Disclaimer: opinions in this post are my own and do not represent opinions of my current employer or any of my past employers or any of my or their clients.

Señor Engineer
I just had to put this picture for few friends of mine ;)

Recently I got promoted to Senior Software Engineer position at Amazon. This post starts with my career story leading to the place where I am now and finishing with thoughts on titles, their meaning, and further thoughts on professional growth for software engineers. Bear with me, this is a long post with no conclusion.

Career Path so Far

My first job was with a Ukrainian outsourcing company, Softserve Inc. I started there in April 2008 and left the company in December 2011 to pursue new experiences in Western Europe. During those 3.5 years I got promoted twice. When exiting the company I was titled “Senior Software Developer” leading a team of 8 developers. Most of us were young software engineers just some years out of college, we were in a different kind of business than all of my next jobs (outsourcing vs. product).

My first job is still an inspiration on how I should be approaching my career. Being career driven, ambitious, and overly eager to learn non-stop were the main characteristics of me back then. I was brave enough to speak at user group events, and teach others. I’ve just read old post on leaving my first job and it inspires me. My English is horrible, but the meaning is everything:

I joined my second company in Austria as a Software Engineer (intermediate level) and was extremely happy with the quality of software we were producing and everyone’s skills. This was the first time I started learning about distributed systems and just loved working there. I hammered the keyboard non-stop and was happy. As it always is, every story has its end. I left my second company banally to earn more money. Sad but true. They tried to keep me by offering some XX% salary increase, and… drumbeat… a “Senior Software Engineer” title. I rejected. I don’t know if that was the right move, but that clearly was time when I chose money over title or even over happiness at work. Below is a blog post about leaving second job and reasons why I chose money, if you are interested:

I spent only 1.5 years with second company after which I had long 4.5 years with United Nations (well, the IAEA, which is international organization associated to UN). I started as a contractor Software Engineer – my title didn’t really matter as at first I was self-employed, I could probably have called myself “God Of Software Engineering” at “Greatest Software Company In The World” and it would not matter as for the IAEA I was just a contractor and they made me go through airport-like security each and every day for few years. In the end they hired me as a Staff Member with a cryptic title “Systems Analyst / Programmer” putting me in charge of a team of contractors :). This was another bump in my income as suddenly I didn’t have to pay taxes (yes, let me repeat it – I legally did not have to pay any taxes at all).

The place is definitely unlike any other workplace. There were over 100 different nationals working in the same building with me. I worked directly with people from Iraq, Zimbabwe, Azerbaijan, UK, Australia, Canada, China, India, and so many other countries it was virtually impossible to know who is from where. There was so much learning about different cultures. This alone was awesome. There were tons of other benefits related to working at that place. Not everything was great. For instance, I had to come to work in a suite – yes, software engineer in a suite. More seriously I was looking for more growth. Even if I managed to get promoted that would not make any major difference. Maybe, I would just start wearing a tie in addition to suite. Unfortunately, I don’t have a blog post about leaving that place, even though I have so much to share. All I have is this picture of me getting out of a nuclear reactor and tweet:

Up until 2018 I was mostly .NET engineer with desktop, distributed, mobile and web skills. Starting to work for Amazon meant dropping good portion of that knowledge and learning Java and many things from the “dark side” (oh, sorry, that’s the other way around). I’ve joined Amazon as SDE2 and I didn’t mind joining on an intermediate title as I knew that working for one of FAANG sets me on a totally different growth path that brings challenges of a different magnitude. I cannot talk too much about work at Amazon other than what’s public. But it is not a secret that one line of code change could mean MM$ of loss or MM$ of revenue here just because of enormous scale. This is why Amazon always tries to raise the engineering bar. Amazon is a place of insane growth. Love it.

Do titles matter?

So where am I going with all of this? If you followed me so far, you would notice I always skipped titles either for new experience, more money, or growth opportunities.

So do titles matter? I think it depends on how you look at them. You can be “CTO” at company of 10 people making 100K a year, or be a fresh grad Junior Engineer at top company in bay area and make twice as much. But “CTO” might have a chance to grow her company to giant and make millions because she is in a different growth position. It is not only about titles but what they really mean, what level of responsibility they bring, what is the pay band, what impact, knowledge, and skills are expected. Most often companies define levels boiling down to some kind of seniority and scope of responsibilities and then would define different titles having technical track, management track and maybe few more.

Long story short, I think titles do matter but they matter in a context.

When I look at titles of people whom I knew from my first job I get humbled – some of them got promoted 6 times to the likes of “Vice President of Something” or “Senior Solutions Architect” or even something more pompous. Not all of them, though, some of them who were less ambitious or had different goals took different paths. This makes me wondering where I would have ended up had I stayed. I will never know, but should I even care? Should you care about your past decisions and think too much? We should not! Regret is a painful emotional state to avoid. We need to always try to minimize potential regret.

So how to get to the next level?

Everyone of us has a different path in life and in our careers and that is just the way it is. We care about ourselves, our families and people we know and relate to. So for the most part you don’t care about me or my title the same way as I don’t care about your title or other engineers’ titles. That having said, you might be interested in this post as you might be wondering how you can get to your next level or what you can learn. Human nature is not to be happy with what they have and I am ok with this. This is normal.

Here are original bullet points from me:

• Do your job and do it well. Really well. Master the tools. Balance delivery and long-term perspective.
• Never ever stop learning. Improve yourself in all areas. Soft and hard skills.
• Work on projects that have impact and could grow to something big. If you don’t think you are on such a project change the project or change the project.
• Find a mentor and work with your manager and others to get you where you want to be.
• Look at what next level implies and do those things. Take responsibilities. Now.
• Make your work visible and document what you’ve done.
• Stay healthy. Sleep well.

How much in a promotion is luck?

This is a difficult question. If I take philosophical approach I would say that a lot is due to luck – we just pop up like little candles in different parts of the world and then we fade away, you might have been unlucky to be born in poorest country in the world or your parents might have started preparing you for Stanford in elementary school. You might have worked on a project that suddenly started making millions of dollars growing and riding everyone’s careers with it or you might have worked on failed project and got laid off.

Another cold-blooded view is absolutely deterministic. You are worth exactly what you are worth, meaning that if you somehow think you deserve higher level this is simply wrong as you were not able to determine what it takes to get that what you want and therefore you don’t deserve it. Big companies have data-driven approach to promotions. If you have the data for the next level you will undeniably get it.

My overnight promotion was years in making.

Conclusion?

This was just a story. You can make your own conclusions. I’m just encouraging you not to give up. Feel free to leave me a congratulatory or any other kind of comment.

Among other things, this promotion completes one of the important parts of my 2020 new year resolution. I’m now 12.5% done and more is to come.

A first glance look at your resume will rest assure a potential employer that you are not worth hiring if it looks like a crap.

Even if you listed tons of technologies, badly looking resume hints that you don’t care about the quality of things. Employer might think: “He must be writing his code in the same ugly way.”

In this blog post I want to share few things I did to my resume.

Actually, I have more of a CV than a resume. After recent changes I created two different versions of my CV. One is more concise two pages that I would normally use and another is extended 4 pages version. Four pages version contains detailed information on projects I worked on, so it can serve for my future editing, should I need more information.

Being Specific about Contributions and Achievements

Probably, the main thing anyone should do to their CVs is to ensure your future employer will have a clear idea on what you had done before. Obscure general phrases are just destroyers of a resume or CV.

For my own resume I completely rewrote everything into smarter format. I used past tense bullet-point sentences to clearly describe what I did. Let’s have a look at before and after of one concrete example.

Before

This is what I previously had as a summary for my experience at bwin.party company:

“Developing and extending large set of back-end services in scope of enterprise SOA architecture in large betting company. Scalability and performance were top most requirements.”

It was followed by a list of projects I worked on. One of them was statistics service I created. I described it like this:

“Service which fetches huge amount of statistics data from external provider over FTP and transforms it for internal consumption.”

Obviously potential employer looking at this description wouldn’t have any idea at what my contribution to this project was. Was I implementing it from scratch or was I fixing bugs? Or, maybe, I just know something about the system so I listed it.

After

After editing, the summary became:

“Bwin.party is an online betting company. I worked in the company’s sports branch, with a team responsible for backend services. Scalability and performance were the top most requirements. Most services were exposed through REST API; they had to be available 24/7 and withstand extreme loads during championship events.”

Then, I came up with this description for the statistics project:

“Designed, implemented, and launched a new sports statistics system. This system imported data from an external FTP location and made it available on our website through AppFabric Cache.”

This description exactly says what I did and even provides a glance look at some of the technologies used.

English

Another thing I had to improve was my writing. I’m not native English speaker and I’ve never took any English grammar classes. I make many mistakes.

I hired an editing and proofreading company to go through my CV and fix mistakes. I only paid 31 Euro, but my CV became English language error free. Plus they provided a few general suggestions on improving my CV.

You have to be really careful with someone editing your CV, as they might change the meaning unintentionally. For example, they wrote “Fixed a serious performance problem using search engine…” when it really had to be “Fixed a serious performance problem in the site’s search engine…”

There were obvious problems that made their way from times when my English was even weaker. For instance, sentence “I was awarded in nomination “Best Rookie Developer of 2008” in my team of 50 people, so am proud of this, because at that year our team got a lot of new people.” sounds horrible to me. Now it just says: “Was awarded the “Best Rookie Developer of 2008”.

Formatting

I completely changed the format of my CV. I’ve borrowed styling and formatting from my friend’s resume. He’s hired a professional technical writer to create a CV for him.

Before

Previous version was grey 4 pages wall of heavy text with odd formatting.

After

The new version is just two pages. It is nicely formatted and is error free. It is available here.

Review

It’s very important that someone reviews your CV. I asked my colleague who does a lot of interviews to review my CV. He said that if CV is short, screener reads through all job posts, but if it is long screening ends at your last job post. So it depends what you want to show. Other thing he thought of, was adding skill grades for different technologies, like C# (major skill), F# (minor skill). I didn’t incorporate this advice, but I’m still considering it.

Photo

I added a new photo to my CV, not the one you currently see. After I showed my CV to my wife, she said that she would never hire someone who looks that frowning and sad. I had to make a new picture with a hint of a smile.

Next Steps

Recommendation Letters

I already have official recommendation letters from two of my previous companies. I’m planning to include those when applying for a job. A recommendation letter for a software developer is not common in Ukraine where I had worked before moving to Austria. But here in Western-Central Europe it is almost a must. I think that it doesn’t do any harm to ask for an official recommendation letter even if it is not common in the country where you live. Ask for it now, otherwise it could be a difficulty to get it few years later.

Cover Letter

I’ve never used a cover letter. It has never came to me that this might be a useful technic. But it might, especially if you are looking for a specific job and want to outline exactly why you are the best match for it. Should I find my “job of dream” I might consider creating dedicated cover letter. For now, I won’t create one. Have you ever used a cover letter? Did it work for you?

Hiring a Professional Resume Writer

I haven’t done this. I also have mixed feelings about hiring someone to write my CV completely from scratch. Probably, they can do a great job. But finding a really worthy professional might take lot of time. Also a good one would cost you few hundreds $. Though, it is definitely a great investment, if you resume looks terrible at the moment.

Conclusion

My resume wasn’t looking good. It isn’t extraordinary great now, but I think I’ve improved it significantly. Main things I did to it, was rewriting it in more concise and descriptive manner, fixing mistakes by hiring a proofreading company, and changing the styling.

Hopefully, this post can be of some help to make your resume look better. I would be really happy to know if it helped.

If you have suggestions on further improvements to my CV, I would really appreciate it.

Update April 2016

There is more to having professionally looking CV / Resume. You should consider having market oriented resume versions.

For instance, described above two pages CV with a photo is common for EU, but it is not a great thing for US market.

In US it is more appropriate to have 1 page resume without any personal information.

As a result I created US oriented one page resume.