Your resume titles don't matter. Just tell me what did you do.
I'm back in hiring mode and going through lots of resumes these days. A thread on HackerNews yesterday sniped me into explaining the most important part of what I look for. You might find it helpful.
PS: you can read and share this online
Forget titles
You have to put roles and titles on your resume. That's the core structure. Company, role, years.
But your title doesn't tell me much. You could be a Senior Principal Architect and at a 3-person startup that's not very impressive. I have junior engineers with tougher jobs than that.
Titles don't translate across companies. They sometimes translate across segments. All of BigTech uses similar ladders, for example, and many VC-backed startups copy their playbook. This gives titles a tiny amount of signal.
The big signal in your title is upward progression. Did you get promoted in a job? That's huge. Did you change jobs to get increased scope and responsibility? Great signal.
Slope beats a lot of y-intercept
Tell me your scope
The main thing I look for is scope. What did you do, for whom, what was the impact?
My boss once said "Being a manager at our company is about the same as a YC founder. You have a team, stakeholders, and lots of problems. Figure it out".
We don't have to [explicitly] fight for funding but he's right. Results are the only thing that matters. You have 5, 6, 7, maybe more stakeholders (whole workstreams). Are they happy? Do they feel supported? Are you moving the needle? That's it.
And that's what I look for in resumes. Did you get shit done? That's all that matters. What did you do, for whom, what was the impact.
What counts as "scope" depends on your role.
For a manager type, we care about how many people and workstreams you managed. For a staff+ engineer, it's about technical impact, leveling up the people around you, and taste. For an individual contributor, what did you build and how.
And fear not, after reading lots of these it's easy to see through the bullshit. Get outta here with "delivered technical solutions to client problems" (this means you went to work) and "designed a semantic database of documents for fuzzy retrieval in a segmented ..." (RAG, a weekend tutorial project for LLMs).
What did you do?
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: a good way to describe scope that translates across companies is ARR. You were at $company from N revenue to M revenue. Or number of employees. This gives hiring managers an extremely precise signal of what your impact looked like. Most companies are roughly the same on the inside.
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