this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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I find it amazing how few companies don’t even give people a chance. I’m tech-inclined, but the only thing I have to my name is a Comptia A+ cert. However, I’ve also done a lot of things that are well beyond that skill set in a multitude of ways, and I also learn quite quickly. It’s tough to put ‘Hey, I managed a MYSQL database for a modded Minecraft server and I set everything up myself.’ on a resume. Nobody even bothers to read that because it mentions Minecraft, never mind the amount of actual work it takes to run a public-facing server like that with hundreds of active players logged in at once. It certainly isn’t ’just playing a video game’.
Don;t mention Minecraft. You implemented and adminstered a MYSQL database system which supported N concurrent users and Y transactions per minute with 99.xxx uptime over Z years, you also developed a custom front-end etc etc
I didn't write a Discord bot, I wrote a chat-accessible service used by tens of thousands of users. It's funny how wording things differently helps on your resume.
The cool thing is, you're right that you've got marketable skills that employers want, you just gotta present them in corporate lingo that sanitizes it of any humanity and fun, lmao. You could rephrase that part about the Minecraft server to something like "Actively maintaining a high-uptime server with
[X amount]of daily clients by utilizing[insert type of tools/languages here, e.g. MySQL databases]."I've always hated the process of "translating" real life experience into the marketable buzzwords that employers like to see, but until it seems like hiring managers on a wider scale are willing to listen to words that normal people would write, I'm gonna keep trying to speak their language.
Sometimes, the less you say, the better. You have to manipulate them and do not worry about if it's bad/wrong. In the corporate world, most are just greedy assholes who don't care about who you are.
Don't ever lie on your resume, just make it glittery on how THEY want to see it, not how you feel about it.
It's a sad world we are living in right now, good luck don't ever give up !
Also, they often don't read more than a few lines. I applied as a dev for a company which I had many friends inside. They all knew my skills. The problem was the high-level managers because they didn't read the memo (and didn't even read my CV), assumed I can't do engineering because I was an academic at the time.
Just to put out the other side of this, you're competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn't free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.
And every candidate that isn’t picture perfect that they deny a position to is that hour gone to complete waste.
That... Isn't what I'm saying? I'm saying they won't bother to go to the interview phase with those people most of the time because they have higher probability options to try instead.
Usually getting in front of a human for an interview is the hardest step. Once you're talking, you can generally show your expertise, and most interviewers I've known are receptive to any sort of past experience that's techy and related enough, or even just problem solving related.
Sounds to me like there is a total glut of software engineers.
Which makes it really difficult to fathom why they are paid so goddamn much.
Thinking about it a bit more, I think it's more like the metrics used to get in front of a human (the automated/hr part) aren't well matched to the actual goals. We end up interviewing a lot of people who are good on paper according to the first sort, but actual good hires within that aren't as common as we'd like. But none of the engineers ever know about any of the people who were disqualified due to having an unimpressive resume...
So in the end, the initial sort does indeed end up wasting time and money, but no one's gotten around to making a good solution for this yet. The alternative so far is to interview a bunch more people, which is also really expensive anyway.
Basically, we have no efficient way to find people who are bad on paper but are actually quite skilled.