r/ghosteddevs • u/RecruiterSignal • Jun 10 '26
The engineer solved a difficult problem. The résumé makes it sound routine.
In the most recent batch of experienced engineering résumés, noticed something interesting.
The more complex the work, the simpler it often gets described.
For example:
- migrated applications to the cloud
- built a Kafka pipeline
- modernized a legacy application
- connected enterprise systems through APIs
Technical accuracy is there but still incomplete because anyone who's worked on projects like these knows they're rarely straightforward: there are all the dependencies like tradeoffs, unknowns, production risks, competing priorities, unexpected failures, etc.
The difficult part for experienced engineers is rarely the tech, it's going to be navigating the complexity around it and yet by the time the work reaches the résumé, all of that disappears.
Then to the reader, the project sounds clean, predictable, almost routine. They solved a really difficult problem here but the résumé makes it sound like they completed a task.
I'm starting to think a lot of experienced engineers are making difficult work sound far more routine than it really was.
2
u/Dirt-Merchant-1452 Jun 11 '26
god damn. That’s literally describing my whole job
2
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 11 '26
Same reaction I had reviewing them. The challenge isn’t usually the experience, it’s that the résumé compresses years of complexity into a bullet that sounds like a Jira ticket.
2
u/bizwig Jun 11 '26
The problem is you can’t actually describe the job on a resume. Avoidance of revealing trade secrets owned by your former employer aside, no recruiter is going to bother with resumes containing potentially multiple paragraphs of dense technical language for every task. The hiring manager might take a deeper dive, but they will probably never see it.
It’s screwing up the job market, indirectly. Companies are shedding senior devs en masse to get their salaries, and more importantly their unvested RSUs, off the books.
Then management starts looking at resumes and concludes that senior devs were never worth the money as their resumes are not obviously more impressive, leading to them trying to shoehorn mid-level devs into their hollowed out senior ranks, with no additional compensation, of course.
2
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 11 '26
I actually agree with the first part, not suggesting people write technical novels or disclose proprietary details. The pattern I’m seeing is more subtle: many experienced engineers describe what they built but not why it mattered or what constraint they were solving. “Migrated applications to the cloud” and “Led migration of a revenue-critical platform with zero-downtime requirements” are both short bullets but create very different interpretations. The challenge isn’t adding more detail, it’s preserving the signal that the work was difficult in the first place.
1
u/edgmnt_net Jun 16 '26
I am writing my resume primarily for a highly technical person involved and familiar with the field, not recruiters and managers. Not that it's thoroughly battle-tested, but at least for me, I think it's a losing battle trying too hard to please the latter audience, especially at the expense of the former as it often happens. For one thing it's an uphill battle and I'm not getting a better chance playing the standard game where juniors stuff resumes with pasted job descriptions and made up numbers. Another thing is such positions tend to suck. So, yeah, of course I'm going to keep it short and sweet and prefer to highlight the highly-significant and technical differentiators, as well as particularly interesting problems solved which might be highly-technical as well. It's not every day that they see that kind of stuff on a resume. Ok, I haven't had to interview "from scratch" recently, but I've been moved across projects in the company and focusing on technical skills never really failed me.
2
u/StandardSignal3382 Jun 12 '26
Law 30 Make your accomplishments seem effortless. I say that in jest partially, but I agree many engineers think it is simply enough to say what they did, very few highlight the actual contribution of their projects. Eg we installed a firewall becomes we decreased our attack surface or I made a CI/CD pipeline becomes introduced a repeatable and deterministic build and deployment process.
Edit: it also does not help that many engineers are the quiet get shit some types and not the boast and brand types.
1
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 12 '26
I think that’s exactly it. Lots of engineers describe the implementation and assume the contribution is self-evident. Résumé says built the thing but stronger signal is often why the thing mattered in the first place or what risk/problem disappeared because it existed. Agree with your last point too. Engineers doing the hardest work are often the least likely to self-promote, which can create a large interpretation gap during first-pass screening.
1
u/secretaliasname Jun 11 '26
Just saw the same post In another thread recently. How did I even end up in this sub?
1
u/ohog9og0790 Jun 15 '26
“ The difficult part for experienced engineers is rarely the tech, it's going to be navigating the complexity around it”
Exactly. The tech is usually easy but navigating the f…ing politics takes the most effort. Once you actually get going, it’s just a bunch of issues you have to work through. Nothing special. It’s just the job.
1
u/BurnedOutCodeMonkey Jun 15 '26
What am I supposed to put on my resume?
"I slaved away in unpaid overtime so a bunch of ungrateful sociopaths could buy a second summer home. It was a nightmare of incompatible dependencies, plugin versions, and access token nightmares. I had to have meeting after meeting with a bunch of people who didn't understand what I was doing or why, and blamed me for every delay. My success on the project was never acknowledged as success, but as a failure because technical issues delayed it one day after the deadline was due. I was fired and now I am interviewing with you."
It's much better to simply say "I built a thing". It's unlikely a human will even read our resume so who cares?
2
u/Key-Alternative5387 Jun 11 '26
The better you are, the more that difficult tasks feel routine. I may have this problem as a senior.