Hiring managers look for 2 things in a resume. Or at least the managers I know do.
- What's your slope?
- What did you do?
That's all your engineering resume has to answer.
The best candidates have high slope. Quick progression of engineering titles or scope. Going from less to more impactful work, having more and more ownership and responsibility, building bigger systems, delivering more value.
Personally I care more about your increase in scope than your fancy title. Been in this racket long enough to know that a senior principal distinguished engineer architect of a 5 person startup means less than joe schmoe engineer at a bigger company. I interview lots of CTOs and founding engineers with less scope than my role as a half-IC half manager :)
If you have BigTech experience this gets tricky. People there tend to have narrow scope, but the numbers are huge.
That's why your resume has to answer "What did you do!?". I see lots of resumes that use fancy words and corporate embellishments to say "Did work every day". Yeah it's great that you delivered systems to customer satisfaction but what does that mean??
The best resumes are direct and to the point.
You built a thing, owned a system, led an initiative, created a team, whatever. You have to tell me what you worked on and why it mattered.
Most managers have a pain point and look for the person to solve it. Your best bet is to have solved similar problems in the past. We like to think our problems are special but honestly it's all roughly the same.
Your resume has to answer "What did you do, for whom, did it work"
Cheers,
~Swizec
PS: for early career engineers side-projects are great. Shows initiative and drive. For later career engineers, I'd be worried if your side projects are more impressive than your work work.
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