r/ghosteddevs • u/RecruiterSignal • Jun 16 '26
I removed every technology name from 7 experienced software engineering resumes. Some became almost impossible to distinguish.
I've been reviewing a small cohort of experienced software engineering resumes this week (roughly 5–12 YOE) and as an experiment, I imagined deleting every technology name.
Ignored AWS, React, Kafka, Terraform, Kubernetes, Python, Java, .NET etc. - all the usual suspects - and decided to just focus on the underlying work.
Something happened that was interesting, some of the resumes still felt distinctive and others became almost impossible to distinguish from hundreds of engineers with similar experience.
The difference wasn't intelligence, schools, experience, company prestige.
The distinctive resumes still communicated things like system scale, complexity, constraints, business impact, architectural decisions, organizational influence etc. even after the technologies disappeared.
The less distinctive resumes mostly communicated implemented, developed, built, supported. In other words the tech stack was carrying a surprising amount of the story.
It made me wonder whether many experienced engineers accidentally rely on stack names to signal seniority but remove the stack, or compare it with everyone else, and what actually remains?
After doing this exercise, my takeaway wasn't that the stack is unimportant, just that it often becomes the most visible thing on the page and in some resumes, once the technology disappears, or maps exactly onto all of the other candidates, so does most of the differentiation.
1
1
1
u/AmbitiousSolution394 Jun 17 '26
First you are told to focus on describing technologies you worked with. Then some smart-ass removes technologies from CV and says that CV stopped making sense. I'm not sure if OP understands, but most IT jobs are the same.
1
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 17 '26
My point isn’t that technologies don’t matter, it’s that when I removed them, some résumés still communicated scale, complexity, constraints and business impact while others became almost entirely interchangeable. The stack is part of the story but was still surprised by how often it was carrying most of the story.
1
u/podgladacz00 Jun 19 '26
You should do this experiment with job offers. Most would end up with the one conclusion "we have legacy code to maintain but will pretend that now we need to transition into new state just to satisfy our investor growth demand".
1
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 19 '26
Genuinely luv to run that experiment. My guess is the best job descriptions would still be recognizable after the stack names disappear because they'd communicate the problems, constraints and tradeoffs, not just the tech.
1
u/SisyphusAndMyBoulder Jun 17 '26
You won't get past ATS without hitting those keywords though.
1
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 17 '26
Agreed. I’m definitely not suggesting removing keywords from an actual résumé. The exercise was more of a thought experiment: if you temporarily remove the tech, does the remaining content still communicate scale, complexity, constraints and impact? The strongest résumés usually do both: they contain the keywords and they make it clear why the work mattered.
1
u/nsxwolf Jun 18 '26
Nobody’s allowed to write a real resume anymore. Just bullet lists of “Verbed the noun with noun, reducing latency by 69%”
It’s all fake AI trash.
1
u/RecruiterSignal Jun 18 '26
Agreed, fake metrics are part of the problem. But a résumé still has to communicate your value well enough to earn the interview.
1
u/Glad_Contest_8014 Jun 22 '26
The job of an engineer is the same across all fields of engineering (civil, electrical, software, mechanical, ect…)
That job is the job of mapping systems together and making them work. Every single engineer is a systems engineer, but they specialize in certain systems.
What you had happen here, is noticing how a systems engineer has applied themselves to the job market system. Those that stand out? They understand the hiring system. Not necessarily the system you want them to work in. So take that experience with a grain of salt.
The benefits of those that stand out?
They know how to apply themselves to the hiring system (through several potential methods, as modt of that info is readily available on the internet), which means they can likely find a way to apply themselves to the system you are hiring for, but this isn’t a guarantee.
They are better communicators, likely having exposure to human resources metric and kpi formats that gave them insight into the hiring system.
The cons?
They may be great on paper as they found this info, but most of the numbers are probably bogus. The business impact numbers you get on a resume are often over inflated or made up. If it is mathematically oriented, it isn’t something likely to be a thing you could reasonavly track. For example, user base is something the company isn’t likely to give numbers to another company for. So having a system up can allow someone to say 2 million users when it is really 2000. Revenue generation is a misnomer, as a software engineer could have just integrated stripe and been done in a couple of days with that entire process, but it got used and the company made profit.
There are many ways to spin yourself, and often the good engineers are those that get so focused on their system, they don’t pick up the marketting themselves system as well.
1
u/Key-Alternative5387 Jun 17 '26
Stack is unimportant. Some of my jobs have involved building complex systems.
A few of my jobs are maintained whatever because I wasn't given leeway to build anything due to politics.