(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Pretty hellish week at work. I've been overworked for months, and the new engineer who's been ineptly assisting me for the past nine months or so put in his notice, so I'm going to be even more overworked going forward, as well as presumably having to train his replacement. This came to a head on Friday with an important customer needing to see progress on a system retrofit we're behind on, and I was missing some of the critical parts to make that happen. So I was up until 1AM Thursday night, and then I was up at 5AM Friday morning to make sure the assembly showed sufficient progress for the customer. (To positive reviews, apparently, but I skipped out before the customer showed up, to go deal with other projects in crisis.) And then Shabbos I basically slept through.

This can't continue. I am feeling pretty burnt out as it is, if help doesn't arrive soon I'm not going to survive. (Though on the other hand, I came in this Sunday morning to work in a less distracted mode and catch up on things, and I am really enjoying myself. Design work is fun! So I can hold on for some amount of time, there are still good things about this job.)

Anyone know how to write a mid-career engineer's resume? The resume I have right now is years out of date, and my work history is one job worked since I graduated from college, for the past thirteen years, plus a couple college internships. I have done loads of cool and impressive stuff at this job, but the details are what makes them impressive. I don't know how to talk about my work briefly in a way that doesn't seem as if I'm just repeating the same thing over and over again: Used processes X, Y, and Z to design Awesome System Q. Used processes X, Y and Z to design Awesome System R. Used processes X, Y and Z to design Awesome System S. If you know what makes System Q awesome and different than System R, you'll think I'm impressive, but I want a resume that can be shopped to a broader array of places, so I need to think about how to display the more broadly applicable skillsets I've developed.

Or maybe I can find a career coach or something who can tell me what to do.

Comments

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

The advice I've been given for when a job doesn't have clear title progressions, is to use process or action statements.

Note, my resume is likewise out of date. See if you can network via alumni or other affiliations.

[seekingferret]

Thanks

[jack]

Eesh, that's a struggle. Can you tell your manager the current situation is unacceptable?

I don't have a lot of certain advice, but from seeing some job moves in myself and other friends, the things that would most often have been useful to hear:

* If your job is worse and worse than it was, you don't have to wait for it to have NO redeeming features, you can always look for other things. Often you might be pleasantly surprised. And even if you don't find anything better, you know a lot more what your options are. If you feel like you need to leave, you will probably be very relieved when you do, even if there are good bits too.
* Don't overthink job hunting. Most people are average-ish at this sort of thing even if they're outstanding as engineers. Start by looking for basic advice that brings you up to an average CV and an average preparation for interview. Don't feel like you need to turn an average CV into an excellent one unless you don't get any responses.
* Try the obvious things. Ask other engineers, do they know anywhere hiring. Ask them if they know a decent recruitment agency in the area. Do some quick googling. You may have to do more, but often the obvious things are enough.

Most people I know hate layout out a CV. My approach is to separate out the practical steps from worry about them:
* Lay out a simple outline, listing name, contact info, etc, and jobs (usually in reverse chronological order, or whatever is obvious) each with some empty bullet points
* Separately, make a list of everything you want to make sure you include. Imagine you're competing against someone who can program but is a bit of a clutz, or a 20yo who's a great programmer but has no actual experience, or an excellent programmer who's a horror to work with. List everything that is a good reason to hire *you* rather than them. Don't worry if it's nebulous, include both things like, "I can program in C", and "if you give me a task, I will get out there and do it" etc. Keep an eye out not just for what you've done, but imagine it from your CEO's PoV, what have you done *that was important to the company*.
* Then iterate on those points. Do they include too much detail? What is really impressive about them? Can you make them more specific (and hence, convincing)? Imagine you're explaining it in a conversation to someone else who's as good as you but doesn't know the same stuff, which bits would you summarise, which bits would you explain, which bits would get them to understand "why this was impressive". Then write them into the empty bullet points.
* Get someone, anyone, else to proofread it for "did you miss out anything really important" and "do you have a bunch of copy-editing errors".

You may not need the pep talk and some of the bullet points may be UK centric, but hopefully some of that is useful.

[seekingferret]

Thanks, this is helpful.

Yes, I have been telling my boss for months that I cannot handle all the work I've been given. He's caught between some realities of a small business, so I'm not sure exactly what fix I'd want him to make, but it doesn't matter if it's his fault or not, at the end of the day he makes the hiring decisions so it's his job to figure out how to make things work, not mine.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

One secret of doing too much for too long is lots of ego boo and protein.

If the office is small, a crockpot in the break room of soup can do wonders. Is boss good on food safety? Or able to pick something up on the way and let people eat it while it's still hot?

[rosefox]

I'm sorry you're in that position. That sucks.

Ask a Manager has good résumé-writing advice: https://www.askamanager.org/category/resumes

Summarized here: https://www.thecut.com/article/how-to-make-a-resume.html

Her gamechanging point is to phrase every bullet point as an accomplishment. This radically changed how I structure my résumé. If I had a bullet point like "Trained and supervised 70 freelance writers", I'd either drop it or rephrase it/consolidate it into another, with a focus on what I achieved: "Reduced editorial workload by 50% by training 70 freelance writers to write better first drafts."

Since I've also worked at the same company for a long time, I list my accomplishments by category under my most recent title: two detailed bullet points each for management, business, editorial, etc.

[ghost_lingering]

Was coming here to rec her advice as well! Life-changing!!!!

[seekingferret]

Thanks, this is very helpful.

[calledtovienna]

I am not in Mech E., but I have looked at a lot of software engineering resumes (and have made several for myself), and happy to chat/take a look/answer specific questions. I generally tell people to talk to someone in their own field, if they can, because I think that a lot of culture & standards around what is considered awesome, who is going to be looking at this, etc., varies across fields.

In addition to everything mentioned by other commenters, I would also say that:

- In software engineering, resumes are definitely, movie trailers, and it is totally reasonable to put a one-liner of "Q is cool because" and "R is cool because", that are different. You should stick to a general form of listing projects in somewhat reverse-chronological order, but what you put under details is "enough to be exciting". If you are always using "Processes X, Y and Z", then maybe find a way to not bother repeating that, just say "Used processes X and Y to design the following: " and then list Q, R and S in separate paragraphs and explain why each was dope. Might want to put dates next to each of them too -- an experiment to play around with, is considering how your resume looks like if you pretend that each of these was a different job (with the same company).

- When I was polishing up my resume, I found that LinkedIn was an interesting source in seeing how people who _really love talking about themselves_ talk about themselves, and what phrases people use to indicate "cool" concepts (ex: "technical lead", "built from scratch" etc.). You don't have to use the same ones, but it is worth taking a look.

- Engineering resumes have an advantage in that a lot of engineering skills & achievements are somewhat more obvious in their impact ("before: no S. After: S"), so often a resume can be just a way to say "Yes, I might have the requisite technical skills" and that can be fine, especially if those skills are kind of rare. Not that you shouldn't follow resume-writing advice, especially as you are moving into senior roles, but just a shout-out to not get overwhelmed.

[seekingferret]

Thanks, this is great help.

I have also looked at a lot of engineering resumes. One of the paralyzing things for me is that I just looked at 50 engineering resumes yesterday and at a certain point they become indistinguishable mush. I have opinions on the very bad ones, and if we got a resume for someone who magically had all the varied and obscure experiences and skills we would like an engineer to come in the door with it would jump out, but otherwise I just found it very hard to tell the difference between an engineer who would or wouldn't be a good fit from a one page list of accomplishments.

This should lead me to just say fuck it, it doesn't matter that much in the end, all I need is a one page list of accomplishments to move past the paralysis and then to just start actually looking for jobs. But my brain doesn't always do what I want it to.

[calledtovienna]

You have looked at resumes already, so you are ahead of the curve! It'll be ok. How does your company actually decide who to bring in for a screen? That's really the main point of a resume.