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Friday Refill: Making Limited Work Look Good on a Resumé

Summary

This episode of Developer Tea’s Friday Refill addresses a common challenge faced by software engineers: how to effectively present their work experience on a resume, particularly when they feel their contributions were limited or part of a larger team effort. The discussion is sparked by a question from a community member, ‘The Drowsy Archer,’ who has worked at the same company for six years but struggles to create a ‘wow factor’ on their resume, partly because they didn’t have direct access to production data for their projects.

The host, Jonathan Cattralli, begins by contextualizing the issue within the current hiring season and acknowledges that many listeners are looking to grow and take on more complex work, which is why they are scrutinizing their resumes. He emphasizes that a resume’s core should be ‘good work,’ but also cautions against letting one’s own colored perception of their experience undermine its value to an external reviewer like a recruiter or hiring manager.

A central theme is combating the ‘imposter’ feeling that leads individuals to underplay their contributions, especially when they weren’t the sole lead on a project. Cattralli argues that if you were part of a team or project, you should take credit for the team’s impact. The key strategy is to start by communicating the business-level impact of a project—a tangible metric understandable to a non-engineer—and then explain your specific role in achieving that impact.

The episode provides practical advice: identify three key ‘impact moments’ from your work, formulate them clearly using action verbs and result metrics, and then seek external review from someone outside your company’s context (like members of the Developer Tea Discord community). The goal is clarity and proving you can contribute to tangible business outcomes, which is what recruiters and hiring managers are ultimately seeking to validate.

Recommendations

Communities

  • Developer Tea Discord Community — Promoted as a place for software engineers to level up, grow in their careers, and have meaningful conversations. Listeners are encouraged to join to ask questions that might inspire future episodes and to get external reviews of their resume impact points.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Introduction and episode inspiration — Jonathan Cattralli introduces the Friday Refill episode. He thanks a Discord community member, ‘The Drowsy Archer,’ whose question about struggling to present six years of work at one company on a resume inspired this discussion. The member’s challenge involves generalizing work and creating a ‘wow factor’ despite not having direct access to production data for their projects.
  • 00:01:51 — Context of job searching and resume scrutiny — Cattralli sets the context, noting it’s a common time for job searching and hiring. He states that while doing good work is the foundation of a good resume, the episode is for those who want to grow and may feel their past work is insufficient. He highlights the critical point that your own perspective on your experience colors it and may differ drastically from a recruiter’s or hiring manager’s view.
  • 00:05:49 — The problem of underplaying impact and the ‘imposter’ feeling — The host identifies a pervasive problem: the fear of taking too much credit, which he labels an ‘imposter’ feeling. He gives the common example of not feeling like a critical part of a successful team project. Cattralli directly tells listeners they need to eradicate this thought, arguing that if you were part of the team, you should take credit for the team’s impact.
  • 00:07:59 — Strategy: Start with business impact, then explain your role — Cattralli presents the core strategy for resume bullet points. Start by communicating the business-level impact of a project using a clear action verb and a tangible result metric (e.g., ‘cut page load time in half, resulting in a 1.4x increase in total sessions’). Then, explain your specific role in achieving that impact. He emphasizes that no one expects an individual to be solely responsible for all the work on a resume.
  • 00:10:30 — Practical exercise and seeking external review — The host gives a practical assignment: identify three ‘impact moments’ from your work and ask someone without internal company context (like in the Discord community) to review them for clarity and perceived importance. The goal is to find confusing jargon or metrics that only make sense internally and refine them to communicate a truthful picture of the business impact you participated in, which is what recruiters need to see.
  • 00:12:38 — Clarifying the resume’s purpose and conclusion — Cattralli reiterates that the resume’s primary goal is to get you to the next interview step, not to prove your worth to yourself or your team. It’s about communicating a truthful picture of the business impact you participated in, providing proof to hiring managers that you can affect metrics they care about. He thanks ‘The Drowsy Archer’ again and encourages listeners to join the Discord community.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2021-04-09T07:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:14:30

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] Happy Friday everybody! My name is Jonathan Cattralli, you’re listening to another Friday Refill episode of Developer Tea.

[00:00:19] I’m going to start off the episode by thanking one of our Discord community members,

[00:00:25] The Drowsy Archer, who asked a question that kind of spurred on this particular episode.

[00:00:33] The Drowsy Archer in our Discord community. You can join that community by the way, and you can ask questions that may turn into episodes,

[00:00:42] by heading over to developertea.com slash Discord.

[00:00:46] And we’d love to have software engineers who are looking to level up, who are looking to grow in their careers,

[00:00:52] who are looking to have meaningful conversations. That’s developertea.com slash Discord.

[00:00:58] So I’ll summarize what The Drowsy Archer mentioned in their question.

[00:01:03] They’ve been working at the same company for around six years. They’re kind of struggling putting that six years of work into a resume format.

[00:01:12] And they’ve attempted to kind of generalize it, but they’re having trouble creating kind of the wow factor.

[00:01:20] Part of the reason that they feel this way is because they didn’t necessarily have direct access to the production data for the projects, right?

[00:01:29] They would deliver it to another team who would take it forward.

[00:01:35] That data turns out to be impressive, but only to their internal team.

[00:01:41] It’s hard to kind of explain the value of that externally, right?

[00:01:46] So this is the setup that we have for today’s episode.

[00:01:51] As we go into the weekend, we’re coming out of a time in the world.

[00:01:59] Many of you certainly already know this, and if you don’t, you’ve probably been asleep for a year.

[00:02:05] A lot of people are probably looking for jobs right now, and a lot of people are probably hiring right now.

[00:02:11] And if they’re not now, they will be soon.

[00:02:14] And not only because of COVID, but because it’s kind of hiring season.

[00:02:19] This seems to be a time when people’s budgets are kind of firming up and new jobs are popping up.

[00:02:27] It tends to be a hiring season. There’s another one, another hiring season that happens later on in the year.

[00:02:33] But because of this, a lot of people are also looking at their resumes,

[00:02:39] and they’re trying to figure out how to make themselves look good to recruiters, look good to hiring managers.

[00:02:46] How do we do this? How do we make our resumes look good?

[00:02:50] And we’re not going to cover the whole subject of that today.

[00:02:54] Certainly, there’s a lot that you can do to make your resume look good.

[00:02:57] The most important thing you can do is good work.

[00:03:01] Good work is going to make your resume look good because that is the core of your resume.

[00:03:08] And even if you do have a good-looking resume, if you don’t have good work to back it up,

[00:03:13] then any reasonable hiring process is going to uncover that.

[00:03:20] Now, let’s be clear.

[00:03:24] When I say that a reasonable hiring process is going to uncover your good work or your lack of good work,

[00:03:32] I want to be very clear that if you don’t have a massive portfolio of work, that doesn’t mean you’re unemployable.

[00:03:41] That should be, hopefully, a very loud message that you take away from this

[00:03:46] because there are a lot of people listening to this right now who,

[00:03:51] for the exact reason that your work is insufficient for what you would call a legacy,

[00:04:01] you don’t feel good about all the work that you’ve done and you want to improve.

[00:04:06] You want to take the next step.

[00:04:09] So if you were to have this portfolio full of incredible work,

[00:04:13] well, you probably wouldn’t necessarily have to go and look for a job.

[00:04:16] That’s not true for everybody.

[00:04:18] Sometimes people look for jobs for entirely different reasons.

[00:04:22] But for a lot of people, the reason you’re looking for a job is because you want to grow.

[00:04:26] You want to do something different.

[00:04:28] You want to continue doing more complex or more involved or more interesting, exciting work.

[00:04:34] And for that reason, you’re looking at your resume.

[00:04:38] And this is a very important factor.

[00:04:40] You’re looking at it through your own experience.

[00:04:44] And you can’t look at it through someone else’s experience.

[00:04:47] It’s impossible to do.

[00:04:49] But it is possible to remember that your perspective of your experience colors it.

[00:04:56] In other words, your way of thinking about those projects,

[00:05:01] your way of thinking about the bullet points on your resume,

[00:05:05] is necessarily going to be different, in fact, perhaps drastically different,

[00:05:11] from anyone else’s, including that hiring manager, including that recruiter.

[00:05:17] So with that in mind, let’s remember that our own perception of our work is going to be colored,

[00:05:25] especially when we’re looking for another job.

[00:05:28] There’s going to be things that we think are very important on our resume that aren’t.

[00:05:32] There’s going to be things that we don’t think are important that are.

[00:05:36] And there’s going to be some things that we are struggling to communicate

[00:05:41] that would be important but end up being underplayed.

[00:05:45] These are all kind of ways that resumes can go wrong.

[00:05:49] Here’s a very important factor in clarifying the impact points on your resume.

[00:05:58] When I say impact, I mean the things that a recruiter is going to point at and say,

[00:06:03] this sets this person apart or this qualifies this person

[00:06:07] above the last five candidates I looked at, the impact points.

[00:06:12] There is a pervasive feeling when you are writing your resume

[00:06:17] that if you accidentally take too much credit,

[00:06:23] that you are somehow being an imposter.

[00:06:29] So in other words, and we’ll talk about how this plays out,

[00:06:33] but if you take credit for a project or for work on a project

[00:06:38] that someone else was the lead on, this is a very common example.

[00:06:42] Maybe you were not the lead, you contributed to the project,

[00:06:45] the project went well, it had a major impact on the business,

[00:06:49] but you don’t feel right taking credit because maybe you started on that project halfway through

[00:06:55] or maybe you feel like the work that you contributed

[00:06:59] wasn’t necessarily absolutely critical to the success of the project.

[00:07:04] I know I’m talking to a lot of you very directly right now

[00:07:07] because I had this exact experience on many occasions in my career

[00:07:11] and I know other people who have as well.

[00:07:14] They felt like they were not a critical part of the team,

[00:07:17] they felt like their contributions were not incredibly important

[00:07:21] and that if somebody were to put it under a microscope,

[00:07:23] they would say, oh, we could have cut you out and it wouldn’t have mattered,

[00:07:27] so you can’t really take credit for it.

[00:07:29] And you have to stop thinking this way.

[00:07:32] This is a thought that you need to eradicate from your memory.

[00:07:38] If you were a part of that team, if you were a part of that project,

[00:07:42] then look at the project and the impact that it had,

[00:07:46] no matter where you were in the stage of that project,

[00:07:50] focus on that impact, communicate that impact,

[00:07:54] and then explain your role along the way.

[00:07:59] Start with the impact.

[00:08:01] The impact for the vast majority of cases,

[00:08:04] this is going to be a business-level measure,

[00:08:08] something that a non-software engineer can look at and understand the value of.

[00:08:16] You’re going to communicate some measure, some metric,

[00:08:20] something that is tangibly important to the business first.

[00:08:26] And the way that this tends to be formed is you use some kind of action verb,

[00:08:34] and don’t go over the top, don’t choose something really obscure,

[00:08:38] and certainly don’t choose something that is vague,

[00:08:42] but choose an action verb,

[00:08:44] and then explain what that action resulted in in that particular impact metric.

[00:08:52] So maybe you worked on a performance team, let’s say.

[00:08:55] You can say cut page load time, cut home page load time in half,

[00:09:02] resulting in a 1.4x increase in total sessions.

[00:09:10] These are made up numbers, and certainly those are not necessarily connected,

[00:09:14] but you can imagine putting that together as an impact metric.

[00:09:21] Now, did you directly do all of the work to make that happen?

[00:09:25] No.

[00:09:26] In fact, if somebody is reading your resume and expecting that you are solely responsible

[00:09:31] for the work that’s on your resume,

[00:09:33] then you probably don’t want to work in that place,

[00:09:36] because they don’t understand that teams tend to be the ones that get the best work done together.

[00:09:42] Very seldomly does an individual actually do all of the work on the resume.

[00:09:49] That would be a ridiculous assumption, right?

[00:09:52] So take credit for the work that the team did, and then explain your role.

[00:10:01] So you helped cut that page load time in half by optimizing the image loading sequences,

[00:10:11] or maybe you worked on, I don’t know, these are all very ridiculous examples,

[00:10:18] but you can understand that you had a part to play,

[00:10:22] and that your role in this, you’re connecting it back to the business impact.

[00:10:28] But here’s what I want you to do with this.

[00:10:30] I want you to come up with, let’s say, three of these kind of impact metrics, impact moments,

[00:10:36] projects that you worked on that had some kind of impact,

[00:10:39] and then I want you to go ask somebody in our Discord.

[00:10:44] You can ask us in there.

[00:10:46] You can ask another engineer in the industry, maybe a recruiter, somebody,

[00:10:51] that you feel does not have the internal context of your company,

[00:10:57] doesn’t understand what that project necessarily is.

[00:11:00] Ask them to read over those.

[00:11:02] They don’t have to do a whole review of your resume.

[00:11:05] Just look at those particular points, and ask them, first of all, do these things make sense?

[00:11:12] Do they seem like things that people would care about?

[00:11:15] Do they seem like something that made an impact on that business, in that moment, on that project?

[00:11:23] And specifically, I want you to look for places where they seem confused.

[00:11:27] Clarity is of utmost importance here.

[00:11:30] If they seem confused about anything, you either need to cut that thing entirely,

[00:11:35] or you need to change the way you’re communicating it,

[00:11:39] possibly change the metric that you’re using.

[00:11:42] It’s possible that you’re using a metric that only makes sense to your internal team.

[00:11:46] Maybe you’re using some kind of jargon that you don’t even realize that you’re using,

[00:11:51] because it’s become second nature to you.

[00:11:53] Once you get this kind of external review from people who are not exposed to your internal culture,

[00:11:59] they’re not exposed to your clients or your work, they don’t have any context on any of that,

[00:12:05] then you might have a clearer picture of something that makes an impact.

[00:12:11] That’s really what we’re going for here.

[00:12:13] We’re not trying to prove to your team, prove to your clients, prove to you even.

[00:12:21] That’s probably the hardest one to get over.

[00:12:24] We’re not trying to prove to you or any of those other people that you’ve done good work.

[00:12:29] We’re trying to get you to the next step in that interview process.

[00:12:35] That is the whole point of these resumes.

[00:12:38] Maybe there is some pride that’s wrapped up into it, maybe there is some sense of worth,

[00:12:45] but if your goal is to get a job, then really what you’re trying to communicate

[00:12:51] is a truthful picture of the business impact that you participated in.

[00:12:56] That’s what you care about, and that’s what your recruiter cares about,

[00:13:00] that’s what your hiring manager cares about.

[00:13:02] They’re trying to get proof.

[00:13:04] They’re trying to get proof that you have the makeup of someone who’s going to have a tangible impact

[00:13:12] on metrics that they care about, that they actually want to pursue.

[00:13:16] There’s plenty of other things that we can talk about on a resume

[00:13:19] that might allow them to see that you’re a culture fit, for example.

[00:13:23] But this specific thing asking about how do I make my work look good

[00:13:28] should be entirely focused on finding those critical points of business impact

[00:13:35] and communicating those first and then your role in that process.

[00:13:41] Thank you again to the drowsy archer in our Discord community.

[00:13:46] You can join that Discord community by heading over to developert.com slash Discord.

[00:13:51] Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Developer T.

[00:13:54] The Friday refill of this show comes out every Friday.

[00:13:58] We also have two other episodes that come out each week, so it’s a total of three episodes.

[00:14:02] It’s a lot of content, and it’s easy to miss out on something if you’re not subscribed.

[00:14:07] So go ahead and subscribe on whatever podcasting app you use

[00:14:10] if you don’t want to miss out on future episodes.

[00:14:12] Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.

[00:14:24] you

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