MetaChat - Professional programmers, please help me with my resume

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20 July 2007

Professional programmers, please help me with my resume →[More:] I'm applying for an internal transfer at my company, and the hiring manager is going to need an updated resume. But the resume I have is quite a few years old, and at the time I was using it, I was looking for sysadmin jobs. So it's structured around systems technologies and trades heavily on my past experience as a security researcher, neither of which are relevent for this job I'm trying to move into. So how should a software engineer's resume look? I'd imagine it should be primarily focused on what I've done, and less on what I know, but beyond that I'm a little lost. What kind of structure do you use for yours?

post by: cmonkey at: 10:36 | 4 comments

I'll email you a link to mine (not posting it here because I don't want my professional information linked with all the personal stuff I post about here).

posted by matildaben 20 July | 10:44

Do a bit of reading... here, and here.

Of course, it all depends on who's gonna be reading it.
Personally I'd make sure that I ...
- Only mention the languages I know well.
- don't specify "HTML" as a language.
- mention any large projects I've contributed to.
- Try to convey enthusiasm for coding.
- Give the impression that I'm smart and gets things done.

posted by seanyboy 20 July | 11:15

Mine is essentially a list of positions I held, with bullets below describing major projects completed or responsibilities held. At the end, along with education, is a list of skills, i.e. operating systems familiarity, languages I'm competent with, major toolkits/libraries known, etc.

Note, most places aren't looking for a plain old code monkey (cmonkey?). They want to know you can do more, i.e. design, code (from scratch, or maintenance, or enhance), test, document, support, etc. Also be able to communicate, contribute to a team, have potential to eventually lead a team.

posted by knave 20 July | 18:14

The "smart and gets things done" thing isn't such an issue, since the hiring manager will have access to all of the performance reviews and peer/manager evaluations that I've gone through, but I guess I should make sure that my resume stands out all the same. Thanks for the tips, I'll start rewriting it tonight.

The c in cmonkey stands for C)

posted by cmonkey 20 July | 18:41

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