4 YOE Not having much success in the market. Something is broken.
For good six or seven months of applying, I only got call back from 4 companies offering around $120k which I had to pass. I have been flat out rejected for senior software engineer roles from HubSpot, Datadog, Adobe, Atlassian, Pinecone, eBay, DataBricks and more. This is with referrals from Blind. Can someone please advise me what the F I am doing wrong here? What is fundamentally wrong with my resume and how can I pivot/push my career to the next level? #resume #resumereview #jobs Current TC $130K
It’s not just you. The market is terrible rn for anything below staff. On your resume you should consider shortening some of the descriptions. The first position comes across as a giant wall of text that’s hard to skim. Also no need for ratings on your skills section.
I used the tool here which supposedly cars creates resume that's ATS friendly https://www.open-resume.com/ Now in my experience, I don't think that's true I extended my experience reading advice here to focus on commerical experience. The wall of text serves a way to get keywords hits too.
Agree, wall of text
Your resume is fine but youre competing against more experienced people. Youre gonna need to apply for mid level roles
I agree. I thought senior engineer role is mid level. I'll apply for regular SWE now.
Nothing on your resume says senior. You could probably change it a bit to be more infra focused and then maybe qualify for senior roles, but you'd really need to reframe your experience. Right now it looks like you have some basic backend experience and maybe handled some devops tickets... I mean come on, Git experience is a bulletpoint and not even for your internship. TDD is like new grad/school experience bulletpoint. Definitely SWE/SWE 2 (barely) vibes right now. Especially current job market, people are going for Sr roles with clear tech lead experience and major, measurable impact across big name companies... Most of your listed impact is maybe team or microservice scale.
You are right. I do very basic DevOps work. Edit gradle or figure out how to deploy services into companies CI/CD framework etc. I am not involved in the team that build the devOps infra at all. (I regret not moving into that team) my work is mostly OOP and business domain. No one gives a damn about my business domain which makes job hunt way harder who want folks with golang, aws, ansible, react, next.js commerical experience... I did the personal project just to get in React keywords and MEARN stack. One thing for certain is I need to stop applying for senior role and target SDE roles instead. It does make me upset since I know folks with 4 YOE and are senior SDE or member of technical staff I have Git there since tons of JD out there want folks to know git. But I get ur point, I'll remove it and push it into internship and figure out what impactful point I can put in.
Look to get Sr level work. Lead projects. Enable impact. Don't just code your tickets, become an independent, impact-oriented software engineer. Sr just means doesn't need babying to get work done (no offence). If you aren't getting the opportunity to do that type of work, ask for it, or figure out what sort of work would help your team more than what you do.
1) If I hire for a Java position, I can read that someone is probably better than you out there. If I hire for a C# position, I can read that someone is probably better than you out there. If I hire for a Python position, I can read that someone is fucking better than you out there. 2) Senior positions in this market need 5-6y of xp. Let’s say I overlook that: you didn’t own any project, nor drive any product initiative nor architected nor mention paring up with stakeholders / users 3) Also no mention of leadership/mentoring/vision/knowledge sharing As a HM I wonder why you’d be a good fit for a senior position since you haven’t performed at a senior level yet
The thing that is broken is unrealistic expectations for TC. Find a 100k TC job. See how soon you find one
I should have mentioned, my current TC 130K
Why are you even looking elsewhere?
Looking for better salary. I'm paid $130K and 4 YOE. A friend of mine has same YOE but has DevOps stack and banging $300k at a semi startup. I won't see any TC growth at my current role.
I think your resume is cluttered. Provide less number of points which are important and impactful. For a one page resume, this one has too many words.
Thank you for the suggestion. If I cut down my resume, won't I be missing on important keywords? My logic with the wall of text is to get keywords hits from job descriptions. Isn't this the whole point of beating the ATS system by having the keywords in?
I don’t think beating a system is that important. If your resume fits the role, then you have more chances of a call.If you can make a HR to look at your resume from top to end you have more chances.
Split the bullet points for your first role into multiple sub-achievements - ex organize them by specific project. You should also cut it down to fewer bullet points. Within the bulletpoints, bold the technologies you worked with to make it easy for recruiters to understand your skill set. Also skill progress bars add no value and are entirely subjective. The list of skills should also be at the top and in some sort of table format or at least have headings for the specific sets of skills to help recruiters find them quickly
I have never seen main experience to be broken down into sub achievements. I'll need to think that through. I agree with you. I will remove the skill progress bar and move skills section to the top for keywords. I'll remove some of the redundant bullet points (e.g. git/perforce) and focus on impactful work.. which will be hard since it's next to impossible to get assigned impactful since manager is focused on bug fixes.
"Deploy code using Git and used Jira"? You need to redo your whole resume. That's a whole wall of text that tells absolutely nothing about you except that you're junior.
I have JIRA and Git there because of job description asking for the keyword. But you are right and from comments, here. I'll shove this up into skills section and try to condense for impactful bullet point only.
When you are rewriting I advise not to focus on trying to fluff your resume with "keywords". Your resume at some point will have a person look at it. When they do you better make sure they spend those 30 seconds knowing how awesome and impactful you are. You also need to focus on impact and results. "Navigate ambiguities and advise senior management" for example also tells me as a hiring manager nothing. An intern can do that. The result is what matters. You advised them then what? Did they care? Did you end up leading a project and creating your own trail for others to follow? What was the follow up action? That's what I would be looking for in a senior when reading it. If you don't list it I would assume you sent them a slack message/email/brought it up once in a meeting and nothing came of it.
4 YOE was not meant to be senior
I see a lot of companies put 5 yoe for senior. It'll be easier next year buddy. Gotta be patient unfortunately since a lot of recruiters use 5 yoe as a blank check yes or no for candidates.
Google is hiring L6 managers with 3yoe recently in Poland and Romania because they cannot find people. Wtf are you talking about Google.