Thinkings

These Things Are Much Better Than Spending Time on Résumé

Preface I have been reviewing a lot of literature related to the job market in software engineering and analysing what stands apart and what gets rejected. While writing this article, I am at a very young age and I am very grateful to say that I had an opportunity to interview people for hiring them into a startup, despite my role as a DevSecOps intern (I was that one multi-tasking startup guy).

You Need to Do this to Get An Unfair Advantage in the Software Engineering Market

Preface: This article is about my experiences and opinions based on my knowledge. We all have an unfair advantage since we all are unique and using that to get better in the market would take you much further. I have been working with software for like a few years while being a university student and learnt a lot from all the amazing people I worked with and followed. While I put down things that I learnt, it has to be noted that your opinions and experiences may vary and I greatly respect that.

The Future of Work and Lifestyle - The Inevitable Change in Thinking and Growth

The Current System of Workspace Working for a company or an organisation to become financially stable surely makes you and your family proud, and certainly, when you were in the 90s, that’s what most people termed as widely successful. It’s absolutely important to make money to have a nice home and send your kids to a good school. And most of the time that works and maybe certainly enough. This method of surviving has dominated for a while now and has shaped the current workspace.

There are always Flaws — Malware Development and Exploitation of Control Flow

Disclaimer: The Author of the article does not hold any opinions of facts other than computer technology. Everything here is as per my research and may not be fully accurate (although I tried my best). He is a very simple person and a computer nerd so information in this blog must be taken with a pinch of salt. I have been studying Cyber Security since an early age and know a few things about it till now.

An Old Computer’s Teachings — Why Vintage Systems Can Make You an Expert

On June 10 1997, Apple Computers released the Apple 2 computer which was one of the first mass-produced computers in the world. It was a success and had a sale of 5–6 million units till the year of 1993. There was a small documentary on this by Bloomberg Originals (here on YouTube) about the same with Steve Wozniak. Now I am not a 90’s kid or something. I was born in the year 2004 and had no connection with these computers.

A Minimalist System — Philosophy Behind Terminal-based Applications to Suckless

Since I have been using Linux for most of my life till now and while I started my computer usage on the Windows Operating System (at a very early age), terminal-based programs have been a life-changing things for me. I have been a person obsessed with minimalism and simplicity in everything. While I spend most of my day in the cyber world, I like to have my computer workspace as minimal as possible.

The Alchemy of Open-Source Software — Community and Freedom

Disclaimer — The following blog post contains the very personal opinions of the writer and is not intended beyond the scope of stating views about the Open-Source. The author respects the opinions of each individual so take it with a pinch of salt. Open-source software has been there for a long time since the software industry started to get into some shape. Open-source is not just a way of developing software but a value that makes individuals in the community contribute to making their skills useful to the world.

The Arch Linux Tales: No Wi-Fi for Today!

I have been using Arch Linux for days now for the sake of having full control over the hardware as well as the software (not moved to LibreBoot or CoreBoot but someday in the future). I have been utilising the suckless utilities and ricing my system for the best look I can have and take the privilege of saying “I use Arch BTW”. Since the total control of the Hardware and Software falls in the hands of the user and Arch repository Pacman releases even the latest packages, way before the software is even stable creating a sensation of being the early user of the tool at the same time being ready to crash out the system.

These Things Are Much Better Than Spending Time on Résumé

Planted June 23, 2024

Preface I have been reviewing a lot of literature related to the job market in software engineering and analysing what stands apart and what gets rejected. While writing this article, I am at a very young age and I am very grateful to say that I had an opportunity to interview people for hiring them into a startup, despite my role as a DevSecOps intern (I was that one multi-tasking startup guy). In this process, I met people with very different backgrounds and skill sets and learnt a lot about how some people become a perfect match for a company, while others fail despite their hard will to work. In this article, I am writing about my opinions and personal recommendations about what makes you stand apart while applying to a company.

Résumé is Like Your Brochure and Most Likely Will Be Thrown Away

I have been sceptical about the concept of resumes while applying for jobs. Surely it helps to give an initial introduction and have a bit of overview, but obsession with creating a resume to boost ATS Score is something that I find the worst tragedy of the job market.

Let me bring some light to the current process of resume review. When you upload your resume, it’s processed by software that will find out key points about you and will try to match the job description. If a specific threshold is met, bingo! you are shortlisted for review by people.

A similar thing happens with shopping websites. Most shopping sites select products best on their qualities, trends, reviews, etc. and those who fail to make it up are pushed down the pages. Nothing less than that happens in a local supermarket, where most sold products are at eye level and the rest are kept at the top or bottom where it’s hard to reach. There are algorithms, everywhere.

Did you notice something similar to a person applying for a job with a resume? A salesman with a white shirt and tie with a brochure filled with qualities selling a product called “time”.

And I find this one of the most inhumane things in the job market. People are indeed becoming no more than products in large areas of life, and job markets are no new.

So should you stop uploading your resume?

It’s actually not possible since we have come this far while very few people notice this tragedy happening in front of their eyes. But there are a few things that I can recommend that will make you as a job hunter more humane than a ruthless machine for sale.

3 Recommendation Letters Can Change Your Life

One of the best advice I received is to work at a small company when you are young. Find a good boss and follow him. Understand his best moves and learn from his mistakes. This will give you way more experience than working in a big corporate company working 9–5 under a pathetic manager in your early ages.

Once you spend enough time working with at least 3 people closely, like humans, ask them for a letter of recommendation. Or if you are lucky to go to a university, your professor who has taught you and evaluated you as a human student will write a great letter for you.

A resume doesn’t contain your actual skills, they include the names of your skills, just like mileage written on the brochure (which is nearly much different in most cases).

On the other hand, a letter of recommendation written by an actual human for you as a human will contain the real emotions that the writer has for you the one who has seen your work. Recruiters don’t need an ATS score or algorithm for that, if they are as humane as you, they would read it (and if not, why would you want to work with a company full of inhumane robots).

Lessons From the Apple’s Showroom

There is a fact that Apple Laptops are kept at an angle of 76° degrees which is just enough to see the screen but a little bit uncomfortable to work with. So visitors are most likely to touch it whole tilting the screen and improving their chances of buying it.

There exists fake jewellery and thanks to modern “paint sciences” for normal people, it’s difficult to spot the difference between real and fake unless you touch it, in which case they realise it’s fake through feeling its weight, texture, density, lustre, etc. thanks to the human body that’s capable of “feeling” something in such great detail.

The same thing happens with a resume. Writing “Kubernetes” as a skill in a role for deployments engineer is easy for 1000 applicants for the job, but there are very few of them who have gone through hours of debugging and crashing the website to learn the best practices to deploy a scalable infrastructure.

Now consider a case where you have live examples to show with 2 applications deployed on the top of Kubernetes (if they are in production and belong to a company, even better) and a few letters of recommendation from your fellow workers who saw you debug that issue on namespace while your fellow intern was tinkering around the YAML file responsible for building and deploying.

Nobody is going to ask theoretical questions while you debug your CI/CD pipelines or bother to know how many boot camps you attended. Solving the issue and getting the application up before the VC calls your CEO to ask about the situation is practical. So an assurance of your real-world skills to your recruited would make more sense. The recruiter must be able to touch and feel the things you have built and keep them dreaming about building this in your own company.

Build Projects that Employers Can Touch and Feel

It’s better to build 2 projects that have made a mark in the community than tinkering around 10 projects that nobody knows about.

A project is admired by the community if it creates value. To deliver value, you need to spend a significant amount of effort and time. It’s not a one-night project that will make the mark and flood your metrics. It’s refining the design and features with feedback that will add more value.

And recruiters for the values that you add to the community and want you to add to their own. That’s the point why they are hiring.

Doesn’t matter if you know 12+ Javascript frameworks and can interface with 6+ databases and deploy manually with Kubernetes. If that doesn’t build anything valuable, then it sucks.

Give the employer the feel of what you can do and build.

White Collars are For Humans, Not Machines. Stop Acting Like a Product Selling Itself

Get out of the employee mindset even if you are applying to become one.

I personally never understand why people are so desperate to sell themselves.

You are lucky to get educated and have exposure to the industry. You are lucky to find that job portal in the age where 36% of people still don’t have access to the internet. You have skills that very few people possess, no matter how saturated the market is.

Make a resume just for an introduction and not for distributing your brochure and selling yourself. Building things and working with people like humans are intended to do.

Have a network of professional people. Have mentors and learn from them. Ask them to write about you as a human. Build things that are valuable to other people and build them to the best of your skills.

And join good companies, companies where work is at a human level. It’s hard to find those since a lot of companies don’t mention in the requirements that they want a living human.