Month: February 2020

Résumé Shortening (and other résumé advice)

Posted on by Scott

I saw a tweet from one of the best tech follows on Twitter (@raganwald) earlier today about the difficulty of shortening your résumé to five pages. While my career in tech is quite a bit shorter than his (and doesn’t include being a published author), I’ve been writing software for a living (and building/leading teams that do) long enough to need to shorten my own résumé to less than five pages.

While I’m certainly not the first person to do this, my (brute force) approach was to change the section titled “Professional Experience” to “Recent Professional Experience” and simply cut off any experience before a certain year. The general version of my résumé runs just 2 1/2 pages as a result of that simple change alone.

Other résumé advice I’ve followed over the years includes:

  • If there is a quantitative element to any of your accomplishments, lead with that. Prominently featured in my latest résumé are the annual dollar figures for fraud losses prevented by the team I lead (those figures exceeded $11 million in 2 consecutive years).
  • Don’t waste space on a résumé objective statement
  • Use bullet points instead of paragraphs to keep things short
  • Put your degree(s) at the bottom of the résumé instead of the top
  • Make your résumé discoverable via search engine. This bit of advice comes from my good friend Sandro Fouché, who started the CS program at University of Maryland a few years ahead of me (and has since become a CS professor). I followed the advice by adding a copy of my current résumé to this blog (though I only make it visible/searchable when I’m actively seeking new work). His advice definitely pre-dates the founding of LinkedIn, and may predate the point at which Google Search got really good as well.

Speaking of LinkedIn, that may be among the best reasons to keep your résumé on the shorter side. You can always put the entire thing on LinkedIn. As of this writing, the UI only shows a paragraph or so for your most recent professional experience. Interested parties have to click “…see more” to display more information on a specific experience, and “Show n more experiences” where n is the number of previous employers you’ve had. Stack Overflow Careers is another good place to maintain a profile (particularly if you’re active on Stack Overflow).

Jamaican Anatomy

Posted on by Scott

I remember having a good, long laugh about this particular image when one of my cousins shared it on Facebook awhile back.  It reminds me that my parents were right about me being Jamaican, even though I was born and raised in America.  When I became a dad, among the many parenting things I did (and still do) was baths.  And while I was washing the twins (moreso when they were smaller than now), I would find myself calling out their body parts in patois as I washed them.  “Come mek me wash your neck back”, and so on.

When I was growing up, I made no effort at all to speak patois–not even when we were in Jamaica visiting for weeks at a time.  I even teased my younger sister for her attempts.  But now the joke’s on me–in more ways than one.  The patois that sneaks out when I’m not even thinking about it isn’t the only way the heritage is more firmly embedded than I realized in my youth.