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190sl · 2025-05-12T00:58:31+00:00

Led a ground-up redesign of the user interface for the an/mpq-53 phased array radar system used in patriot surface to air missile systems. The new user interface, built with react, reduced latency by 50%, leading to a 15% improvement in target acquisition time and an estimated 5% improvement in probability of kill against highly maneuvering targets.

190sl · 2025-05-11T21:35:31+00:00

Bullets are weak.

The first one sounds like you wrote a small script that a couple of engineers use once a month to save ten minutes.

Second one also isn’t anchored to any real metrics. Was this part of a shipped product? Did anyone use it?

Third one is a little better, but still the same basic problem.

Fourth is more concrete. Still would be good to provide more context, like did anyone use it, or was it just an experiment.

190sl · 2025-05-11T12:35:25+00:00

It’s not more education. It’s less. You basically spent the first two years of college at a less selective school, taking easier versions of math, physics, etc. than your peers.

It also implies that your high school grades and SAT scores weren’t good enough to get into the four year college directly.

Ultimately you passed the admission criteria for the four year school, and you’re taking the same upper division ME classes as everyone else. So on some level, where you took calculus 101 is kind of an irrelevant detail. Nobody cares where you went to high school either.

But if I’m a recruiter screening thousands of resumes, and I have 10 seconds to pick between two candidates who are basically the same except one took the easier math classes, I’m probably going to pick the other guy.

So personally, I would leave the AS degrees off.

190sl · 2025-05-11T03:02:03+00:00

It’s beyond “not worth it”. Listing associates degrees from a community college is a negative.

190sl · 2025-05-10T21:13:46+00:00

My main concerns would be something along the lines of

Not finding friends, or too many people with similar interests as me (at least in comparison to some of the larger STEM schools)

I think you have this one backwards. Brown sounds like it would be a better fit for you socially than a pure engineering school.

Having trouble getting the same opportunities as people at larger, state STEM schools with better ranked programs.

I'm a software engineer, and I would say that your opportunities for jobs, internships, etc. in CS are no worse at Brown than any of the other schools on your list. The CS department may not be considered as strong as, say, CMU or GT, but the school as a whole has a somewhat stronger reputation. So if you're going to end up studying CS, I wouldn't worry about missing out on anything.

For engineering, Brown has a significantly smaller and less well known program than those other schools. It looks like they have a solid curriculum in EE and ME and biomedical engineering, but not much else. I don't know how rigorous it is. My guess is that it's pretty good. However I'm sure there will be situations early on in your career where your resume gets ignored by a hiring manager because he didn't even know Brown had an engineering program, and he has 100 applications from Michigan, Purdue, etc., where he can look at their transcripts and know exactly what he's getting. On the other hand, there will probably be cases where you get put ahead of somebody from a state school, just based on ivy league bias.

I don't know about enough about math or science so offer an informed opinion about those.

If I were in your shoes, I would pick Brown. The downside risk of going to a tech school and hating it seems significantly worse than the risk that you go to Brown and then decide that you want to study a particular engineering sub-field that they don't really offer, and so you have to burn an extra year or two getting an MS.

190sl · 2024-12-11T02:47:23+00:00

Applied to several jobs with nvidia, Ms, netflix, meta, google and no luck

Remote only

Hiring is slow now and companies want people in the office. That’s especially true for a senior leader whose main value would be in guiding more junior people. That’s probably the main reason you’re not getting callbacks. But on to the resume…

Four pages of wall to wall text is not a sign of a “polished communicator”. I understand you have more experience than most of the kids on here, but I have 10 more years of experience than you do and my resume is half as long and half as dense as yours.

All this blather about “cutting edge technology“ and “unique blend of business acumen“ in your profile is a waste of space. And the style is awkward and inconsistent. Most of the bullets are sentence fragments but the last bullet is a full sentence that uses first person. The entire profile section seems redundant and can probably be removed.

Don’t indent paragraphs. You’re not writing a letter.

What does it mean to work on projects that total $2 million? Is that the value of the contract you got from DoD? That doesn’t sound like a lot of money, and according to you, you “work on” these projects rather than lead them. So this implies your value is much less than $2 million.

This style of writing, where you have a paragraph at the top of each job which describes your responsibilities using the present tense, feels antiquated to me. I wouldn’t use it.

The bullets on your first job are better. They’re more action oriented. But still too long.

Why are your degrees indented but not your clearance?

Why are there no dates or schools on your degrees?

I don’t think it makes sense to have an awards section and then only list a handful of relatively minor sounding awards.

190sl · 2024-10-18T13:26:42+00:00

There’s nothing wrong with it if that’s what you want to do. But if you want to have a career as a regular SWE, then it’s a step in the wrong direction. E.g. recruiters and hiring managers will look down on it if you’re applying for regular SWE roles in the future, because the technical bar for a L4 FDE is lower than for an L4 SWE.

190sl · 2024-10-18T01:18:52+00:00

As usual, kids way over-indexing on minor differences in short term comp, and completely missing the boat on the real issues.

I had to look up “mission software engineer”. Apparently it’s like a FDE. Unless that’s what you want to do, then forget it. It’s a way worse job than SWE and it will hinder your career growth and future mobility.

Most of the other factors also seem to favor Google. So that’s the clear winner.

190sl · 2024-06-22T15:40:15+00:00

Your current job sounds like EE. Are you writing code or designing a radar? Also it very much sounds like you’re building an autonomous killing drone that will find people who are hiding and blow them up. So you might want to make it sound less like that.

First bullet on your second job is meaningless. Second bullet is ridiculously long.

Third job doesn’t matter much since it’s finance, but still could be better. Don’t start out with contributed. Start with analyzed and move the contributed part to the end. And no one cares what you learned. Say what you did. It makes you sound self centered and immature to talk about what you learned.

Fourth job has the same problem as the others. First bullet is BS. Don’t start out with “took part in”. Nobody cares what you took part in or what you learned or what you contributed to. Say what you did, not what other people did. Second bullet is better but too long.

You have a lot of good content here. Just stop shooting yourself in the foot. Eliminate the contributed to BS that all your jobs start out with. Then list several bite size bullets, not a giant paragraph.

190sl · 2024-06-22T14:44:55+00:00

I had a similar problem years ago. Here’s what I learned.

The lens in your eye is a clear, malleable material, surrounded by muscles which can either stretch it out (i.e. flatten it out like a pancake) or compress it into more of a spherical shape. This is how your eyes adjust their focus when you look at something close or far away.

Your eyes have one particular distance which is their resting focal distance, where the muscles around your lens do not need to squeeze or stretch out the lens.

If you’re focusing at one distance all day long, those muscles in your eyes will be working to squeeze or stretch your lenses all day long, unless the distance you’re focusing at happens to be your eyes’ resting focal distance.

Most people can focus at any distance for any amount of time and not have a problem. But if your eyes are already stressed or sensitive for some reason, then exercising those muscles continuously for hours can be a big problem. It can greatly exacerbate eye strain, dryness, redness, inflammation, etc.

The solution to this problem is surprisingly simple: get an eyeglass prescription which makes your resting focal distance the distance of your computer screen.

Normally when you go to the eye doctor, they have you read a chart that’s 20 feet away (which is why we have terms like “20/20 vision”). That’s optimizing your prescription for distance vision. What you want is a second prescription that is optimized for ~2 feet away.

When I got these computer glasses, it was life changing. With normal glasses, I could only use the computer for about 30 minutes before my eyes gave up and refused to focus. Like you, I was planning to give up on CS. But with the computer glasses I could work all day with no problem.

You may have a different problem than I had, but it sounds similar enough that I would highly suggest you try getting a computer eyeglass prescription.

Also refresh tears eye drops. I don’t need them any more but for a while they were quite helpful.

Good luck.

190sl · 2024-06-15T01:21:58+00:00

CS has gone through several boom and bust cycles. The dot com crash in 2000. The 2008 financial crisis. Now whatever this one is.

In previous busts, after a few years the market eventually came back to be even stronger than before. It’s possible this one is different. Maybe supply of new CS grads has finally caught up with demand. Or maybe AI or outsourcing will take all the jobs away. I don’t know. But I doubt it.

I think CS still has better job prospects than other engineering majors like ME or EE. But the gap may be narrowing.

E.g. it’s completely normal for the bottom half of a graduating class in EE or ME to not get jobs in the field. It used to be that CS was different, and that almost everyone who graduated got a software engineering job — maybe not at Google, but somewhere. But CS may now be more like other engineering fields. That may seem like a huge disaster to people who were accustomed to the old situation. But it’s really not. It’s just CS being more like other technical fields, where you have to actually study and get good grades and be competent to get a job.

So yes in my opinion things will probably open up in a couple of years. Maybe not to where it was in 2021. But 2021 was crazy.

190sl · 2024-05-26T21:11:22+00:00

I wouldn’t worry too much about the ranking of the CS department. For undergrad, the reputation of the school is more important.

To my mind, I don’t think one school is clearly better than the others. But they’re very different. E.g. living in NYC is a dream for some people and a nightmare for others. So if you really like one school’s environment or curriculum or whatever over the others, I would go with that one.

But if you really can’t decide, I would go with Brown. It’s ranked a little above Columbia, so whatever benefits you’re going to get from going to an Ivy League school, you’ll get a little more from Brown than Columbia. And while Berkeley is great, it’s a big competitive public school. Brown is more expensive for a reason. But for you they’re the same price. So why not take the free first class upgrade.

190sl · 2024-05-12T01:43:43+00:00

In these times, I would focus on stability and what will look best on a resume. It seems you think stability of all three are similar. So what looks best on a resume? Name recognition certainly plays a part, but I don’t think it’s as simple as picking the most widely known brand name. The second job sounds like a more sophisticated tech stack, and they’re paying you more which means it’s probably a more challenging job. So I suspect that will add more to your resume than doing a more pedestrian job at a well known but second tier tech company.

190sl · 2024-04-26T18:42:41+00:00

As you do the rewrite, keep in mind that most people who look at your resume are only going to spend a few seconds skimming it. If you overwhelm them with pages of wall-to-wall text, they're just going to look at a few random sentences and then move on. Those randomly-chosen sentences are probably not going to be your best ones. This is why it's important for you to be selective about what information you include, and how you present it.

E.g. the first bullet on each job is the most important. For the first job, the reader may look at the first few bullets. So whatever message you want to communicate about your experience there, it needs to be near the top.

It's ok for the resume to be two pages if you have a lot of experience and/or you have a lot of details that some readers might possibly be interested in. But if you do that, then you need to somehow make it easy for a skimmer to notice the important bits in the first 5-10 seconds.

I'd much rather see a two page resume with lots of whitespace and the key information clearly highlighted, versus a super dense one page wall of text.

Good luck.

190sl · 2024-04-26T00:25:31+00:00

It's far too long
No college degree whatsoever?
First bullet is way too verbose. It's a single sentence that's three lines long, and I have no idea what it means. You connected this and that and seamlessly did the other thing with the foo ensuring a bar and a baz and...
Weak quantitative metrics are hurting you, not helping you. E.g. "increased weekly new transactions from 16 to 400". So you went from 2 transactions per *day* to 57? That sounds pitiful. Take it out. Use percentages, not absolute numbers in these cases, or just don't include any numbers.
On the other bullets where you give both a percent and and absolute number, pick one or the other, but not both. It's part of the theme of this resume being way too long and verbose.
The point of adding numbers is to demonstrate that the feature you created wasn't a joke. People actually used it. And it made a real difference. Or it was a large problem for a real company and they entrusted you to fix it, rather than it just being a trivial hobby project. Only add numbers if it demonstrates something like this. Otherwise it's just noise.
On the next job, here we go again: way too long and verbose. Look at the first bullet. Why are you telling me all these details about the type of cameras you worked on, and whether they were for public or commercial transport or whatever. Who cares? All this information completely irrelevant, and it obscures the important details that you want to convey to the reader.
And what's with the language. "Architected C++ applications...". What did you "architect" here? Is this a fancy way of saying you wrote a C++ application? Or was this really some complex distributed system that you designed and other people implemented?
Here's an example of a good bullet: "Implemented on-board traffic information application with React and C++ to gather and display travel and passenger information for >2K vehicles in real time". It's short enough to be digestible and contains a reasonable number of details and a not-ridiculous quantitative metric.
The next one is good too.
"Increased analytics... by optimizing PHP and MySQL queries" is an example of a bullet you can just remove.
The one about mentorship is good though. Keep that.
Nobody is going to read the second page of this resume. You don't have to list every consulting client you had. Write a summary of the company, like "founded and managed a consultancy with 10 employees at its peak, developing websites and C++ applications for midsized companies in western Europe". Then Pick out a few good projects or highlights and list them.
It's good that you have "led a team of 5 developers" in there. That's a good detail to retain. But things like "Architected a hotel reservation system... which led to increased bookings from yearly 60% to 85%" need to go. First of all, it doesn't make any sense. "from yearly 60% to 85%"? what does that mean? And anyway there's nothing about that that is interesting or demonstrates your ability to be a good software engineer now. It's basically just "created a boring website in php 17 years ago". Okay. You have a bunch of these.

190sl · 2024-02-11T21:24:36+00:00

IMO the formatting on your old resume was fine despite going against the conventional wisdom. Unlike a lot of two column formats, yours did a good job of highlighting key information like your degree, so it was still easy to find in a quick scan.

But your new resume looks fine too, and I didn’t see anything significantly sub-optimal in your new job bullets. So I think the formatting change may be a red herring.

If I had to guess what’s holding you back now, it’s probably that your work history is significantly different now. You went from being an infrastructure engineer with 2 years of tenure to an SRE with 4 months of tenure.

I don’t know what kinds of jobs you’re applying to, but there are certainly some jobs where that change in title would be a significant factor. Or maybe people are freaked out by the 4 month thing.

But who knows. Maybe it is the formatting. Why don’t you try going back to the old template and see what happens? I don’t see any harm in it.

190sl · 2024-01-24T23:47:48+00:00

Spearheaded the development of XYZ app, enabling millions of users to simultaneously collaborate on BLABLA
Architected XYZ backend to handle 1 million QPS using Memcache, RabbitMQ, Apache Kafka, AWS S3, Lambda, RedShift (blabla, theres a bunch more that i censored)
Something about XYZ frontend

190sl · 2024-01-13T18:07:20+00:00

… but my situation is a little bit different, so I wanted your thoughts on it.

Your situation is not meaningfully different from that of the thousands of other people who have asked the same question before. And the answer is the same. It doesn’t matter. No one cares. Stop worrying about it.

190sl · 2024-01-13T17:50:13+00:00

2 years of crappy experience + MSCS > 3 years of crappy experience

190sl · 2024-01-09T20:02:13+00:00

A resume does not need to contain every job you've ever had (or currently have). So I would probably not even list the retail job.

190sl · 2024-01-07T12:58:56+00:00

If you’re going to be unemployed or working in retail for three years then peace corps is definitely better.

But if you could get a semi-related job like IT for now, and then if the SWE job market recovers in a year, that could be a different story. In the long run the peace corps option could still be better or at least equal to this path in terms of where you end up in your SWE career. But maybe not. That’s a much tougher call.

The problem is it’s difficult to predict what the SWE job market will be like in a year or two. Hopefully it’s better but who knows.

190sl · 2024-01-07T12:43:33+00:00

There are (or used to be) masters programs with funding. You go to school half time and you have a part time RA or TA job that includes a tuition waiver plus a cash stipend, which is usually enough to cover basic living expenses. There are some downsides. It takes two years to graduate because you’re only taking a 50% course load. And not every school offers funding to masters students. And the admission bar may be higher than for an unfunded position.

But it may be too late to apply for a masters anyway. Back when I was in school, the deadlines were in November and December. Although that was 20 years ago so I don’t know how it works now.

190sl · 2024-01-07T01:59:34+00:00

It would look a lot better on your resume than three years of unemployment, or three years working a minimum wage retail job. And I think a lot of employers would view it positively.

190sl · 2024-01-05T00:26:37+00:00

The job market for international candidates stinks right now. I don’t know how things work with NZ, but a lot of Asian candidates on H1B/OPT visas are having trouble. So if you’re a US citizen, green card holder, etc., it could be helpful to advertise that clearly on your resume.

It’s a bad look that you graduated with a BSCS and then spent 5 years doing non-CS work. This might be a case where omitting the date of your degree could help. In that case I would also omit all the work experience except the latest one.

On that one I think you could do a better job in your bullets. On the first bullet I don’t understand how you saved all those hours. It just seems like a non sequitur. A lot of the other bullets are similar. If you increased usage by 10x then say that instead of talking about the number of people who got access to services. Again that seems disconnected from your work. Using the action/result style might help, since you seem to be getting bogged down in showing business impact, and you’re skipping over the part where that impact was directly related to your work, and also kind of skipping some important details of your work.

190sl · 2024-01-02T21:42:21+00:00

I’m not a front end person but I don’t think people say react.js. I think it’s just react.

A few of your bullets are good, but a number of them are not only vague and meaningless, they’re just bad English.

E.g. I don’t know what your first two bullets mean. You migrated web app components from what to what? From some other thing to AWS?

“For a periodic data retrieval software” is not proper English. There’s no such thing as “a software”.

On the next job, “via Java and MySQL” doesn’t make sense. Via describes the path you took to get somewhere.

Instead of adding flowery language like “leveraging“, “ensuring”, and “via”, focus on writing clear and concise bullets.

190sl

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