to have multiple page resumes if it is then i have nothing to say over there at least in u.s and canada it's usually recommended to have one page the the sad part about this is like all of this could have totally been consolidated over here and here and here and with the formatting it would have probably fit the one page thing right but not only that like the summary has one two three four five six like 10 or 12 bullets here right like but then if i go to the actual software senior software engineer role um the role is senior software engineer now through present and then there's a project description which is unnecessary but then if you look at responsibilities and achievements it's like two lines right feature enhancement like slack and teams integration okay that's like pretty trivial for a senior software engineer where like that's usually like level one or two or even intern level um thing and then started playing critical role in the implementation like what does that even mean i expect you to play a critical role because you're a senior software engineer you know that's a given this would be a pass for me unfortunately this is the last one a lot of text but still well formatted that i know what's going on here education up top graduation date up top i know that this person's not graduated yet software engineer intern so they put their internship experiences and looks like this person also has founded something um side projects pretty cool okay um so if i read on there's a course work they've included all their important courses that's good um and then they've included the technologies they know that's good everything i need to know good so software engineer intern launched an automated underwriting service that approves or declines customer loan and lease requests for uh something receives 100 000 plus applications important to know numbers so that's a lot of applications and they've created a service that solves that problem good and then managing risk oversight for billions of dollars annually so that's awesome uh built api in javascript and web from that receives declined applications allowing underwriters to make manual decisions okay i would have loved to know what the api numbers were but that's cool too decreased customer wait time and reapprovals by 78 that's good and then one thing i wanted to highlight is this guy over here this is what i meant about personality so you you don't this is not like a fancy too creative resume it's pretty straightforward it looks like a generic resume but this is where this person has inserted their personality into it right like serious serious serious seriousness bam suddenly right here is like this little joke but the reason this works because it says speed next to someone and i don't want to disclose their identity but just know that this company that their work they worked for is a pretty big company very well known company and then the ceo is like a celebrity everybody knows the ceo okay so the fact that this person's mentioned that oh i happen to be next to this person if you read that you you'd chuckle you'd laugh and and that's the kind of thing it's harmless it's funny but it works because the rest of the resume is pretty strong right like if the rest of the resume was like full of nonsense then this would suddenly be like what the hell meant you know so this is a strong i would consider maybe another internship position or at least for an entry-level position definitely seems like a cool person alright that's all i have for today i hope this video is useful if it was hit the like button share the video and let me know in the comments below what you thought about it also subscribe to this channel and hit the notification bell icon so you don't miss videos like these in the future and if you have a question directly to me feel free to reach out to me on my instagram i do my best to respond to every message i get over there as well and finally if you're interested in my lifestyle and non-software engineering content please feel free to follow me there the link to the new channel is in the description below i'll see you around [Music] you

Channel: Engineering with Utsav

Views: 30,002

Keywords: How to Write a Great Software Engineer Resume, software developer resume, resume tips, software engineer resume, software engineering resume, software engineer resume tips, software engineering internship resume, software developer resume tips, programming resume, technical resume, google resume software engineer, resume for software developer, how to make a resume, computer science resume, software engineer cv, software engineer, how to make software developer resume

Id: ciIkiWwZnlc

Length: 29min 1sec (1741 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 24 2021