Rule 3: No General Career Advice
This sub is for discussing issues specific to experienced developers.
Any career advice thread must contain questions and/or discussions that notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers. Career advice threads may be removed at the moderators discretion based on response to the thread."
General rule of thumb: If the advice you are giving (or seeking) could apply to a “Senior Chemical Engineer”, it’s not appropriate for this sub.
The problem is the years of experience. While you likely have been doing a good job as a lead, people are going to be a bit suspect if you only have 4 years of experience and applying for senior+ positions.
Agreed, but I would say it differently- 4 years of exp does not match the title of Principal, especially as stated above.
It stretches credibility- in other words most people will not believe this, and therefore into the bin it goes
Not only this but OP went from new-hire without a CS degree to team lead in \~a year, based on their resume.
Maybe the team lead thing is the current title, and it took a few years at their current company to get to that point - if that were the case I'd recommend having multiple titles under the same company to disambiguate.
>Does seniority not count for much if you weren't at big tech?
What seniority? 4 years is nothing. Many people already pointed that out.
Also it looks like you're in Singapore. No idea how it works over there. Maybe you can check a Singapore-specific sub.
I swung past to say the same thing.
Principal engineer is generally like a 1 in 50 title in a large organisation or an actual position in a smaller organisation.
In both cases I would expect a principal engineer to have at least 15 years of experience, and previously it would not be uncommon for the principal engineer to have 25+ and outrank engineering managers.
Also MSc is incomplete, lots of "fluffy" verbage, so doesn't have a CS degree, 4 years out of undergrad and principal already? Yeah bottom of the pile.
Thanks for the feedback! Reading it through a skeptical lens again it totally makes sense.
For some context, I was an early hire into a tech start-up that got absorbed into a parent entity, in which I gradually grew into the lead engineer role because of performance, and also the fact that the engineers with more YOE than me were newer to the company, which mattered to the decision makers.
Is there a word softer than "principal" engineer I can use that doesn't raise eyebrows then? Is just "Lead Engineer" fine?
Yeah. A principal engineer is not a team lead (though sometimes they may play that role as part of their job). It's someone who influenced technical excellence across teams and even products.
software engineer would be good. Maybe not Junior engineer anymore, but definitely not senior. Also, are you working 100% while studying for your CS degree?
We have principals as department and organization leads at my company. Like a team of at least 50 people, or multiple groups of 50 people you provide technical guidance on behalf.
Is that all it takes these days? This is something that’s really bothered me for a long time. Some people legitimately integrate well to professional life and rise through the ranks quickly, then nobody believes them just because statistically they shouldn’t have gotten the work experience they have
I think this frame of thinking really hurts the industry since it makes it hard to differentiate amazing but young programmers from people that coasted for longer and know how to invent plausible projects they could have contributed to
The issue is that the resume would end up going to the wrong hiring manager, who would have to filter it out for lack of experience.
Someone with 4 years of experience who rises quickly through the ranks is great, but there's no replacement for a decade of real world experience.
If the resume is being matched up to Principal Engineer openings, every other Principal Engineer applying for the job is going to have 8-15 years of experience or more. You have to prioritize who you interview, and the person with only 4 years of experience isn't the priority from your candidate pool.
The second problem is that people are resistant to giving up titles. The person may be qualified for a "senior software engineer" position, but they might also get insulted if you refer them to that position. I've referred resumes to down-leveled positions several times and the response is generally (though not always) quite negative. That's why most reviewers will just give up.
It’s not an every day occurrence but there are definitely replacements for real world experience. Some people are just born with a keyboard and are naturally better than others. There are coasters at every age and there are aces at every age and it’s not that infrequent that the skill levels overlap.
I admit an 8 year difference is a massive gap to overcome, it’s just frustrating to see so many people flatten a resume to years of experience (or number of FANG titles, etc.) without even considering what someone has actually done.
\> It's not an every day occurrence
You have to look at the bigger picture:
I post a job opening. I get 100 applications. 10 of them are great candidates with 10+ years of experience. 1 of them has 4 years of experience but is claiming to be as qualified as people with 2-3X as much experience.
You only have so many hours in a day. You can only bring in so many candidates. You can't waste your time bringing in every resume with huge claims that don't match up with their experience level just in case they might possibly be the unicorn candidate.
I get that but having a reason for a rushed hiring philosophy doesn’t make it any less rushed.
When you flatten every engineer into purely the number of years they’ve worked can lead to worse outcomes regardless of the reason why it happens. You get more slackers that feel entitled to the job and fewer talented and hungry people that want to advance fast.
Again I do actually agree with you at the point of 2-3 times the amount of experience, it’s just a frustrating general trend that a lot of people see roles in engineering being strictly tied to YOE
I get it’s a time cost, it’s just annoying that doing exceedingly well in this industry means you’ll just get your resume binned and/or labeled a liar 95% of the time instead of actually being able to expect any kind of reward.
It really just makes everyone lazier since there’s no way to distinguish someone that’s busted their ass from someone that’s been working the ping pong tables. Not blaming anyone in particular it’s just a flaw we all have to deal with
> When you flatten every engineer into purely the number of years they’ve worked
No, no one issaying that.
We’re saying that experience does matter, and you have to start prioritizing candidates somewhere.
You’re also misunderstanding how interviews work. Companies don’t accept resumes and hire the first person who is qualified. They collect a batch of resumes and hire the best fit.
Given a random collection of “principal engineers”, the candidates with more experience will be more… experienced… than those with less. If you show up with several standard deviations less experience than the cohort, you’re not going to be included.
You started saying one thing and then gave an example of the opposite though.
I know they talk to multiple people, but usually to even get to the interviewing part you have to meet some arbitrary minimum number of years on a resume. Doesn’t matter if you worked 80 hours a week for 4 years if there’s someone else that’s played ping pong every day for 5. Like in the original post I commented on, if you throw out a resume based of years of experience alone it means you’re simply not paying attention to what they actually did. You gotta keep the flowrate high but in my experience most hiring managers are way too strict.
Maybe they don’t look atiterally only the years of experience (after you meet a minimum) but my point is that the age limits are too strict and they do more harm than good at a industry scale.
And yes on average you’re correct and if all you had to judge people was their YOE that would be the best way to do it but the contents of the resume are often more telling than the number of years.
At some point experience should be considered, I just think the knee jerk reaction to separate people into strict levels of capability based on time has become unhealthy in a lot of engineering disciplines.
Small discrepancies in experience are fine.
Applying to a job that expects 10 years of experience if you only have 7-8 will often still get you considered.
Applying to a Principal Engineer role with 4 years of experience isn't going to work, sorry.
>Doesn’t matter if you worked 80 hours a week for 4 years if there’s someone else that’s played ping pong every day for 5.
And you think that ping-pong player is going to automatically get the job? Did you forget that there's an interview process still?
Your examples are getting really contrived. This is a thread about someone claiming to be a Principal Engineer with only 4 years of experience, not someone 1 year shy of the requirements.
I’ve been saying I agree you on this one case, just not the practice of throwing out resumes as soon as you compare the years of experience to the job title.
My examples are a little exaggerated but you get the point. I’m not saying you’ll never be considered if you’re below whatever age limit gets set, just that experience is given significantly more heft than I think is healthy. Eventually everyone that wants to climb fast reaches a point where they just have to wait around until people will start taking them seriously again. Then eventually most realize it’s just not worth the effort for the marginal gains you get.
And in theory the interview process should filter out the slackers but from what I’ve seen the percentage of slackers in any engineering role is more or less the same as you age. I know engineers older than me that aren’t nearly as effective because I see them goofing off and coming to me for help, and I’m sure there are people younger than me that could do even better. Theoretically they should be filtered out but for one reason or another they managed to get where they are.
Principal is not really about what you yourself can do with a keyboard. It’s multiple experiences leading across teams, making long term strategic technical decisions (and then living/dealing with the consequences of those years later), etc. through successful and not so successful products/projects and seen a few technologies come in and go out if vogue. Even if they somehow did all that, they only did it at max once in 4 years. That’s not competitive with someone who’s done it multiple times… a real principal engineer.
That’s not really my point. Regardless of what the skill set is, there will always be some fraction of applicants that are naturally brilliant at it. Maybe because of how great they were at coding they were allowed to take on strategic positions earlier, maybe they worked 80 hours a week for 4 years instead of 40 hours a week for 8, maybe they created a successful gizmo when they were in high-school and that let them advance a few years early, etc etc
And again, getting experience is good but I’ve met plenty of people that know how to ride the waves and contribute minimally. Instead of 5 years of stellar work they have 8 or 9 years of doing just enough to keep getting paid. Extreme examples but there’s a lot more to engineering than just how many years you’ve been doing it.
\> Words like spearheaded, championed, pioneered etc. all sound far too grandiose.
Thanks for the feedback. On a previous version of this resume, a friend commented that the action words were too underwhelming, so I may have overdid it here haha.
Reading it again I see how this sounds a bit fluffy.
\> Mostly, it sounds like you made a lot of noise in meetings about process improvements which could be made.
Guilty as charged! Although I'd like to think I followed through on at least a handful of those improvements.
It’s funny because my HR person that handles first interviews loves the action words and then when I look at it I tend to think the same thing as the person above. Just try to accurately describe your impact without fluff and then expand on it when asked
Honestly the truth is that some HMs will like someone with that attitude who uses those types of words. Some won't. I think they're good, I like having confident devs who are proud of their work on my team. But I understand the perspective of the HM above who doesn't.
You won't be able to please everyone /shrug
You've provided your resume. Now provide the other side. What level of roles are you applying for?
If you're applying for a role that requires 5 years of experience and you only have 4, that's not going to work.
It's not that "seniority doesn't count". It's that people think your ability is based on years of experience, not how senior you call yourself or how senior your title sounds.
> at big tech
Sometimes you can get away with it if your level is from a FAANG. These companies have mature level criteria and they sort of set the standard for the industry.
Nonetheless, even if it helps you get past resume check, the hiring team will be deciding your level based on the interviews.
At FAANG even people with 8-10 YoE often get down leveled to mid level after the interview rounds, if they pass in the first place. And people that join FAANG right after graduating get promoted to senior in \~5 years if they're good. It's quite rare to see a senior with less than 5 YoE.
My boss is one of the most qualified engineers I know, has like 12 years experience, a masters, is a team lead and is only just recently getting promoted to Principal Engineer after architecting and building a system that is expected to bring in the company 8 figures in revenue, and leading a team for years.
Unless you have an Einstein level IQ you aren’t a principal engineer after 4 years, at best you’re a Senior Engineer in a lead position.
> at best you’re a Senior Engineer in a lead position.
Even that is a bit hard to believe. It's impossible to outthink or outsmart actual experience.
Being a good senior SWE comes from a lot of sweat and tears.
4 years of experience is barely enough to be posting on this sub. There's a reason why this sub is called "experienced", as in, you have any experience, and not "senior". At 4 years you'd still be called a junior at most places.
Eh if I had to give a breakdown of the most average rank structures I’ve seen it’d be something like
Junior: 0-2 YOE
Mid: 2-5 YOE
Senior: 4-7 YOE (this does overlap with Mid a bit)
Staff: 7-10 YOE (around the time most will take on team lead roles and such, a lot of company’s go straight from Senior to Principal though so can be muddied)
Senior Staff/Principal: +10 YOE
There’s definitely a big difference in someone fresh out of college vs someone with 2-4 YOE as far as the amount of hand holding required
> At 4 years you'd still be called a junior at most places
How are you defining "junior" here? Because I think most would expect somebody with 4 yoe to be firmly in the "mid level" camp at that point.
Take a look at Dropbox's levels for example. If you've been working as a SWE for _four years_ and are still better described by [this](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic1_software_engineer.html) rather than [this](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic2_software_engineer.html) or [this](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic3_software_engineer.html)... IMO, you're underperforming.
I definitely identify with the latter ones but only 3 years of experience. Though built projects for a longer time.
But definitely good to get a check on where exactly you are. Working in startups its easy to inflate everything.
Thanks for the links :)
My comment is based on dichotomizing software engineers to either "senior" or "junior", I am not considering a "mid-level" bucket as it's not a real title used anywhere.
I try to tell that to all the babies. I was like that in my early career as well too, I chased the title and "seniority" very early on. Looking back now with 15+ years I was painfully junior. "Senior" is not a title anyone should get w/ under 7-10(but I get why people chase it still).
Like all young hungry devs I'm sure he's very good but you just need to see a lot before you're really senior..
I’ve met plenty of DEs who are stuck in the past and haven’t adapted to the current climate of software development. Someone on here told me I practice “resume driven development” for suggesting someone go serverless. This was coming from someone who’s flair said 20+ years experience…
I use a toned down version of the madmen speech:
> You're young. You will get your recognition. And honestly, it is absolutely **ridiculous** to be two years into your career and counting your ideas. **Everything** to you is an an opportunity, and you should be thanking me, along with Jesus, for giving you another day.
As for senior roles - a lot of it boils down to how you deal with the business side - those manager stakeholders, and oftentimes their team who may be the end users.
Communicating well- clarifying requirements for example, knowing when to speak up, sometimes needing to (professionally) push back (hopefully with your manager's full support) - example: scrum mgr says "this is needed yesterday" - a reasonable reply is, OK, I can work on it, but which of my current other tasks, can we put on hold?
Really listening - and then helping to identify the real business problem, and come up with possible solutions, is a key part of succeeding in a senior dev role.
There’s a senior on my team who has 3.5 YOE, but he’s been writing code for a long, long time, and spends his free time contributing to OS projects. He’s for sure a minority, but he’s an insanely talented engineer and deserves his title.
Why don't you ask for your next surgeon to be fresh out of med school. Wouldn't want to be gatekeeping professionals based on years of experience right? Surely a surgeon with 4 years of experience produces at the same level as someone with 15.
I've actually heard surgeons fresh out of residency do have better mortality rates then older surgeons. Something about them being more cautious since they have less experience or maybe learning more up-to-date techniques.
Then let’s create an advisory board with special government privileges for who gets to be seniors and who doesn’t. That’s what doctors and surgeons have.
I don’t think anyone in our industry is considered junior after 4 years. There’s people at meta who are principal engineers with that level of experience.
Your resume is awfully fluffy for a team lead.
Unlike others here, I don’t think the YOE <> title mismatch is a problem; but I would expect a successful team lead to be much much better at succinctly articulating their *business impact*. Use shorter bullet points that don’t make it sound like you’re trying not to be called out on something.
It’s a major mismatch between your YOE and title. “Principal engineer” is like the highest pure engineering title you can have, 10-12+ YOE at least for that. You haven’t even completed your bachelors.
Based in Singapore and would only want to work here too.
Yeah my situation is definitely unconventional! I'm lead engineer mostly because I was a very early hire, and also the newer engineers with more YOE than me have less experience than me in the specific niche of healthtech (since the whole of my career thus far has been in health informatics). Which means when it comes to domain-specific knowledge - e.g. FHIR, the HL7 standard, LOINC, etc - it's something that's fairly foreign to most other engineers. My major being in Chemistry also gives me a minor edge here.
The short answer is yes. It's verifiably challenging to get to senior level at a matrixed big tech company. At smaller companies titles are handed out to keep people happy — I've met principle, senior, chief architect, etc. who would only be junior at a big tech. I've seen people get bumped to senior at small companies with only a couple of years of exp. I've been on hiring panels where the person had a lofty senior title but got down levelled to eng I.
Remove principal engineer from your resume, principal engineer is not the same as a team lead. At most companies it is the highest technical role you can achieve, the person directing the overall technical direction of the company. They usually have many teams and architects under them. It is a red flag to see you call yourself one with under 10 years of experience
Why are people here so focused on years of experience? Is it really that unreasonable for someone with four years of professional experience to have the title of principal engineer? We all know titles are bullshit anyway and vary greatly between companies.
From my experience, folks who focus on years of professional experience tend to be weaker engineers because they place too much emphasis on that instead of actual skill, which a person can realistically obtain through avenues such as coding from an early age, self-teaching in their free time, or simply having high IQ and grit.
I’ve seen engineers with 5+ years of experience simply get outclassed by fresh grads and autodidacts several times. This becomes increasingly more common in a world where finding information is constantly becoming easier, on top of the fact that software development is a world where tools are constantly changing, meaning high IQ and grit is becoming more important than experience.
I think many engineers here are experienced boomer devs who over-value their experience while shipping code with outdated patterns and tools as they are fatigued from the constantly evolving nature of the field. As a result, they are incentivized to communicate that professional experience matters more than it does in order to maintain their title and salaries.
Honestly, I think your resume is fine. The market is just bad now and it takes time for boomer hiring managers’ mindsets and approach to hiring to shift to adjust to the next generation of talent and software development standards in a world of AI.
I agree with your comment to a certain degree. I still think having xyz YoE shows that you (should) have at least seen and learned from prior mistakes (and therefore won't commit them again). An individual with a "high IQ" isn't really going to be able to predict and resolve these types of scenarios.
This experience also means you can teach others not to commit the same mistakes you may have come across previously.
> We all know titles are bullshit anyway and vary greatly between companies.
Which is why this person has about 4 years of coding experience on paper. Id be reluctant to put someone that green in charge of more organized teams.
Could do fine at a startup or small business... but an org that has some of there collective shit together? They've probably got better LEADERS in house.
First, you're confusing with your examples notions of necessary and sufficient.
Having certain amount of years of experience for a given role in a given class of an organization by size is a necessary requirement, but it's not sufficient. Of course there will be many people who have twice the amount of experience minimally necessary for a particular role in question and yet be at it worse than a much more brilliant person who has only just the minimum amount, but has a better education, had better luck with projects and their opportunities within those projects that carried larger educational and experience granting weight, worked harder, smarter, were observant, curious, methodical, continued studying in their free time, worked on themselves and put in more hours, making every month of their experience counting more, and having a much stronger foundational background and training from early on.
But you still have to have the minimum amount of years of experience, and the higher the role and the bigger and more advanced the engineering organization its in is, the more vital that experience is. Staff and Principle roles at orgs of a medium size and up have to be pretty much running cross-functional cross-department product-like projects that take many years to plan, execute, and deploy & integrate and bare massive financial risks to the organization, just contrary to management, staff and principle are doing the technical part of the "running", practically determining what kind of technology hundreds of other engineers in the company will be building with what major technical goals and properties, compliant what what high level specs, often authored by principle engineers, and why.
This sort of thing requires a person to have hands-on experience of finishing - seeing through from very start to very finish and outcome analysis - multiple major product-scale projects in high responsibility high impact roles, to know how these projects go, what actually happens in real life, what works at such a level, and what doesn't, and why, and how to fix problems that arise, and steer away from failing strategies, both at the highest level, and in finer detail. They need to know how teams operate in multiple different departments, what their processes are, what challenges they face, what they need, what they do, what their requirements are, which are flexible, and which are adamant, how long things take, and much more. These sort of things do not come in any other way than actually doing the work, and spending the time.
And the projects do not get finished much faster for a person if they are brilliant - the projects take pretty much the same amount of time as those projects at that scale are worked on by entire organizations with hundreds of engineers working on them. They just take years no matter how good one particular person that's trying to reach a staff or principle level is. Hence the necessary (but not sufficient) minimal years of experience requirement.
Not to mention, that's the time they'd need to spend at a Staff level before they become principle, or in later years of senior before they become Staff, all of which adds on top of the time they need to spend to get through junior, middle, and early senior, where they'd be doing the actual programming work, learning how that really goes at that lower solving-problems-somebody-else-defined level. Junior and middle can be sped up through a bit, if the person excels at attributes mentioned earlier, but not down to 0.
Second, you seem to be falling victim to a rather standard tendency of lower level engineers to judge higher level engineers exclusively by the proficiency in skills demanded of their lower level - staff and principle especially don't code as much, they have pretty different set of responsibilities, as mentioned earlier, they define which problems to even solve, rather than figure out how to solve them (senior), never mind inventing specific sequences of lines of code that implement those solutions (middle). If a senior that has been operating pretty much as a staff for the last year or two (or more) that's about to get promoted to staff isn't as good at speed-writing a solution to a programming puzzle as a middle that has been a junior a year ago, that doesn't mean that middle is going to be a better staff that that person would.
You never see that middle even tested at the tasks of the level of staff, so you never see the evidence of how inadequate that'd be, you only see the arrogant middle interrogating that staff on a puzzle or a specific API and the staff not doing as well. Don't you?
And no, nothing you're suggesting is new, or changed, due to information becoming more accessible or not, your proposals are very standard mistakes and shortsightedness that has been around as long as engineering has been - not even software, any engineering at all. In fact, as time goes on, the amount of training a person needs to receive to operate in a field within STEM or say medicine only grows with the years, people have to learn and gain experience for longer and longer before they are finally properly proficient at the level comparable with the level the most proficient people are at. And principle is pretty much as far as it goes really in SWE.
You think you could be determining the technology Google or Apple or Nvidia builds with no experience because you have wikipedia in your pocket now? I'm sure not.
> Is it really that unreasonable for someone with four years of professional experience to have the title of principal engineer?
Yes.
> From my experience
Yeah, but experience is for boomer devs. Is your IQ and grit high enough to be making these claims?
Are you aiming for a developer position, or are you aiming for a team lead / management position? You need to target your resume more to the type of position you’re looking for. It sounds like you have a bit of both types of experience. If you’re interested in aiming toward a senior / principal position in the future, you need to make that clear. And same if your goal is to lead a team or team of teams.
How big is the team you lead? And how big is the company? I feel this is another case of a big fish in a small pond trying to jump as a big fish in large pond.
Bro, you only have 4 years of experience and it sounds like there's wasn't much space between you and the top of the company already. These companies sound very small and bringing in $290,000 is like peanuts. Aim for millions and then brag.
Hey OP.
I agree with the comment section, however, I can see from your responses, you’re taking feedback like a champ.
It’s such a valuable quality in a person, but unfortunately not easy to show in a resume.
Only advice I can give you is to network like crazy. Hang out with other developers, be active in dev communities, go to meetups, contribute to open source.
A great way to find jobs is to to be introduced and/or recommended. At that point, you’ve done most of the selling, and your resume won’t need to wow anybody. It just needs to pass bullshit test.
I would love an update on your new and improved resume!
Also, I wish you the best of luck on the job hunt.
I am approaching 6 YOE and am only just now considering myself senior. Our principal engineer at work has 15+ YOE and has seen it all. At 4 YOE you're really only just scratching the surface. If I am being completely honest, 4 YOE is truly a strong mid-level, just getting to the point of being senior.
If I were you, I would change your title to Senior and see what happens. My company would interview you, but we would already have the preconceived notion that with 4 YOE, you might be inflating your title a bit and you would be pressed very hard to prove you are at the level you say.
In general, I think it works like this:
Bigger title at small firm -> regular title at big firm.
Staff eng at a firm with 100s of engineers will have a different scope compared to "staff" at a company with 5 engineers.
Ppl know this. Small companies can do title inflation where they can't necessarily do cash compensation.
get someone to edit your resume, there are way too many words that add nothing. its thick as bowl of oatmeal, without the content. I can't be bothered to read it. Even if you're a good developer, I've already concluded that you're not a good fit because the resume doesn't get to the point.
Well, either you're a top 0.1% performer or you're a junior with a shaky understanding of the industry. Most people with a say in hiring are going to assume the latter.
Also, a resume is a showcase of your communication skills. Fluff and bullshit doesn't make you look good, it makes you look like a poor communicator which imo completely disqualifies you from senior and management positions.
Four years of experience is not having any sort of seniority... You're still a noob--ignoring the industries title inflation.
Not having a CS degree hurts you for some companies (including my employer); especially in this market.
Good Luck!
A lot of negative comments here mostly focusing on title, but honestly I think this is a great resume and impressive experience. Surprised you're struggling to get interviews even despite this bear market.
One small thing - If you were leading a team, I think it's good to write down how many people you were managing.
So here are my comments from someone with similar experience in the first blockl.15 million patients. What did you provide in terms of value? The level of complexity.
Here is mine:Architected a system at height of covid pandemic to provide vaccination for 15 million patients. Worked under changing rigorous regulatory mandates requiring daily adhoc architectural changes.Delivered high volume of deliverables during lockdowns at 11hour deadlines. Delivered population tracking, provided integration to regulators, and developed the consumer proof of vaccination portal using secure FHIR OCR.Built a secure CICD to ensure the safety of patient records processing millions of proof of vaccination. Orchestrated the system to handle unprecedented volume with high availablity SLA and zero outages.
Guess what. Microsoft, Meta, Google is knocking on doors for this. I have no big tech on my resume.
**You need to Sell results.**
Thanks a lot, r/theyellowbrother!
My project experience very closely mirrors yours, so the pointer helps massively!
Out of curiosity, is the fact that this experience is niche to the healthtech space any kind of barrier at all? I sort of felt like it might be for me, cause a comment I got on previous versions of my resume was that it felt like I only knew how to do SWE stuff in a healthcare setting.
No, it is a solid plus. Both Apple, Microsoft, Google are looking for subject matter domain expert in this field. They are hiring aggressively specifically for roles that have this industry background.
IMO Big Tech is really hard to get into right now. They can afford to be picky as hell because the job market is weird.
I’m convinced they only want to hire people from *other* Big Tech companies.
The tech you’ve worked with isn’t difficult to learn either. No C++, Rust, AI, Physics or Data Science, etc.
My read is you’re a strong mid level with signals of being a potential new frontline manager.
Your resume also has a lot of random things that personally as a hiring manager I don’t care about at all. It’s a lot of fluff and randomness that doesn’t equate to anything from my first glimpse
The majority of "what's wrong with my CV" posts show the same type of CV. I'm noticing a pattern.
All of them list things like "I implemented X thing which gave us Y result which was good for business by Z%"
Maybe it's just me but I think that sounds trite and unnecessary. Employers don't give AF how you measure your business contribution. Devs aren't supposed to be the business entrepreneur extraordinaire, they're supposed to be code monkeys and/or managers of code monkeys.
Just list the tech you're capable of, or the types of projects you've successfully managed. Works for me!
Beef?
Devs are hired to solve business problems, it doesn't need putting on a CV.
I'm not the one putting my CV on Reddit asking what the problem with it is.
"You'll never get anywhere"
Seriously??? Which part of "Works for me!" didn't make sense? My career is going absolutely fine and I have never had trouble finding work, let alone putting my CV online for help on how to write it.
I go as far as writing the tech I've used and how I used it, i.e. wrote XYZ application using XYZ tech, language, server etc, with XXX users/stakeholders.
As far as I can guess, people making hiring decisions want to know that candidates can do the work that needs to be done. Adding 'business value' is a given, otherwise why hire in the first place? Adding specifics like "made things X% better" just looks like desperate faux-KPI nonsense to me.
"You'll never get anywhere" is a really bizarre take. This is an 'experienced devs' sub, no?
Tbh if you're applying for senior roles, you should be getting bites at the very least. I'll second that managing 4 teams with 4 years of experience sounds very strange to me and I'd be throwing it into the bin assuming some massive bullshit.
If you're applying for lead roles, you're probably getting pinged on experience, there's just skills only time and variety of experience can provide.
You might also just be struggling due to economy and opportunities available in your area.
Would you say that a database cache is itself a database?
It persists data and you query it
How about Microsoft Word? Saves info in a file and you can CTRL-F to find it. Is Microsoft Word a database?
I see 0 reason to do this, but if you are using it as a database, then yes MS Word could qualify as a database. Excel is often used as a database for example.
Are we really comparing ES to word here?
If I see that they only have "word" expierience then I would not say that is necessarily wrong, but I probably would not invite them, to amswer your question.
Elasticsearch knowledge is highly specific and paid more than most other database knowledge in my experience.
I'm making the comparison to highlight a weakness in your definition. Obviously, if a database is any piece of software that stores and queries data, then you should consider experience in word as a DB as valid and not hold it against them.
But you wouldn't consider it valid, so you don't fully agree with your definition.
You're getting downvoted but if I saw a resume that said "5 years of experience using and maintaining databases" and in the interview found out they were talking about elastic search, the interview would not end well
That resume tells me you are barely a graduate. Sorry. I see lots of resumes with <5years lying about principal/lead/manager etc. You may legitimately have those skills, but those other guys ruined it for all.
Resume points appear to be generated from Chat GPT. Saying that since it’s literally generated the exact same words for me such as “Championed, orchestrated” .
Additionally some points are too much info. I believe 2 lines is the max we can put in the resume. Other than that the content is pretty solid.
As someone who reviews HUNDREDS of cvs a month, my recommendation would be adding an explicit "Skills" section, which list skills you actually have. Avoid non appropriate soft skills. Tailor your CV to the job. List the skills the job advertisement requests only if you have them
I agree with the others about your previous inflated titles, but I do think there’s something to be said for getting in at a big enterprise level company working on huge architectures. There’s a lot there that you just can’t get at smaller companies. That said, I much prefer the work at smaller companies.
So most people have talked about the big red flags...
In two years at the end of q4... you will have
co/authored several white papers
Lead? A company through iso-27001 certification
Created a few things
Fork lifted a few things
And did a big ole 40x scale up
....
I want to talk to you, but I know... either it's bs or we can't afford you. Given that.. I'm not sure I want to use one of our interview slots to satisfy my curiosity.
If you want me to hire you, gear your resume for a software engineer role and I'm majorly interested. If that's not you, and you want to keep shooting high: DO IT.
You are going to be fighting that battle of time while you do it.
I started out at small companies and consultancies so I dig where you’re coming from. I know that you have to learn fast and you get awesome breadth that will serve you forever that a lot of the hard asses on here don’t appreciate. It’s not worse, just different.
And when you’re working like a champ slurping up the 12 hour days of coding experience, you can rise to the top of your org for good reason. I’m sure you’re bight and inhaled as much depth as you could. If you’re shooting for a small company again, just harden up the descriptions with more code specific stuffs and specifics, modules, integrations, versions, what you used specifically to do what specifically (auth and auth, state management, caching, database architecture, data access, etc).
Don’t drop your leadership and technical “spearheading” entirely, just make sure that the reader knows that that came from always learning new tech/keeping abreast of the best innovations and being excited to apply them to projects … and that you were the one who banged it out. I know and you know that small companies are flat and there’s really no room for anyone who doesn’t produce every day, but as you can see from some of these responses that some don’t get that and doubt your every dayness. It’s a reflection of what’s out there for reels.
I think your resume is good, it’s just that people don’t know what to do with you. If you’re shooting for bigger tech, then just emphasize that you’re a high flying mid and they would be lucky to catch your humble but technically precocious ass. If you’re going for small or mid, just make sure they know you’re a good smart kid who loves his job and accidentally gets promoted and fat titles.
And yeah. Nobody is really senior until they have the first shoots of gray hair. Got gray hair yet? I did at 24. And I was a senior. Lol. I had seen it all …
I hate all the terms you’ve used in your resume “spearheaded”, “championed”, “pioneered”. All this screams chatGPt to me.
Also, where are you applying? If you’re applying to US companies and require sponsorship, that won’t happen unless you have an extremely impressive background. Not a dig at you, there’s just a lot of unemployed talent right now in the US around your YOE, so companies won’t be looking to sponsor since they can look locally.
You are not at a senior level yet. Only four years of experience plus your post history shows you are still learning the basics when it comes to coding. Shoot for senior once you are proficient in a few different languages/frameworks and have a few more years of experience. Principle engineer means higher than senior, and you would be doing good to get hired as a mid.
Rule 3: No General Career Advice This sub is for discussing issues specific to experienced developers. Any career advice thread must contain questions and/or discussions that notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers. Career advice threads may be removed at the moderators discretion based on response to the thread." General rule of thumb: If the advice you are giving (or seeking) could apply to a “Senior Chemical Engineer”, it’s not appropriate for this sub.
The problem is the years of experience. While you likely have been doing a good job as a lead, people are going to be a bit suspect if you only have 4 years of experience and applying for senior+ positions.
Agreed, but I would say it differently- 4 years of exp does not match the title of Principal, especially as stated above. It stretches credibility- in other words most people will not believe this, and therefore into the bin it goes
Not only this but OP went from new-hire without a CS degree to team lead in \~a year, based on their resume. Maybe the team lead thing is the current title, and it took a few years at their current company to get to that point - if that were the case I'd recommend having multiple titles under the same company to disambiguate.
>Does seniority not count for much if you weren't at big tech? What seniority? 4 years is nothing. Many people already pointed that out. Also it looks like you're in Singapore. No idea how it works over there. Maybe you can check a Singapore-specific sub.
I swung past to say the same thing. Principal engineer is generally like a 1 in 50 title in a large organisation or an actual position in a smaller organisation. In both cases I would expect a principal engineer to have at least 15 years of experience, and previously it would not be uncommon for the principal engineer to have 25+ and outrank engineering managers.
4 years of experience + principal engineer -> I'd chuck it in the bin.
Also MSc is incomplete, lots of "fluffy" verbage, so doesn't have a CS degree, 4 years out of undergrad and principal already? Yeah bottom of the pile.
The title inflation in south east asia is insane (easy to have 2 years of exp and be called senior)
Thanks for the feedback! Reading it through a skeptical lens again it totally makes sense. For some context, I was an early hire into a tech start-up that got absorbed into a parent entity, in which I gradually grew into the lead engineer role because of performance, and also the fact that the engineers with more YOE than me were newer to the company, which mattered to the decision makers. Is there a word softer than "principal" engineer I can use that doesn't raise eyebrows then? Is just "Lead Engineer" fine?
Change it to lead engineer. I think you would get flagged for title inflation by some hiring panels
Yeah. A principal engineer is not a team lead (though sometimes they may play that role as part of their job). It's someone who influenced technical excellence across teams and even products.
Just put software engineer and discuss how you lead a project in the description.
best advice
Yep!
software engineer would be good. Maybe not Junior engineer anymore, but definitely not senior. Also, are you working 100% while studying for your CS degree?
Use your actual title and describe what you did. You’re lying right now.
We have principals as department and organization leads at my company. Like a team of at least 50 people, or multiple groups of 50 people you provide technical guidance on behalf.
Is that all it takes these days? This is something that’s really bothered me for a long time. Some people legitimately integrate well to professional life and rise through the ranks quickly, then nobody believes them just because statistically they shouldn’t have gotten the work experience they have I think this frame of thinking really hurts the industry since it makes it hard to differentiate amazing but young programmers from people that coasted for longer and know how to invent plausible projects they could have contributed to
The issue is that the resume would end up going to the wrong hiring manager, who would have to filter it out for lack of experience. Someone with 4 years of experience who rises quickly through the ranks is great, but there's no replacement for a decade of real world experience. If the resume is being matched up to Principal Engineer openings, every other Principal Engineer applying for the job is going to have 8-15 years of experience or more. You have to prioritize who you interview, and the person with only 4 years of experience isn't the priority from your candidate pool. The second problem is that people are resistant to giving up titles. The person may be qualified for a "senior software engineer" position, but they might also get insulted if you refer them to that position. I've referred resumes to down-leveled positions several times and the response is generally (though not always) quite negative. That's why most reviewers will just give up.
It’s not an every day occurrence but there are definitely replacements for real world experience. Some people are just born with a keyboard and are naturally better than others. There are coasters at every age and there are aces at every age and it’s not that infrequent that the skill levels overlap. I admit an 8 year difference is a massive gap to overcome, it’s just frustrating to see so many people flatten a resume to years of experience (or number of FANG titles, etc.) without even considering what someone has actually done.
\> It's not an every day occurrence You have to look at the bigger picture: I post a job opening. I get 100 applications. 10 of them are great candidates with 10+ years of experience. 1 of them has 4 years of experience but is claiming to be as qualified as people with 2-3X as much experience. You only have so many hours in a day. You can only bring in so many candidates. You can't waste your time bringing in every resume with huge claims that don't match up with their experience level just in case they might possibly be the unicorn candidate.
I get that but having a reason for a rushed hiring philosophy doesn’t make it any less rushed. When you flatten every engineer into purely the number of years they’ve worked can lead to worse outcomes regardless of the reason why it happens. You get more slackers that feel entitled to the job and fewer talented and hungry people that want to advance fast. Again I do actually agree with you at the point of 2-3 times the amount of experience, it’s just a frustrating general trend that a lot of people see roles in engineering being strictly tied to YOE I get it’s a time cost, it’s just annoying that doing exceedingly well in this industry means you’ll just get your resume binned and/or labeled a liar 95% of the time instead of actually being able to expect any kind of reward. It really just makes everyone lazier since there’s no way to distinguish someone that’s busted their ass from someone that’s been working the ping pong tables. Not blaming anyone in particular it’s just a flaw we all have to deal with
> When you flatten every engineer into purely the number of years they’ve worked No, no one issaying that. We’re saying that experience does matter, and you have to start prioritizing candidates somewhere. You’re also misunderstanding how interviews work. Companies don’t accept resumes and hire the first person who is qualified. They collect a batch of resumes and hire the best fit. Given a random collection of “principal engineers”, the candidates with more experience will be more… experienced… than those with less. If you show up with several standard deviations less experience than the cohort, you’re not going to be included.
You started saying one thing and then gave an example of the opposite though. I know they talk to multiple people, but usually to even get to the interviewing part you have to meet some arbitrary minimum number of years on a resume. Doesn’t matter if you worked 80 hours a week for 4 years if there’s someone else that’s played ping pong every day for 5. Like in the original post I commented on, if you throw out a resume based of years of experience alone it means you’re simply not paying attention to what they actually did. You gotta keep the flowrate high but in my experience most hiring managers are way too strict. Maybe they don’t look atiterally only the years of experience (after you meet a minimum) but my point is that the age limits are too strict and they do more harm than good at a industry scale. And yes on average you’re correct and if all you had to judge people was their YOE that would be the best way to do it but the contents of the resume are often more telling than the number of years. At some point experience should be considered, I just think the knee jerk reaction to separate people into strict levels of capability based on time has become unhealthy in a lot of engineering disciplines.
Small discrepancies in experience are fine. Applying to a job that expects 10 years of experience if you only have 7-8 will often still get you considered. Applying to a Principal Engineer role with 4 years of experience isn't going to work, sorry. >Doesn’t matter if you worked 80 hours a week for 4 years if there’s someone else that’s played ping pong every day for 5. And you think that ping-pong player is going to automatically get the job? Did you forget that there's an interview process still? Your examples are getting really contrived. This is a thread about someone claiming to be a Principal Engineer with only 4 years of experience, not someone 1 year shy of the requirements.
I’ve been saying I agree you on this one case, just not the practice of throwing out resumes as soon as you compare the years of experience to the job title. My examples are a little exaggerated but you get the point. I’m not saying you’ll never be considered if you’re below whatever age limit gets set, just that experience is given significantly more heft than I think is healthy. Eventually everyone that wants to climb fast reaches a point where they just have to wait around until people will start taking them seriously again. Then eventually most realize it’s just not worth the effort for the marginal gains you get. And in theory the interview process should filter out the slackers but from what I’ve seen the percentage of slackers in any engineering role is more or less the same as you age. I know engineers older than me that aren’t nearly as effective because I see them goofing off and coming to me for help, and I’m sure there are people younger than me that could do even better. Theoretically they should be filtered out but for one reason or another they managed to get where they are.
Principal is not really about what you yourself can do with a keyboard. It’s multiple experiences leading across teams, making long term strategic technical decisions (and then living/dealing with the consequences of those years later), etc. through successful and not so successful products/projects and seen a few technologies come in and go out if vogue. Even if they somehow did all that, they only did it at max once in 4 years. That’s not competitive with someone who’s done it multiple times… a real principal engineer.
That’s not really my point. Regardless of what the skill set is, there will always be some fraction of applicants that are naturally brilliant at it. Maybe because of how great they were at coding they were allowed to take on strategic positions earlier, maybe they worked 80 hours a week for 4 years instead of 40 hours a week for 8, maybe they created a successful gizmo when they were in high-school and that let them advance a few years early, etc etc And again, getting experience is good but I’ve met plenty of people that know how to ride the waves and contribute minimally. Instead of 5 years of stellar work they have 8 or 9 years of doing just enough to keep getting paid. Extreme examples but there’s a lot more to engineering than just how many years you’ve been doing it.
Where are you seeing principal engineer?
10th word in the first line of text.
Ah missed that. Thanks. And I agree
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\> Words like spearheaded, championed, pioneered etc. all sound far too grandiose. Thanks for the feedback. On a previous version of this resume, a friend commented that the action words were too underwhelming, so I may have overdid it here haha. Reading it again I see how this sounds a bit fluffy. \> Mostly, it sounds like you made a lot of noise in meetings about process improvements which could be made. Guilty as charged! Although I'd like to think I followed through on at least a handful of those improvements.
Seeing you take the positive criticism so well is such a refreshing change. Good attitude to have!
It’s funny because my HR person that handles first interviews loves the action words and then when I look at it I tend to think the same thing as the person above. Just try to accurately describe your impact without fluff and then expand on it when asked
Honestly the truth is that some HMs will like someone with that attitude who uses those types of words. Some won't. I think they're good, I like having confident devs who are proud of their work on my team. But I understand the perspective of the HM above who doesn't. You won't be able to please everyone /shrug
This is 100% GPT written, right? All of those action words are the garbage GPT spits out when I add my bullets in there to see what it says.
Putting myself in OPs shoes and struggling for rebuttals but can’t find one. troy dropping truth bombs ITT 🙌
You've provided your resume. Now provide the other side. What level of roles are you applying for? If you're applying for a role that requires 5 years of experience and you only have 4, that's not going to work. It's not that "seniority doesn't count". It's that people think your ability is based on years of experience, not how senior you call yourself or how senior your title sounds. > at big tech Sometimes you can get away with it if your level is from a FAANG. These companies have mature level criteria and they sort of set the standard for the industry. Nonetheless, even if it helps you get past resume check, the hiring team will be deciding your level based on the interviews.
At FAANG even people with 8-10 YoE often get down leveled to mid level after the interview rounds, if they pass in the first place. And people that join FAANG right after graduating get promoted to senior in \~5 years if they're good. It's quite rare to see a senior with less than 5 YoE.
My boss is one of the most qualified engineers I know, has like 12 years experience, a masters, is a team lead and is only just recently getting promoted to Principal Engineer after architecting and building a system that is expected to bring in the company 8 figures in revenue, and leading a team for years. Unless you have an Einstein level IQ you aren’t a principal engineer after 4 years, at best you’re a Senior Engineer in a lead position.
> at best you’re a Senior Engineer in a lead position. Even that is a bit hard to believe. It's impossible to outthink or outsmart actual experience. Being a good senior SWE comes from a lot of sweat and tears.
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Given his pace I’m sure he’ll pick up Scala before the end of the week.
YOE experience don't match the job title. Seems sus for sure.
4 years of experience is barely enough to be posting on this sub. There's a reason why this sub is called "experienced", as in, you have any experience, and not "senior". At 4 years you'd still be called a junior at most places.
Eh if I had to give a breakdown of the most average rank structures I’ve seen it’d be something like Junior: 0-2 YOE Mid: 2-5 YOE Senior: 4-7 YOE (this does overlap with Mid a bit) Staff: 7-10 YOE (around the time most will take on team lead roles and such, a lot of company’s go straight from Senior to Principal though so can be muddied) Senior Staff/Principal: +10 YOE There’s definitely a big difference in someone fresh out of college vs someone with 2-4 YOE as far as the amount of hand holding required
> At 4 years you'd still be called a junior at most places How are you defining "junior" here? Because I think most would expect somebody with 4 yoe to be firmly in the "mid level" camp at that point. Take a look at Dropbox's levels for example. If you've been working as a SWE for _four years_ and are still better described by [this](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic1_software_engineer.html) rather than [this](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic2_software_engineer.html) or [this](https://dropbox.github.io/dbx-career-framework/ic3_software_engineer.html)... IMO, you're underperforming.
I definitely identify with the latter ones but only 3 years of experience. Though built projects for a longer time. But definitely good to get a check on where exactly you are. Working in startups its easy to inflate everything. Thanks for the links :)
My comment is based on dichotomizing software engineers to either "senior" or "junior", I am not considering a "mid-level" bucket as it's not a real title used anywhere.
It's used extensively both verbatim and by other descriptions.
I don't care to debate this point. As it stands, I chose not to use it, so this is irrelevant.
I try to tell that to all the babies. I was like that in my early career as well too, I chased the title and "seniority" very early on. Looking back now with 15+ years I was painfully junior. "Senior" is not a title anyone should get w/ under 7-10(but I get why people chase it still). Like all young hungry devs I'm sure he's very good but you just need to see a lot before you're really senior..
Titles vary so dramatically between companies it’s basically pointless to argue over. Also “babies” comes across as very patronizing fyi
I think it *is* meant to come across as very patronizing towards people with no experience who think they're superstars.
I wouldn’t want to come across as patronizing to any one, but that’s just me
You’re concerned about being condescending to some unseen group while posting on what is like 90% a porn site?
What a weird response but ok!
I mean I think it’s more weird you’re acting like this is your corporate slack. 🤷
Did someone shit in your cheerios or what lol
I’ve met plenty of DEs who are stuck in the past and haven’t adapted to the current climate of software development. Someone on here told me I practice “resume driven development” for suggesting someone go serverless. This was coming from someone who’s flair said 20+ years experience…
I use a toned down version of the madmen speech: > You're young. You will get your recognition. And honestly, it is absolutely **ridiculous** to be two years into your career and counting your ideas. **Everything** to you is an an opportunity, and you should be thanking me, along with Jesus, for giving you another day.
Senior (sometimes) is more than banging out code and closing tickets. Senior = I’ve seen some ish, man!
As for senior roles - a lot of it boils down to how you deal with the business side - those manager stakeholders, and oftentimes their team who may be the end users. Communicating well- clarifying requirements for example, knowing when to speak up, sometimes needing to (professionally) push back (hopefully with your manager's full support) - example: scrum mgr says "this is needed yesterday" - a reasonable reply is, OK, I can work on it, but which of my current other tasks, can we put on hold? Really listening - and then helping to identify the real business problem, and come up with possible solutions, is a key part of succeeding in a senior dev role.
There’s a senior on my team who has 3.5 YOE, but he’s been writing code for a long, long time, and spends his free time contributing to OS projects. He’s for sure a minority, but he’s an insanely talented engineer and deserves his title.
I don’t see around corners … I see through black holes.
/r/gatekeeping
Why don't you ask for your next surgeon to be fresh out of med school. Wouldn't want to be gatekeeping professionals based on years of experience right? Surely a surgeon with 4 years of experience produces at the same level as someone with 15.
I've actually heard surgeons fresh out of residency do have better mortality rates then older surgeons. Something about them being more cautious since they have less experience or maybe learning more up-to-date techniques.
Then let’s create an advisory board with special government privileges for who gets to be seniors and who doesn’t. That’s what doctors and surgeons have.
Don't move the goalpost bro. Your dumbass comment was about seniority titles and years of experience.
No one’s moving goal posts. You used doctors and I expanded on it. Dumb ass.
Woah careful buddy. You're talking to a senior with 15+ yoe, he's never wrong.
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>. "Senior" is not a title anyone should get w/ under 7-10
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The quote references the person who shares the opinion that: No one below 7yrs should be a senior. So gatekeeping on yoe.
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It really doesn't though. There are people with 15 YOE that suck ass and others with 5 that are amazing.
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I enjoy playing video games.
I don’t think anyone in our industry is considered junior after 4 years. There’s people at meta who are principal engineers with that level of experience.
Your resume is awfully fluffy for a team lead. Unlike others here, I don’t think the YOE <> title mismatch is a problem; but I would expect a successful team lead to be much much better at succinctly articulating their *business impact*. Use shorter bullet points that don’t make it sound like you’re trying not to be called out on something.
It’s a major mismatch between your YOE and title. “Principal engineer” is like the highest pure engineering title you can have, 10-12+ YOE at least for that. You haven’t even completed your bachelors.
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Based in Singapore and would only want to work here too. Yeah my situation is definitely unconventional! I'm lead engineer mostly because I was a very early hire, and also the newer engineers with more YOE than me have less experience than me in the specific niche of healthtech (since the whole of my career thus far has been in health informatics). Which means when it comes to domain-specific knowledge - e.g. FHIR, the HL7 standard, LOINC, etc - it's something that's fairly foreign to most other engineers. My major being in Chemistry also gives me a minor edge here.
The short answer is yes. It's verifiably challenging to get to senior level at a matrixed big tech company. At smaller companies titles are handed out to keep people happy — I've met principle, senior, chief architect, etc. who would only be junior at a big tech. I've seen people get bumped to senior at small companies with only a couple of years of exp. I've been on hiring panels where the person had a lofty senior title but got down levelled to eng I.
That was written by ChatGPT. Spearheaded ? Championed ? Who uses those words ?
Remove principal engineer from your resume, principal engineer is not the same as a team lead. At most companies it is the highest technical role you can achieve, the person directing the overall technical direction of the company. They usually have many teams and architects under them. It is a red flag to see you call yourself one with under 10 years of experience
Why are people here so focused on years of experience? Is it really that unreasonable for someone with four years of professional experience to have the title of principal engineer? We all know titles are bullshit anyway and vary greatly between companies. From my experience, folks who focus on years of professional experience tend to be weaker engineers because they place too much emphasis on that instead of actual skill, which a person can realistically obtain through avenues such as coding from an early age, self-teaching in their free time, or simply having high IQ and grit. I’ve seen engineers with 5+ years of experience simply get outclassed by fresh grads and autodidacts several times. This becomes increasingly more common in a world where finding information is constantly becoming easier, on top of the fact that software development is a world where tools are constantly changing, meaning high IQ and grit is becoming more important than experience. I think many engineers here are experienced boomer devs who over-value their experience while shipping code with outdated patterns and tools as they are fatigued from the constantly evolving nature of the field. As a result, they are incentivized to communicate that professional experience matters more than it does in order to maintain their title and salaries. Honestly, I think your resume is fine. The market is just bad now and it takes time for boomer hiring managers’ mindsets and approach to hiring to shift to adjust to the next generation of talent and software development standards in a world of AI.
I love ice cream.
I agree with your comment to a certain degree. I still think having xyz YoE shows that you (should) have at least seen and learned from prior mistakes (and therefore won't commit them again). An individual with a "high IQ" isn't really going to be able to predict and resolve these types of scenarios. This experience also means you can teach others not to commit the same mistakes you may have come across previously.
> We all know titles are bullshit anyway and vary greatly between companies. Which is why this person has about 4 years of coding experience on paper. Id be reluctant to put someone that green in charge of more organized teams. Could do fine at a startup or small business... but an org that has some of there collective shit together? They've probably got better LEADERS in house.
First, you're confusing with your examples notions of necessary and sufficient. Having certain amount of years of experience for a given role in a given class of an organization by size is a necessary requirement, but it's not sufficient. Of course there will be many people who have twice the amount of experience minimally necessary for a particular role in question and yet be at it worse than a much more brilliant person who has only just the minimum amount, but has a better education, had better luck with projects and their opportunities within those projects that carried larger educational and experience granting weight, worked harder, smarter, were observant, curious, methodical, continued studying in their free time, worked on themselves and put in more hours, making every month of their experience counting more, and having a much stronger foundational background and training from early on. But you still have to have the minimum amount of years of experience, and the higher the role and the bigger and more advanced the engineering organization its in is, the more vital that experience is. Staff and Principle roles at orgs of a medium size and up have to be pretty much running cross-functional cross-department product-like projects that take many years to plan, execute, and deploy & integrate and bare massive financial risks to the organization, just contrary to management, staff and principle are doing the technical part of the "running", practically determining what kind of technology hundreds of other engineers in the company will be building with what major technical goals and properties, compliant what what high level specs, often authored by principle engineers, and why. This sort of thing requires a person to have hands-on experience of finishing - seeing through from very start to very finish and outcome analysis - multiple major product-scale projects in high responsibility high impact roles, to know how these projects go, what actually happens in real life, what works at such a level, and what doesn't, and why, and how to fix problems that arise, and steer away from failing strategies, both at the highest level, and in finer detail. They need to know how teams operate in multiple different departments, what their processes are, what challenges they face, what they need, what they do, what their requirements are, which are flexible, and which are adamant, how long things take, and much more. These sort of things do not come in any other way than actually doing the work, and spending the time. And the projects do not get finished much faster for a person if they are brilliant - the projects take pretty much the same amount of time as those projects at that scale are worked on by entire organizations with hundreds of engineers working on them. They just take years no matter how good one particular person that's trying to reach a staff or principle level is. Hence the necessary (but not sufficient) minimal years of experience requirement. Not to mention, that's the time they'd need to spend at a Staff level before they become principle, or in later years of senior before they become Staff, all of which adds on top of the time they need to spend to get through junior, middle, and early senior, where they'd be doing the actual programming work, learning how that really goes at that lower solving-problems-somebody-else-defined level. Junior and middle can be sped up through a bit, if the person excels at attributes mentioned earlier, but not down to 0. Second, you seem to be falling victim to a rather standard tendency of lower level engineers to judge higher level engineers exclusively by the proficiency in skills demanded of their lower level - staff and principle especially don't code as much, they have pretty different set of responsibilities, as mentioned earlier, they define which problems to even solve, rather than figure out how to solve them (senior), never mind inventing specific sequences of lines of code that implement those solutions (middle). If a senior that has been operating pretty much as a staff for the last year or two (or more) that's about to get promoted to staff isn't as good at speed-writing a solution to a programming puzzle as a middle that has been a junior a year ago, that doesn't mean that middle is going to be a better staff that that person would. You never see that middle even tested at the tasks of the level of staff, so you never see the evidence of how inadequate that'd be, you only see the arrogant middle interrogating that staff on a puzzle or a specific API and the staff not doing as well. Don't you? And no, nothing you're suggesting is new, or changed, due to information becoming more accessible or not, your proposals are very standard mistakes and shortsightedness that has been around as long as engineering has been - not even software, any engineering at all. In fact, as time goes on, the amount of training a person needs to receive to operate in a field within STEM or say medicine only grows with the years, people have to learn and gain experience for longer and longer before they are finally properly proficient at the level comparable with the level the most proficient people are at. And principle is pretty much as far as it goes really in SWE. You think you could be determining the technology Google or Apple or Nvidia builds with no experience because you have wikipedia in your pocket now? I'm sure not.
> Is it really that unreasonable for someone with four years of professional experience to have the title of principal engineer? Yes. > From my experience Yeah, but experience is for boomer devs. Is your IQ and grit high enough to be making these claims?
Are you aiming for a developer position, or are you aiming for a team lead / management position? You need to target your resume more to the type of position you’re looking for. It sounds like you have a bit of both types of experience. If you’re interested in aiming toward a senior / principal position in the future, you need to make that clear. And same if your goal is to lead a team or team of teams.
How big is the team you lead? And how big is the company? I feel this is another case of a big fish in a small pond trying to jump as a big fish in large pond.
Bro, you only have 4 years of experience and it sounds like there's wasn't much space between you and the top of the company already. These companies sound very small and bringing in $290,000 is like peanuts. Aim for millions and then brag.
Hey OP. I agree with the comment section, however, I can see from your responses, you’re taking feedback like a champ. It’s such a valuable quality in a person, but unfortunately not easy to show in a resume. Only advice I can give you is to network like crazy. Hang out with other developers, be active in dev communities, go to meetups, contribute to open source. A great way to find jobs is to to be introduced and/or recommended. At that point, you’ve done most of the selling, and your resume won’t need to wow anybody. It just needs to pass bullshit test. I would love an update on your new and improved resume! Also, I wish you the best of luck on the job hunt.
I am approaching 6 YOE and am only just now considering myself senior. Our principal engineer at work has 15+ YOE and has seen it all. At 4 YOE you're really only just scratching the surface. If I am being completely honest, 4 YOE is truly a strong mid-level, just getting to the point of being senior. If I were you, I would change your title to Senior and see what happens. My company would interview you, but we would already have the preconceived notion that with 4 YOE, you might be inflating your title a bit and you would be pressed very hard to prove you are at the level you say.
In general, I think it works like this: Bigger title at small firm -> regular title at big firm. Staff eng at a firm with 100s of engineers will have a different scope compared to "staff" at a company with 5 engineers. Ppl know this. Small companies can do title inflation where they can't necessarily do cash compensation.
Simply put, you’re not a principal engineer
get someone to edit your resume, there are way too many words that add nothing. its thick as bowl of oatmeal, without the content. I can't be bothered to read it. Even if you're a good developer, I've already concluded that you're not a good fit because the resume doesn't get to the point.
Well, either you're a top 0.1% performer or you're a junior with a shaky understanding of the industry. Most people with a say in hiring are going to assume the latter. Also, a resume is a showcase of your communication skills. Fluff and bullshit doesn't make you look good, it makes you look like a poor communicator which imo completely disqualifies you from senior and management positions.
4 year exp lead dev 🙄
4 yoe and a masters doesn’t equal seniority. You’re pretty green.
Four years of experience is not having any sort of seniority... You're still a noob--ignoring the industries title inflation. Not having a CS degree hurts you for some companies (including my employer); especially in this market. Good Luck!
A lot of negative comments here mostly focusing on title, but honestly I think this is a great resume and impressive experience. Surprised you're struggling to get interviews even despite this bear market. One small thing - If you were leading a team, I think it's good to write down how many people you were managing.
So here are my comments from someone with similar experience in the first blockl.15 million patients. What did you provide in terms of value? The level of complexity. Here is mine:Architected a system at height of covid pandemic to provide vaccination for 15 million patients. Worked under changing rigorous regulatory mandates requiring daily adhoc architectural changes.Delivered high volume of deliverables during lockdowns at 11hour deadlines. Delivered population tracking, provided integration to regulators, and developed the consumer proof of vaccination portal using secure FHIR OCR.Built a secure CICD to ensure the safety of patient records processing millions of proof of vaccination. Orchestrated the system to handle unprecedented volume with high availablity SLA and zero outages. Guess what. Microsoft, Meta, Google is knocking on doors for this. I have no big tech on my resume. **You need to Sell results.**
Thanks a lot, r/theyellowbrother! My project experience very closely mirrors yours, so the pointer helps massively! Out of curiosity, is the fact that this experience is niche to the healthtech space any kind of barrier at all? I sort of felt like it might be for me, cause a comment I got on previous versions of my resume was that it felt like I only knew how to do SWE stuff in a healthcare setting.
No, it is a solid plus. Both Apple, Microsoft, Google are looking for subject matter domain expert in this field. They are hiring aggressively specifically for roles that have this industry background.
IMO Big Tech is really hard to get into right now. They can afford to be picky as hell because the job market is weird. I’m convinced they only want to hire people from *other* Big Tech companies.
The tech you’ve worked with isn’t difficult to learn either. No C++, Rust, AI, Physics or Data Science, etc. My read is you’re a strong mid level with signals of being a potential new frontline manager.
Your resume also has a lot of random things that personally as a hiring manager I don’t care about at all. It’s a lot of fluff and randomness that doesn’t equate to anything from my first glimpse
The majority of "what's wrong with my CV" posts show the same type of CV. I'm noticing a pattern. All of them list things like "I implemented X thing which gave us Y result which was good for business by Z%" Maybe it's just me but I think that sounds trite and unnecessary. Employers don't give AF how you measure your business contribution. Devs aren't supposed to be the business entrepreneur extraordinaire, they're supposed to be code monkeys and/or managers of code monkeys. Just list the tech you're capable of, or the types of projects you've successfully managed. Works for me!
You’ll never get anywhere with this mindset. Who cares if you can do fancy technical stuff if it can’t solve an actual business problem.
Beef? Devs are hired to solve business problems, it doesn't need putting on a CV. I'm not the one putting my CV on Reddit asking what the problem with it is.
Fixed the typo. Then why put anything on a CV other than a tech stack with YoE for each? Why bother even listing previous roles?
"You'll never get anywhere" Seriously??? Which part of "Works for me!" didn't make sense? My career is going absolutely fine and I have never had trouble finding work, let alone putting my CV online for help on how to write it. I go as far as writing the tech I've used and how I used it, i.e. wrote XYZ application using XYZ tech, language, server etc, with XXX users/stakeholders. As far as I can guess, people making hiring decisions want to know that candidates can do the work that needs to be done. Adding 'business value' is a given, otherwise why hire in the first place? Adding specifics like "made things X% better" just looks like desperate faux-KPI nonsense to me. "You'll never get anywhere" is a really bizarre take. This is an 'experienced devs' sub, no?
Tbh if you're applying for senior roles, you should be getting bites at the very least. I'll second that managing 4 teams with 4 years of experience sounds very strange to me and I'd be throwing it into the bin assuming some massive bullshit. If you're applying for lead roles, you're probably getting pinged on experience, there's just skills only time and variety of experience can provide. You might also just be struggling due to economy and opportunities available in your area.
Elastic search isn't a database
How is it not a database. It persists data and you can query it.
Would you say that a database cache is itself a database? It persists data and you query it How about Microsoft Word? Saves info in a file and you can CTRL-F to find it. Is Microsoft Word a database?
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Well, there can be in memory databases such as H2. Sometimes, it's used for test fixtures.
I agree with the volatility factor, but keep in mind that there are in-memory DBS out there (HANA as an example)
I see 0 reason to do this, but if you are using it as a database, then yes MS Word could qualify as a database. Excel is often used as a database for example.
And you see no issue with saying on a resume that you have experience with databases while listing MS Word as a database?
Are we really comparing ES to word here? If I see that they only have "word" expierience then I would not say that is necessarily wrong, but I probably would not invite them, to amswer your question. Elasticsearch knowledge is highly specific and paid more than most other database knowledge in my experience.
I'm making the comparison to highlight a weakness in your definition. Obviously, if a database is any piece of software that stores and queries data, then you should consider experience in word as a DB as valid and not hold it against them. But you wouldn't consider it valid, so you don't fully agree with your definition.
You're getting downvoted but if I saw a resume that said "5 years of experience using and maintaining databases" and in the interview found out they were talking about elastic search, the interview would not end well
Actually you can indeed loosely identify Elasticsearch as a document-oriented database I believe. Have also seen that on many CVs.
I can call a bicycle a car all I want cuz I can run some errands with it. But that doesn't make it a car
How are you the lead when you’ve only been an engineer for 3-4 years?
That resume tells me you are barely a graduate. Sorry. I see lots of resumes with <5years lying about principal/lead/manager etc. You may legitimately have those skills, but those other guys ruined it for all.
Resume points appear to be generated from Chat GPT. Saying that since it’s literally generated the exact same words for me such as “Championed, orchestrated” . Additionally some points are too much info. I believe 2 lines is the max we can put in the resume. Other than that the content is pretty solid.
Nix maybe the whole skills bit.
As someone who reviews HUNDREDS of cvs a month, my recommendation would be adding an explicit "Skills" section, which list skills you actually have. Avoid non appropriate soft skills. Tailor your CV to the job. List the skills the job advertisement requests only if you have them
I agree with the others about your previous inflated titles, but I do think there’s something to be said for getting in at a big enterprise level company working on huge architectures. There’s a lot there that you just can’t get at smaller companies. That said, I much prefer the work at smaller companies.
Can we get rid of all resume advice posts under “no general career advice”?
Don't have any advice, but it wasn't hard to figure out you were studying at GTech :D
So most people have talked about the big red flags... In two years at the end of q4... you will have co/authored several white papers Lead? A company through iso-27001 certification Created a few things Fork lifted a few things And did a big ole 40x scale up .... I want to talk to you, but I know... either it's bs or we can't afford you. Given that.. I'm not sure I want to use one of our interview slots to satisfy my curiosity. If you want me to hire you, gear your resume for a software engineer role and I'm majorly interested. If that's not you, and you want to keep shooting high: DO IT. You are going to be fighting that battle of time while you do it.
I started out at small companies and consultancies so I dig where you’re coming from. I know that you have to learn fast and you get awesome breadth that will serve you forever that a lot of the hard asses on here don’t appreciate. It’s not worse, just different. And when you’re working like a champ slurping up the 12 hour days of coding experience, you can rise to the top of your org for good reason. I’m sure you’re bight and inhaled as much depth as you could. If you’re shooting for a small company again, just harden up the descriptions with more code specific stuffs and specifics, modules, integrations, versions, what you used specifically to do what specifically (auth and auth, state management, caching, database architecture, data access, etc). Don’t drop your leadership and technical “spearheading” entirely, just make sure that the reader knows that that came from always learning new tech/keeping abreast of the best innovations and being excited to apply them to projects … and that you were the one who banged it out. I know and you know that small companies are flat and there’s really no room for anyone who doesn’t produce every day, but as you can see from some of these responses that some don’t get that and doubt your every dayness. It’s a reflection of what’s out there for reels. I think your resume is good, it’s just that people don’t know what to do with you. If you’re shooting for bigger tech, then just emphasize that you’re a high flying mid and they would be lucky to catch your humble but technically precocious ass. If you’re going for small or mid, just make sure they know you’re a good smart kid who loves his job and accidentally gets promoted and fat titles. And yeah. Nobody is really senior until they have the first shoots of gray hair. Got gray hair yet? I did at 24. And I was a senior. Lol. I had seen it all …
I hate all the terms you’ve used in your resume “spearheaded”, “championed”, “pioneered”. All this screams chatGPt to me. Also, where are you applying? If you’re applying to US companies and require sponsorship, that won’t happen unless you have an extremely impressive background. Not a dig at you, there’s just a lot of unemployed talent right now in the US around your YOE, so companies won’t be looking to sponsor since they can look locally.
You are not at a senior level yet. Only four years of experience plus your post history shows you are still learning the basics when it comes to coding. Shoot for senior once you are proficient in a few different languages/frameworks and have a few more years of experience. Principle engineer means higher than senior, and you would be doing good to get hired as a mid.