Your resume reeks of someone who lacks focus.

1. Objectives on resumes are useless fluff. Yours doesn’t add anything useful. It’s so vague, I couldn’t even tell what type of job you are looking for. Project management? Test? Software Development?

2. Your whole summary of skills sections is word soup. I would completely ignore it. Anyone can list technologies they touched once. It’s too unfocused. In your experience section list how you actually used those technologies. Why put you know how to use source control? That’s like listing you know how to type. Why list 8 different languages? Could you handle a deep technical dive in all eight?

3. In your work experience section, you listed your accomplishments, but I have no idea what technologies you used to accomplish anything. You didn’t list the languages you used in any of your jobs since 2007.

I wouldn’t call you in for an in person or a phone screen based on your resume. You claim that you can pick up a language in a day or two but I can’t tell from your resume where you feel technically in any specific area. Again, it looks like you think because you can figure out the syntax of a language you’ve avoided learning the ecosystem, the tooling, the frameworks etc.

You can ignore picking up popular frameworks but you won’t be competitive with people who have stayed up to date.

If you came into an interview saying that you could advise on a technology based on “what you read” and you said you decided not to actually put it into practice, that would be a red flag.

I’ve been working for 20 years. I at one point had an encyclopedic knowledge of C and C++, that’s nowhere on my resume, neither is VB6, Perl, or PHP. I don’t want a job in any of those languages and I don’t want to discuss them.

My resume for the last 8 years has been entirely focused on telling the story I want to tell. I’m a backend C# developer/architect with some front end Javascript experience.

Slowly it’s been morphing into an architect who specializes in “cloud native solutions” with AWS and I’ve added Python and Node and hopefully will be adding the $cool_kids front end stack over the next year or two.

Fair feed back. The Summary of Skills is mostly a Keyword hack for passive job hunting I can move it around.

I can deep dive into Elixir, Embedded C, C/C++, Java, C#, and PHP. I've used all of these on the job excluding perl, python and ruby in the last 5 years, and python and ruby i've used on side projects or for tutoring a friend on algorithmic programming for a evangelical role google asked her to do a follow up interview on. This is also not a comprehensive list of every language I've ever worked in or touched. I don't list Lisp, F#, Haskell, ActionScript, etc.

It probably makes sense to prune out outdated frameworks. And I should probably be updating this with some of the more recent frameworks i've worked with. But the thing is I'm bright, top 1% of the top 1% IQ, inability to write a compelling resume aside. I can pick up frameworks like candy, I read the manual. Further when I want to figure out how to do something that's not initially obvious or covered in the documentation I just read the source code or look it up, which is what everyone does but I do it better. That 2-3 day number includes getting a handle on libraries and frameworks being used on the project. I can pickup just syntax in the 10-90 minutes it takes to glance over existing code and documentation for most languages. For existing code I can usually follow the flow on first read with out knowing the language in advance. I learned C/C++ when I was 14 from reading intermediate level game programming books and reverse engineering it to figure out what the constructs do since there was no internet or other books handy, and the skill stuck with me.

So how do I stress that flexibility on my resume, or tell that story with out coming off as braggadocious?

P.s. do you mind if I ping you with a modified version in a few days that takes into account your suggestions?

I’ve resurrected an old associated email account to keep this conversation out of HN email me. My email address in my profile.

But for the more generic comments that are germane to the topic....

Fair feed back. The Summary of Skills is mostly a Keyword hack for passive job hunting I can move it around.

You don’t need to move it around, you need to get rid of it. Your resume should express how you’ve used a technology/framework/language in a method that added business value to a company.

Besides, if you’re waiting for the job tooth fairy to show up and hand you a job because you list a bunch of keywords on your resume - you’re doing it wrong. At some point in your career you should have built a network of former coworkers, managers, and even good local recruiters that you can reach out to.

I can deep dive into Elixir, Embedded C, C/C++, Java, C#, and PHP. I've used all of these on the job excluding perl, python and ruby in the last 5 years, and python and ruby i've used on side projects or for tutoring a friend on algorithmic programming for a evangelical role google asked her to do a follow up interview on.

“Deep diving” is not knowing the syntax of a language. It is having enough experience to know the ecosystem, libraries, frameworks, pros and cons and to have written and being involved in large projects using the language. By definition, you can’t have been focused on five languages in five years. What exactly is your focus? Your resume doesn’t give a clue with what you’re good at.

Again, you come across as someone who thinks they are a special snowflake because you “learned C when you were 14”- you’re not. You’re posting in a forum with a lot of greybeards who are looking at this entire exchange just thinking “that’s cute”. I

And “knowing algorithms”, leetCode and how to invert a binary tree in Python puts you about on the experience level of a new grad.

So how do I stress that flexibility on my resume, or tell that story with out coming off as braggadocious?

From your responses you come across very much as an “expert beginner” (https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-th...).

I’m a reformed former dev lead, what you call “showing flexibility”, I would see as a jack of all trades and a master of none. If in 2019, you’re in any major metropolitan city in the US with years of experience as a software engineer and you’re not getting lots of hits - it’s you.

Your resume doesn’t (A) tell a coherent story with where you’ve been, which technologies you’ve used to bring business value or your focus and (B) where you are trying to go.

I'll send you an email, meanwhile to hopefully clear my good name.

Learned C, Algebra and Calculus at 14 for what it's worth. I wrote a general purpose game GUI system, scrollbars, font system, picture in picture, keyboard and mouse handlers, etc. thousands of hours over the summer break between junior high and highschool. On my own, I mean little brown kid, whose mother dropped out of highschool and didn't know any one else involved in computer stuff, or access to people with math backgrounds own. I wasn't just writing hello world and simple console apps.

I know there are thousands of other developers on here with similar background, many who are much better than I am but I started off good. I took AP C/C++ freshman year of high school and was in the top of my class etc. Although I quit programming for a few years after getting refused entry into the specific program I wanted to attend in the college program my sophmore year of high school, and after the shift from dos to Win95, GameSDK which I just didn't enjoy working with as much.

I never got into the 31337 coding or algorithms side heavily, although I've been meaning to now that I'm down to a nice 40 hours a month work schedule. My focus has mostly been performance tuning high volume web sites, system/software architecture, and internal systems and tools. I'm a strong autodidact so I constantly go out of my way to learn new things and usually go out of my way to do things the hard way (e.g. investigate the best possible solution on a given platform/framework for a given problem instead of just going with the tech debt laden good enough solution based on what I already know), but I've been tied-up picking up IOT development, and Elixir/Phoenix for the last few years instead of electron or whatever is hip these days.

I'm currently the primary developer and architect on a multi million dollar IOT stack that includes a GAE Java with Objectify client api layer, Elixir/Phoenix + Mnesia, Riak and formerly Redis backend, and an Angular4/Bootstrap4 TypeScript admin page. I've had to help debug issues in the Objective C iphone client, and wrote some of the initial framework code and library wrappers for it to interface with some of the Elixir Libraries and to add a layer of indirection around the generated GAE apis. I maintain some node.js admin tools although I've migrated most of that over to elixir. I also have applied some patches to a weather forecast proxy service maintained by another developer in GO to enable better handling of null values and some other odds and ends and read through documentation and plenty of articles on here and elsewhere discussing the high level pros and cons of the language versus elixir to get a feel for it, and it's use cases although I don't know it well enough to list having only spent a few hours here and there with it. I could work in the language today if I had to but I don't know all of its quirks yet.

In addition to the above recent java/elixir and some node experience, I had to go in last minute and spend a good chunk of time rewriting my clients product line's 2017 firmware after the chinese hardware team failed to get the product to reliably function. Prior to that I had to help troubleshoot SSL connectivity and resolve a SSL cipher issue after another hardware team with much more experience than me in the area had failed to do so. These were my first real exposures to doing embedded system work, discounting designing and writing an x-mode GUI on the 386 when I was kid, and I objectively did incredibly well based on outcomes.

In addition to maintaining these Java, Elixir, Typescript (mostly pushed off on the junior dev as of the last year) Admin Page, and C Firmware projects I maintain a php rpg game which, because I wanted to dig into it I setup to run on a docker cluster a few years ago. Senginx with dynamic ip resolution (because it cost extra on vanilla nginx) routing to phpfpm, elixir and static containers, mysql on containers, postgres, jira/atlassian containers, with consul.io DNS for hooking things together with out loosing connectivity after rebooting. Here I don't mean I checked out some existing containers, I went in and figure out how to do a lot of things (should probably include that somewhere in my resume), so I could help give others advice on the stuff.

In the previous five years I've additionally helped trouble shoot some C# issues for JetzyApp although i'm starting to get a bit rusty. At Great nonprofits I helped push the change to bootstrap 3 and responsive design, updated parts of the code and API to run on laravel (because it looked more interesting than previous php frameworks I'd used and had good enough performance characteristics), improved the work flow by setting up production like vagrant developer sandboxes, and circle ci continuous deployment, etc.

At microsoft I took a crude poorly working batch processing script responsible for converting test data from one system and converted it into a reliable system service. I didn't need to make it a system service, It just seemed like the most reliable approach to get to the point it was supposed to be at, and I'd never written one so I wanted to dig into it.

I continuously go out of my way to learn new things, but I think I've been making the mistake of learning the things I find most interesting instead of what the market most values lately.

You’re digging a hole for yourself. HN is not the place to brag about your superstar coding skill. There are probably literally thousands of people here who have more impressive credentials.

In school, many of us were use to being the smartest kid in the room. It’s just like being the star basketball player in high school and going to college and being surrounded by a dozen kids who were also the best in their high school.

For instance:

I know there are thousands of other developers on here with similar background, many who are much better than I am but I started off good. I took AP C/C++ freshman year of high school and was in the top of my class etc.

Bragging about being good at C based on how well you did in programming class is not saying too much. High school programming classes have historically been easy for anyone who was already a programming geek. Do you know how many of us wasted time on comp.lang.c on Usenet before the web even existed?

On any technical subject that’s posted here, you could have experts in the field that could put either of us to shame.

I don’t think I was a special snowflake, but by the time I was 14 (1988), I turned my nose up at any “high level” language because they were too slow and non performant for the little hobby projects I wanted to do on my 8 bit computers. I had already been doing assembly for 3 years. A lot of the grey beards around here can tell you much more impressive stories.

The whole point of this lecture is that your professional experience is no more impressive than plenty of people I’ve worked beside every day and certainly not any more impressive than people on HN.

I am not trying to discourage you. But as has been said by myself and others, you don’t have a consistent easy to follow resume that tells a story about what your area of expertise is, how you stand out from dozens of other applicants and I couldn’t tell where you would be a good fit from reading it.

noted.

I am at lunch and on mobile so I can't get too detailed, but, with respect, I see a number of errors on your resume. You are simultaneously being too broad in your objective and too detailed in the body. It's not telling a coherent, targeted story. You can leave off "references available upon request" because that's assumed. You can just list your school instead of that you only got an associates degree. I would if I were you find a good recruiter and ask them how it reads. Make it more focused and scannable. I put a lot of work into my resume and personal branding on LinkedIn and it pays huge dividends.

What steps do you take for personal branding. I'm really bad with this networking, self selling stuff.

appreciated. I haven't polished the thing really in years its a bit rough.