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Resume & jobs
OnlineCop
Member #7,919
October 2006
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I TL;DR'd most of the others' comments here. I did stop and and read @james_lohr's feedback, though. Those responses were very to-the-point and I agree with almost all of those points.

Passions

I've circulated two resumes, identical with exception of a "passions" section, just to see whether it made a difference. I'm a nerd for statistics (and I was bored), so I sent out 100 of each of those resumes (so to 200 different companies) and just counted up how many people contacted me back. The one without the "passions" section returned 26 responses. The one with that section had 88 responses.

That section was something along the lines of:

I dream of programming. I love to absorb new programming languages and figure out how they work, and how they can help me. I'm enthralled with Open Source projects, and love to help out with their development, love to work with individuals and teams. I love to make beautiful code: big things, small things, stuff that makes you go hmmmm... I love to code. It's what fuels me.

Like mentioned by others, definitely put SOME kind of "passions" statement in there, even if it's not programming-specific.

Experience

I like to give specific examples of projects I've contributed to, even if all that means is a "Special Thanks to" mention in one of their readme's or whatever. I include links to those projects, and if the URL is long, I include an additional URL-shortened copy that they can hand-type (if they received a paper copy).

I've found that most companies are looking for technologies that I just don't have, but I've been able to land those jobs because I had OTHER languages under my belt. They cared MORE that I could be taught something new and that I could work well with freaky coworkers (artists' brains work VERY differently than programmers' brains, and they often butt heads over projects), than the fact that I didn't know most of the technologies listed on their Requirements section.

Specific to your resume

Objectives

Your 'objective' section uses too many industry buzz-words.

  1. Programmers who "love to solve difficult problems" are masochists. If you "love to get the ah-hah! after solving difficult problems," then it sounds more like you're not afraid to tackle those problems because it will be a learning experience for you (going back to the "companies want you to be able to learn" ideology).

  2. "...engineering interactive software" is very generic. Do you like to engineer software that fulfills a purpose? Like making freakishly-addictive games, or that is easy enough for a grandmother to learn, or that will let you zoom in crazy-close to some vector graphic without slowing to a crawl.

  3. "...real-time demands" is good, although you want to show the person reading your resume what that means. Use examples. Talk about products you've had your hand in (even if only very briefly).

Projects

  1. You didn't list your projects in descending order: most-recent to oldest. I want to see what you're working on now before I want to see what else you've worked on before.

  2. I'd love this section to give me the project's name/title, then a link straight to the project source on GitHub/SourceForge/BitBucket (or "unreleased" if it doesn't have one or isn't really something you want to show to the recruiter quite yet), and a very brief description of what the project is.

  3. Describe how you helped/contributed on each project: were you a programmer? Layout developer? Content writer? Storyboarder? Beta tester? I'm not really interested in what a project is so much as what you contributed to it.

Skills

  1. "Visual Studio" jumped out to me first. Most companies want someone who know their way around it: Do you know how (or when) to create multiple projects within a single solution? Do you know about Unit Testing? Do you know how to use the debugger? The call stack? Breakpoints? The Immediates window? Have you used it enough that you would feel comfortable navigating around it?

  2. "C#" jumped out to me next. Developers I've worked with tend to use high-level "managed" languages since they can crank out code and not have to deal with all the memory management manually. How much have you used it (in terms of months/years)? Do you have any "favorite" features about C# (or any of your other mentioned languages) that make it something that you love to use?

Misc

Something not pointed out, but that I caught onto right away: Your consistent use of lower-case in your headers. It actually looks really good. You kept each of your sections brief/summarized, your font was easy to read, and it all fit nicely on a single page.

Conclusion

Show passion. Give examples, and link to your work. Accentuate the languages and tools you know well, and for the ones you don't know as well, list the parts that you do know well (or like to play with).

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Bob said:

You'd be surprised how quickly $100,000 can be paid back with an good engineering / programming / medical / accounting job.

FTFY. I've had a programming job for the past 8 years. The money I make is pitiful, and it seems to be the same for most programmers in my region. It depends where you are and it also depends on your confidence level and people skills i.e., somebody arrogant and incompetent will do better than somebody honest and humble. Indeed, a large number of the programmers in the industry are terrible at their job. They arguably shouldn't even be in the field they are in. Skill has little to do with it. I'm convinced getting paid well has more to do with people skills than technical skills or competency. Obviously the best programming jobs will pay very well, and in those specific positions anybody less would get fired quickly, but not everybody is cut out for those jobs and in the everyday jobs that programmers do around the world incompetence will not be noticed by management (it's usually plentiful in management and those jobs are much less fruitful for the skilled tradesman.

The hardest jobs can only be done by the select few that can do those jobs. The majority of programming jobs are bland and crappy. Often the money goes with the living expenses too. As SiegeLord said, if your living expenses go way up then the increase in pay may not be as much as you thought. And typically in those situations the quality of life goes down because the environment is stressful, noisy, busy, rushed, and synthetic.

I make round $40,000 per year after 8 years. I am paid hourly and have no benefits. I flew to Toronto twice for interviews about a year ago. The first company offered me the job, but drew the line at $50,000. The second company seemed to be very pleased with my interview on the surface, but I never heard from them again.

The cost of living in Toronto is probably close to double what it is where I live now. That just doesn't make sense to move there for $50,000. The work may have been more fulfilling, assuming everything worked out for me there, but everything else about it sucked: the money, the environment, the commute, the noise and pollution, the distance from family and friends, etc.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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Thanks especially James Lohr, Bob, and OnlineCop. I've revised the resume with your suggestions in mind (even if it's still not good enough, at least it's better for future tinkering [I hope!]).

I'd like to note (if it isn't clear or whatever) that I've resumed searching for a job (albeit unskilled ones for now). (And I'm not going to mention my disability, financial situation, or anything like that, of course! I already knew that :p). I'm also going to get up to the local university as soon as possible (hopefully this week) to talk with the admissions and financial aid offices to see what they require (since I was homeschooled + I am a special circumstance student in regards to financial aid).

This leads me on to my next question: when I attend college, can I replace my high school education with something like "attending soandso college for soandso degree, start to present", and if so, when would this be appropriate? When I do attend, I'm going to make full use of resources for my situation, as well.

Also I looked at the attending companies for the job fair and saw that they're pretty specialized towards the military, education, and medical fields (there's... McDonald's on there, I guess), so I'll probably just not even bother.

+ I'm going to contribute to open source projects. Does Allegro count? :p

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Michael Faerber
Member #4,800
July 2004
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I once read that a recruiter would consider an information such as "the applicant speaks C, C++" quite uninteresting, as most people have a command of these languages, however, a statement such as "the applicant speaks Brainfuck, LISP, ..." would gain more attention, as these languages stand out more. (Not to say that I would recommend you to program seriously in Brainfuck ... ^^)

Initially, I was quite reluctant to study computer science at university, because I feared I might not learn anything new. (I was already quite proficient with C++.) Fortunately, via some detours, I found a very good university where I was taught completely new programming concepts that grabbed my attention and made me rediscover the beauty of programming.
Seeing that you have listed mostly imperative programming languages (C, C++, Lua, C#, JavaScript), I think it might do you good to learn some languages making you discover completely new ways of thinking. Make sure you choose a university that doesn't transform you into a code monkey (learning the currently most popular programming languages requested by companies), but which expands your knowledge. Success will then come naturally, as you will still be able to pick up any code monkey language, but you will have a far greater command of it.

--
"The basic of informatics is Microsoft Office." - An informatics teacher in our school
"Do you know Linux?" "Linux? Isn't that something for visually impaired people?"

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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I was already quite proficient with C++

This is something that I've wondered. At what point does one become proficient with a language like C++?

edit: This question makes it seem like I'm doubting my skills. I'm not.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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The better you think you are with C++ the worse you are. :) Proficiency comes when you realize just how difficult it is to get C++ correct, and how much better tools there are available for many of the jobs. C++ is still used quite often in certain fields, but it's completely obsolete in many of them also. It's probably used in a minority of jobs these days so specializing in C++ with no diploma/degree probably isn't your best strategy... The jobs that do require C++ still probably have historical reasons for it. That and a few game programming jobs.

Just as a heads up, the gaming industry is a TERRIBLE industry to go into if you want to make money. The employees are treated very poorly, get paid relatively little compared to business programmers, and are forced to work extremely long hours (without overtime pay). It sort of sounds like you dream of going into the gaming industry, and that might well be what you should do, but just don't go into it expecting to make good money or to have a luxurious, comfortable job...

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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bamccaig said:

The better you think you are with C++ the worse you are. :) Proficiency comes when you realize just how difficult it is to get C++ correct, and how much better tools there are available for many of the jobs. C++ is still used quite often in certain fields, but it's completely obsolete in many of them also. It's probably used in a minority of jobs these days so specializing in C++ with no diploma/degree probably isn't your best strategy... The jobs that do require C++ still probably have historical reasons for it. That and a few game programming jobs.

And I don't (or didn't) mean to inflate my skills with C++, either. I admit, C++ is at times atrocious. Type aliasing is the one of the worst aspects of C++ I've dealt with personally in the past year (I hope you know a little bit about the assembly of your target platform if that ever bites you :)). Templates I find are often unmaintainable syntactically (and the 'additions' in C++11 and up are just... crazy... and since it's still so new, I just forget about that if I want to write cross-platform code), the compile times as a result are also horrible. That's just the tip of the iceberg and I'm sure many C++ programmers have dealt with such issues.

But it's also beautiful. Something I guess most people don't care about. I'm not babied by C++ (oh no, pointers are too complicated, let's abstract that away!--though this makes me wonder why type aliasing is a thing). In my project, Hologine, I wrote some pretty spiffy allocators for very specific purposes. You can't do that in C# because it thinks it knows better with its general purpose allocators. For most uses, I guess it's fine (see below). Then there's the things like SIMD and all, which isn't even exposed by these high level languages. Forget using assembly if the day ever comes where you need it.

But the only reason 'C++' is obsolete for the general programmer is because computers are so powerful it doesn't matter if you don't follow the intricacies of the hardware. On one side, great, it means we can waste memory and not care about cache misses, overdo OOP, all that great (and also equally horrible) stuff, without having to metaphorically hit our heads against a brick wall.

On the other hand, it means computers must get more powerful because of laziness on the software developer's part.

Personally, .NET isn't the best for me because I can't reuse my code on any platform I want (I'm intending on targeting the Wii for a silly idea of mine--but all the code I've written in C# is useless here). Python and Lua are great for anything that doesn't require performance, cool, but again, if you write a really neat something you can't just use it on any environment you want without including a dependency on the scripting language, unless you feel like rewriting it.

And web programming is just horrible in my opinion. Honestly, I have no passion for that whatsoever. I like breaking the barriers of what I thought was possible (considering my skills and the hardware I target). With web development, if it runs slow (because we have too many users, or whatever), just throw more hardware at it! That's how it looks to an outsider, at least. I make no claims that my knowledge of web development is accurate. Again, I'm an outsider here.

Quote:

Just as a heads up, the gaming industry is a TERRIBLE industry to go into if you want to make money. The employees are treated very poorly, get paid relatively little compared to business programmers, and are forced to work extremely long hours (without overtime pay). It sort of sounds like you dream of going into the gaming industry, and that might well be what you should do, but just don't go into it expecting to make good money or to have a luxurious, comfortable job...

I don't want to necessarily go into the gaming industry, especially for the reasons you outlined. I'd rather something related to high performance computing, especially for something like rendering. I admit this is a niche field, and a majority of such jobs are in the games industry, but so it goes.

In regards to game development, I have experience forcing myself to work day after day to get something done on a schedule. I did this many times during the one game featured on my resume, even if the schedules I set were of my own doing. I had to finish it in a year and so I did (heck, I don't even believe the version on my website is the final build, but I really don't care). And I receive nothing (as far as income) and little feedback for this project.

I know, what I enjoy and what would make me employable are two distinct things. Honestly, all of my passions are so niche they're worthless to general employers. English literature? Cool, you're now qualified to work at McD's, or maybe the school system...! Programming video games? Sell us your soul! And so on it goes.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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bamccaig said:

I make round $40,000 per year after 8 years. I am paid hourly and have no benefits.

You need to go job shopping my friend. From what I've seen of your programming experience, you are certainly capable of getting a better job. But you live in Canada, so perhaps things are different there? Is the cost-of-living much lower?

Have you considered going into consulting? Someone in my family with ~10 years of IT experience (and getting paid crap the whole time) finally struck gold for a consulting company and he's salaried at 90K/year.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

jmasterx
Member #11,410
October 2009

Bam has a low salary because he refuses to use globals and singletons >:(

If he did, he would produce lots of valuable spaghetti code very rapidly and gain admiration from coworkers, superiors, and customers for delivering something that works right now rather than something that will cost 90% less to maintain LATER.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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jmasterx said:

Bam has a low salary because he refuses to use globals and singletons >:(

Oh man, you made me laugh!

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

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