Play the game

___

INTRODUCTION

As part of this and some upcoming blogs, I intend to help the fresh college grads, starters, or experienced folks in the tech industry, gain some perspective into how resumes are supposed to work.

In the time of virus scare and job losses, this will be my 2 cents of help. Contrary to the ideas like – get good grades, work hard and you are set, this world has a few different rules.

To avoid only the ‘Gyan’ … I build my own resume per the instructions I shared. Hopefully, the step by step approach and the details will help all readers.

The next part will discuss the ‘how’ of resume writing.

Let’s get writing …

Summary

I will start with the high-level pointers about my resume. These would be some of them:

–Almost 10 years of experience

–Technology layer : backend and the middle layer (have hardly worked on the front end technologies)

–Technologies : Java and its frameworks ( spring, EJB, Struts ), Data Structures and multithreading, Oracle, DB2, Unix etc

–Type of organizations : Worked mostly in the service industry and less into the product industry.

–Domain : Banking and capital markets

–Type of work : Developer, designer, bug fixing, performance improvement

–Achievements : Awards, rewards, recognitions, and multiple projects.

With the above-mentioned pointers, I am gonna take a shot at writing my profile summary …

Summary : First Draft

Software engineer with almost a decade of experience as a developer, lead, and architect. Worked on open system technologies like : Java, Android, DB servers, Unix scripting etc.

Managed multiple projects as a lead and few as an architect. Have worked as an individual contributor and have lead teams of size 3-10, to deliver projects of size ~500 k $.

Have always been appraised among the best performers of the organization.

The summary seems OKKAY types, not too impressive, and we could improve this with some more facts. But I’d rather not clutter too many details in the objective section for now.

We will further improve this section in a subsequent ‘How to write’ blog.

Remember : Improvement will always be required … feel enough comfort with imperfection to move ahead, and enough discomfort to keep correcting !

Education

In this section, let’s talk about how I would create this kind of section for myself.

College	Intermediate	Highschool
2003 – 2007	2000 – 2002	2000
70%	75%	82%

Points to be noted:

–I did not put my college/ school names or locations. Why ? Coz they are unimportant! If yours are important .. please do add.

–I am almost 10 years into my work experience and my college scores do NOT hold the same value for an employer now !

–Education will usually be a less important section than many would imagine it to be.

So, I might simply NOT add this section to my resume. If you are more than 5 years experienced, I’d imagine the section to be unimportant for you too.

Please figure out how well this section suits you.

Skills

A very important section, in my opinion. Here would be my content:

2008 – Eclipse, Java, Unix, Scripting, Oracle

2010 – Java ( EJBs ), DB2, Banking & Insurance, Scripting,

2012 – Java ( Spring ), Performance engineering, Reporting ( SSRS and Power BI )

2015 – Mongo, Android, System redesign and any useful libraries, CICD ( Continuous integration and Continuous deployment), TDD ( test driven development)

Would I want to list these with a timeline ? Sure !

Should everyone do it ? Not really … one could use other approaches. We will discover them in the ‘How to write’ blog.

As a fresher into the industry, you might NOT have a big list of technologies. That is okay. While you develop the tech skills, feel free to mention the relevant tools/ technologies.

My observation has been that a smaller tech stack drives some folks into ‘doctoring’ their skills, to improve their odds so to speak. I would recommend NOT to fake one’s skills. Instead, try developing an ear for tech lingo in your workplace/ books, and add to your vocabulary. So …

–If you appear for an interview … and are unable to understand a phrase. Ask its meaning and remember it ! add it to your resume next time.

–If you give a test and do not understand a phrase … note it and check out what the phrase means.

–If you read a book … same thing.

A healthy tech vocabulary representing a small tech stack can be much more useful than a large but ‘fake’ set of skills. Subjectively speaking … it’s okay to NOT have a big tech stack !

Also, in-depth knowledge of a few technologies is better than a shallow understanding of multiple ones.

Work Details

An interviewer will primarily want to look at these aspects of my work projects:

a.Technology set

b.The width or depth of my work

This is all that matters ! so, let’s get started:

Project 1:

Name : Embark

Tech stack : Android, Couchbase, Tools and libraries (LeakCanary, Barcode and OCR readers etc)

Description :

–Integrated magnetic swipe hardware into the application.

–Resolved memory leaks from the android application, resolving listeners, singleton classes, callback registrations. Etc.

–Implement an Android-based project with following:

–Code refactoring to fix design issues and improve performance

–Worked on UI refactoring to improve GPU rendering, thus UI performance.

Role :

–Individual contributor/ programmer

–Tech Lead – team of size 2-3 members.

Project 2:

Name : Facial recognition

Tech stack : Amazon DeepLens, Python ( tools and libraries ), Spring, Android, Couchbase

Description :

Allow passengers on a cruise to be onboarded when recognized by a live video camera feed.

–Researched face recognition technologies – DeepLens, Google APIs, face_recognition ( python library ) etc

–Implemented a successful POC with DeepLens

–Integrated a flow from:

Camera feed -> Python recognition -> Spring app -> Couch DB -> Android device

Along with other functions, this POC can help the organization gain multimillion dollar worth projects.

Role:

– Individual contributor/ programmer

Project 3:

Name : New Web App

Tech stack : Spring MVC, Java, MySQL, Web Technologies, SSRS, Tomcat, SMTP

Description :

–An integrated application to collate an otherwise scattered business induction process.

–Implemented SSRS reporting to help reduce the build time by 90%. Reports that needed 90 hours took 8 hours to completion

–Tomcat use for cost reduction from other web servers

–Task : Code, data structures and algorithm reviews

–Responsible for stack choice : Spring JPA, spring validations, SMTP ( for mailing ), HTML and Javascript

–Ensured TDD with integrated Spring MVCs

–CICD pipeline

Git -> Maven -> SonarQube -> Cobertura -> Junits -> Artifactory -> Jenkins

Role :

–Tech lead, worked with 3 developers

Project 4:

Name : App migration

Tech stack : Java, Websphere, EJB, Tomcat, Spring – MVC and JMS

Description :

–Migrated an old application from Websphere to Tomcat, saving the company a major chunk of money in the first year and even more in the next year’s projected costs.

–Websphere provides inbuilt libraries – transaction management, session management, messaging. Researched and found parallel libraries in the open system space ( Camel vs Spring JMS | Spring JPA vs Hibernate etc )

–Programmed and finally integrated the app with unit and integration tests, to provide a product and not just an application.

Role :

–Individual contributor/ programmer

I could go ahead with more projects .. but, most recruiters wouldn’t read the resume anymore. So, in the interest of both our time – I will polish and improve this limited content rather than add more !

Note:

●Hobbies not mentioned ( unless they are relevant to the software profile )

●College projects NOT mentioned

This is because I am NOT a fresh graduate. If you have a good solid college project, feel free to add it with relevant details.

●Skills were REAL, with varying degrees for competence.

●Project details were REAL and not fake. The details used tech vocab and kept the essence.

Wrapping up

In this section of the resume building, I’ve put down the first draft for each of the sections I would want in my resume. If this seems far from perfect, that’s because … it is so.

There are sections that I’ve not added such as previous organizations. This section could either be a simple chronological listing of the past organizations OR could be a mixed with the project details; adding the organization name with the

Now that we have the bare bones text, we will attempt to polish and massage it. We will look at how to write what we write, we will understand the unnecessary and edit it out, and will understand the necessary and make it shine.

Till then … happy learning !

Write back, in case you have an opinion. Like what you read – do like, comment and share.