The Software Engineer’s Guide to Ditching Your Resume

So your mind is made up. It’s time to move on from your current place of employment. The reasons this time may be different but the result is the same: you’re on the hunt for something better. Regardless of whether it was the long hours, the lack of challenging work or feeling like your efforts at work just aren’t making the impact you want to see, you’re back to square one. Time to dig up your hard drive, dust off Microsoft Word and do the same thing you’ve been doing since your first job out of high school: update your resume.

Granted, it’s easier to do now, since you’ve filled out your base of experience beyond the completely mundane — at least stuff like “Shift Leader at Bob’s Burgers” dropped off the bottom of your resume long ago. However, that three-word phrase, “update your resume”, is still among the most dreaded in existence for software engineers.

Worse yet, you know that updating your resume is really just the beginning — you also best brush up on how to write an algorithm to count the ways to make change out from coins, endless fizzbuzz iterations or other meaningless dribble from your academic days before you even knew how to do 99% of the things that companies actually pay you for.

You’re a codesmith not a wordsmith, why should you have to subject yourself to the torture of trying to write sales-ready spin about your own career and skills, when the market for engineers has never been better? The answer is actually pretty simple; if after years as a software engineer you’ve found yourself in this situation yet again then you’ve been playing the wrong game.

The key to depreciating your resume is to have a public reputation that clearly positions yourself as the expert solution to the engineering problems companies are facing. The way to do that is to add value to as many people as you can.

Building a professional reputation moves you away from the commodity focused outreach of recruiting agencies as “just another developer” that needs a resume and into the eyes of decision making technical leadership as an indispensable resource to the challenges their company is facing. When your work speaks for itself, you no longer need a resume.

Think of the “top 3” engineers in the field that you admire most. Maybe they’re someone you’ve seen speak at conferences; maybe they’re someone whose books you’ve devoured, and then passionately recommended to friends and colleagues. Maybe they’re your boss. These engineers probably have a solid reputation, one that enters rooms before they do. They most certainly have opinions that elicit respect and trust. You can bet that they’re all almost certainly afforded all the opportunities given to those hyper-talented, hyper-productive individuals who have seemingly conquered the field.

What’s the key difference between you and this person? Let me guess what just went through your mind:

These people are experts, and I’m not.

Yet.

— — — — — — —

I’ve had the fortunate opportunity to work with hundreds of incredible engineers while creating and running the alumni community at Hack Reactor. Over the course of just over 3 years that I’ve been involved with the school, I’ve had a bird’s eye view into what fast-tracked software engineering career progression looks like and it has been fascinating to watch.

I’ve watched hundreds of engineers go from first lines of code to working at the world’s’ tech giants. I have also watched dozens go from first job to founding CTOs of well funded startups, speakers at major conferences, technical authors and core contributors on major open source projects. This second group of engineers don’t have to apply for jobs, work with spammy recruiting agencies, update their resumes or practice interview problems- because the best jobs aren’t posted on websites and have a way of finding you if you show them where you’re hiding in the haystack.

Infact one friend of mine was invited from a cold e-mail to Costa Rica to spend a week with an elite startup team as his “interview”. Despite the beachfront digs, tropical weather and unlimited piña coladas, he turned the lucrative offer down to take his dream job as a Senior Engineering position at a top EdTech company where he negotiated a completely work from home arrangement so he could spend more time with his family. Another started speaking at meet-ups, contributing to open-source and was eventually invited to speak at the premier conference for the community. She now works on the core team at Google.

The question I always asked myself after witnessing one meteoric rise after another: Where was the starting point to their success?

The answer was almost always the same thing; each had built a system that enabled good opportunities to find them, all while dramatically improving their skills along the way- living on the edge of the professional growth afforded them by each new opportunity. Each had a reputation that enabled opportunity to find them. Each had eventually positioned themselves as an expert in what they do.

What is an Expert Anyway?

The reality is that the chasm between you and esteemed experts may be grand, but that’s because you’re comparing where you are now to where they’ve been for years, if not decades. They started somewhere, most likely either where you are now with your current domain knowledge or skills or even earlier. The key is that they started and kept growing in their trade.

Conventional thinking has created an odd concept in the career landscape: a reputation destination, an expertise endpoint, which everyone has silently agreed to crawl toward at a predefined rate, with an expectation that it will really only be for a chosen few. We’re told that becoming an expert takes an immense amount of time, work, 10,000 hours worth of dues-paying. When I saw dozens of my friends trod that path to public expert in under three years, speaking in front of thousands of their far more seasoned peers on the main stage at premier conferences, I realized that it wasn’t just a few select gifted people but that there was a replicable way to hack the process of becoming an expert. You don’t have all of the requisite credentials. You just simply need “enough”. There is no X axis of time spend in the space to be far enough up the Y axis to qualify. There are no expert police out there checking to make sure you’re not cutting in line. The surprising truth I’ve discovered is that your future expert peers actually want you to join them, and you’d be shocked at how much they’ll help you to get there.

So then why do we stop short and fall back in line? Why do we convince ourselves that the herd sticks together because their way works. It does work, just not for the flock but the shepherd. In reality, the herd sticks together because they don’t know what else to do. There’s comfort in following the recipe. This must be the path to my destination, because this is how everyone else is doing it, and everyone else can’t be wrong…. right?

One of the best moves you can make in your career is to actively work towards depreciating your resume by creating a body of work that speaks for itself and is publicly visible, so that the best opportunities can find you. I’m not talking about shameless self promotion, we all hate that. I’m talking about sharing the value you create to help the most people possible, whether that’s with your team in your projects at work or with the world through open source contributions, public speaking or blogging.

This is Part 1 that will focus on building a public facing professional reputation. Part 2 will discuss building your internal reputation inside your company- a key component to negotiating a raise- but most of the content in this post is applicable.

Defining Your Niche

The simple reality is that nobody is an expert at everything. In business they say: “The Riches are in the Niches”. When you hone in on one specific target market you can understand their needs and provide value better than anyone who is trying to be all things for all people.

The same is true for you when it comes to building your professional reputation. As a software engineer, you probably already have your niche of specific technologies that you enjoy working with or that you are the go-to person for on your team. When it comes to building your professional brand, you have to start somewhere specific, you have to embrace a community and become a part of it and add value it it. However, that does not mean that you have to stay there for good. Technologies evolve. People, communities and organizations change. You will naturally evolve and change as well but the value you add and leave behind will come along with you.

Your objective when building a brand is to get yourself associated with a niche such that when one thinks of a technology, your name is on the shortlist. You’re the React girl or the Rails guy. The goal is to try lots of things, and figure out what you both enjoy doing intrinsically and an area to become a domain expert. There is no one right approach. Writing books works amazing for some people. Contributing to open-source is a game changer for others. This section contains various step-by-step processes that you can follow to try out what works for you and then run with that. Your goal is to become known for “X” so that the perceived value of being an expert is conferred upon you and opportunities start to come inbound instead of outbound. It doesn’t matter if you use some clever brand like “mixergy” or your own name, what matters is that you own it and that you’re consistent.

In our brains there can be a perception that those in experts circuit of technology communities are like exclusive clubs, with a guest list and a full-time bouncer. No one is standing outside the community conference saying, “Nope, we’re good, we have enough experts. Maybe come back later when a spot opens up.” If anything, the people in these communities who are perceived as experts want to bring more people in. More brains to interact with = more creativity = more productivity. A friend of mine, Lukas Ruebbelke said of being perceived as an expert, “As the person near the top, I’m not trying to protect my domain. I can’t think of everything all by myself. I want people up there with me.” There are no barriers to entry to any of these communities; you just have to start doing the work and putting it out there. If you’re willing step up to the plate and contribute, you will be welcomed into the with enthusiasm.

Below I will detail out the five main ways to do build your public professional brand, going to go into some detail on each, but just for quick reference:

• Open-source contributing
• Blogging
• Speaking
• Writing and publishing
• Effective networking

These are the ways I’ve seen people leverage their skills to make massive advancements, and the key is “start don’t stop”. You don’t have to be super-productive or excellent at all components, but visibility and productivity in each will stimulate that snowball effect for your reputation, and pretty soon you’ll be sought after without any effort on your part.

Contributing to Open-Source

Making meaningful open source contributions is the most obvious and useway way to add value to a your niche community. You get to test your ideas, you get feedback on your code from real people, and you get a specific measure of how good your ideas are, simply by looking at your pull requests. From a much broader perspective, it’s an instant web presence if you don’t have a blog or a website. It’s an example of real, consistent work product that simply can’t be matched in impact, not even by a resume.

I’m assuming in this post that that you’re already familiar with the basics of how to contribute to open-source projects, use version control, push changes, etc. but if you need a refresher there is a great course on the nuts and bolts of contributing to open-source by Kent C. Dodds on Egghead.io. As such, I’m not going to teach you how to use GitHub here. What I really want to do is impress upon you how effective consistent, meaningful participation in the open-source community can be to building your reputation and accessing the secret job market.

One of my good friends is Scott Moss. When Scott was first starting out as a software engineer several years ago he organically discovered the value of building a professional brand and started with a relatively simple Angular animations library called ng-fx that solved the pain people were experiencing at the time. His first aim was to solve a problem for the community and provide value and in so doing he was able to put his name out there and supply the industry with a quick reference point for his work, a validation of his ability and expertise. His repo started trending — it wasn’t anything particularly extraordinary, but he was consistent and productive, and got respectable traffic. Eventually Scott started speaking at meet-ups, doing more open-source, running workshops and now has a great senior job and speaks regularly at the largest conferences in the community. Scott is an expert and all he had to do was start small and add value to others. I have dozens of other friends that I’ve watched first hand take a very similar path, from unknown to known in no time flat.

That’s just one example of how you can leverage open-source to expand your network, and it’s a good look at how relentlessly putting your ideas, work, and name out in the ecosystem for all to see and use can only ever be a good thing.

The fear of losing something we have is typically much more influential in driving our motivations than the potential of gaining something new. We fear that we’ll lose the respect of our peers, our reputation or even self-esteem if it turns out that we didn’t really know what we were talking about once presenting to other professionals. Maybe you don’t know what you’re doing (you probably do), but who cares, there really is nothing to lose. The reality is that open-source software contributors are typically some of the most helpful and welcoming engineers in the industry. Not only do those already contributing understand what it’s like to fear being judged as they started where you are, they by the very nature of how the community is organized want you to join and will contribute tons of their otherwise very expensive time.

Participating in a the open-source community and collaborating with people in your industry, indicates to others that the work, not the credit, is what’s most important to you. You’re contributing for contributions sake. This is an attractive quality, and indicates to people you might want in your network that you’re not hoarding your knowledge; that you’re approachable and generous with your time, and that that generosity might extend to advice or value they may need to draw from you. If software engineering is a society, you want to do everything you can to indicate that you’re a reliable, contributing member of that society.

Blogging

I know, I know — you just want to code. But, hear me out.

Writing is hard. Written communication is a skill that’s incredibly time-consuming to practice. When it comes down to it, most people feel their time is better spent actually building cool stuff rather than writing about how and why they’re doing it. They’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Writing may be hard, but reading is something that everyone you want to influence does every single day, either in one long go during their lunch break, or in dribs and drabs throughout the day. They read blogs on their phones, computers, tablets, they listen to audiobooks while driving, they read themselves to sleep with the yellow-light filter on their laptops. They’re constantly discovering new content because people are constantly sharing new content.

Sharing your knowledge about what you’re learning with others is one of the best ways to start building a personal brand. Blogging is typically the easiest way to do that. I personally wanted a website that could serve as information about who I am, what I do and what my expertise are that I could also leverage as a blogging and ecommerce platform. There is a huge amount of value to putting it all on one domain and sharing the SEO and traffic benefits. You might be tempted to craft your own solutions from scratch, but I personally recommend leveraging the robust community of CMS platforms that already exist rather than reinventing the wheel yourself. Before you dive into your own custom build that may or may not save you time and give you control, realize that it might not always be you managing all of the content forever and leveraging a traditional CMS will enable non-technical people to administer your content on your behalf.

To write valuable content, you do not have to be a great writer; you simply have to supply your audience with value. However, the trick isn’t necessarily getting eyes on your article; it’s keeping eyes on it past the first few sentences. Grab your audience with upfront value. This is called a “hook” — you’ve heard of this, because it’s the same term used in songs, TV, novels, basically any content of which the purpose is to reel in viewership. A hook can be anything, but it should introduce the solution to a problem, or ask a new question. Find a story that perfectly elucidates the concept you’re trying to communicate, and lead with that and your audience is going to sit up and listen.

When you think about it, a well-stocked blog is like an internet-based conference where the only speaker is you. Make yourself a reference point in the industry with a blog that’s diverse, informative, and easily searchable. Set yourself a goal to blog on a regular basis, it doesn’t even have to be that frequent to help position yourself as an authority on your niche subject. A major sticking point when it comes to blogging is coming up with content. It doesn’t have to be revolutionary. If you’re searching for an answer to a problem, you find an answer on Stack Overflow, research it a bit deeper and write a blog post on the subject. You could also write a step-by-step step tutorial of a process that you solved at work recently (remember: it doesn’t have to be earth-shattering to be valuable!).

If you don’t have a personal website/blog you can get great reach by publishing on Medium and leveraging their network effects. Every time you publish a new post, sprinkle it around the internet on sites like Reddit and Hacker News, where if they make it to the front page based on the value of the content you can see tens of thousands of visitors to your content in a single day and the effect lasts for years because other people are now aware of your content and may start backlinking to it, which also raises your rank in google search results and drives even more traffic. The more eyes that land on your content, the more it’ll get shared, and your name, credentials, and GitHub will get shared along with it. Yes — some people are going to read it, roll their eyes, and say, “Well, duh.” Guess what? For every one of them, there are five people in whose eyes you just became an expert. You’re not writing for the know-it-alls. You’re writing for an audience whose knowledge you’re building from the ground up.

I’m in a weekly mastermind with a friend of mine who started his path to expert by blogging about the things he was learning on the job. He was fairly new to the community and had fears of putting himself out there like the rest of us, but he just posted anyway. His first several posts when largely unnoticed but he kept improving on the job and sharing the things he was learning with others until he wrote a post about Angular that people found to be valuable, they shared it with others and it put his name on the map in the community. He kept adding value, contributing to open-source, teaching what he knew on his blog and eventually started getting invited to speak at conferences and podcasts, to become the founding CTO of a funded startup and recently has been able to teach nearly 20k developers through his free course at reactjsprogram. Through all the content he creates he focuses on adding value first and all other things have stemmed from that.

Everybody that you view as an expert starts somewhere, and value add blogging is a fantastic place to start.

Speaking

I was talking to a friend of mine recently about how quickly someone can raise their professional profile with a single speaking gig, and he responded: “Yeah, I really need to start doing that.” Within a few months he started putting himself out there through is already well established network from adding massive value in the open-source community and was soon enough speaking at the major conferences and getting even more opportunities to come his way.

Why is the conference circuit so neglected by so many software engineers? Engineers certainly attend plenty of conferences, and it’s plain to anyone in attendance that the speaker at any particular presentation has a certain cache, a certain sheen of expertise and acclaim, simply by the fact that they’re up at the podium. It shouldn’t be mysterious to any of us how to earn some of that cache for ourselves. Clearly, your professional brand would benefit from getting up on that podium too.

This is the step in your system that has probably the biggest perception gap between how difficult you think it is to do, and how difficult it actually is to do.

Here’s how it works: conference organizers want to put on a show that is valuable, memorable, and discussion-worthy. They want their attendees to go back home and tell their work colleagues that they saw a great talk on XYZ, and learned some valuable piece of information that’s going to enable them to level up at work — or, at the very least, build something really cool.

So the front-door of speaking at events/conferences is through a Request for Proposal process. Another way into the conference scene is to simply ask — and by “ask”, I mean submit a topic via a Request for Proposal process. What could it possibly hurt to send a couple topic articles to some of conferences you can find in the upcoming calendar year? Even if you’re not selected, your name is noted, and associated with the content you put out there. You might even get discussed with their network, further expanding your notice in the industry. Make it your goal that, if someone asks the question, “Hey, have you heard of [your name]?”, the answer is a definite “yes”. Even if they don’t ask you to speak that year, your name enters the landscape of potential future speakers and contributors.

The reality is that the primary channels that conference and event organizers find high-quality speakers is to use the advice of their own networks to ask for suggestions and vet potential options. If you’re consistently participating and adding value to the community through open-source, blogging on the topic and speaking at local meetups, you’re exponentially more likely to get an invite. People like helpful people, and they like being helpful in return. And on the organizer side, people trust people their friends recommend. It’s as simple as that. The standard reimbursement for speakers of airfare and hotel if the conference is not where you live is an added perk to travel for free.

When I speak with engineers looking to break into the speaker circuit, I always recommend that they supply conference organizers with as much validating data as possible. You want to be able to point to external validation, to a roomful of people who have already heard you speak, and say, “It’s not just me telling you what I have to say is valuable — all these people thought it was valuable, too.” The easiest place to start is to find a local meetup group and to message the organizer with a brief proposal of what you’d like to speak on to the group, you don’t have to wait to be asked because that day is unlikely to come on it’s own. Meetup organizers are doing exactly what you’re doing, building a brand and network. They are always looking for more speakers and you can typically get a speaking gig at the local meet-up for the technology of your choice by simply submitting a proposal. If you struggling to gain traction, try a smaller or more accessible group that is likely having a harder time finding speakers, then leverage that experience to get into progressively larger venues.

Even a learning lunch or brown bag with twenty half-distracted engineers in attendance will act as a legitimizing element, something you can point to when conference organizers are looking for evidence of your expertise. Start small, and build your value through a multitude of channels.

Yeah, you might be asking, but what would I even talk about?

It sounds kind of like cheating, but you do not have to know everything there is to know about a subject to give a great talk on it. All information is new to someone. You might think that you have to figure out some mystery, solve some problem, in order to deliver value on a chosen topic; this absolutely isn’t the case. The simple act of sitting and listening to someone deliver engaging, well-organized information is valuable to conference attendees. You’ll have true experts sitting in your audience who are still deriving value from your talk. When it comes down to it, it’s useful to hear people break down concepts.

If you’re delivering great content but you’re an uninteresting presence, you’ll probably still get a few conference invitations — but if you’re delivering great content, and you’re dynamite up at that podium, you’re basically gold to conference organizers. The opportunities to speak will multiply steadily without you going after a single one. So, get comfortable with public speaking. Do whatever you have to do to get good at it, or, at the very least, not bad at it. Practice. Talk in front of anyone who will listen.

Writing

One more way to lock in the perception of your expertise is to write a book. There’s something so permanent and real about a book.

Think of all of this — your mindset, your system, your work product — as your career portfolio. Just like a designer who has a portfolio full of hard evidence that their services are high-quality and sought after, you’re building a portfolio that proves your value through as many channels as possible. The great thing about your portfolio, compared to that of an artist, is that your art is intrinsically shareable. Other engineers are going to pull and fork your code. People are going to post your blog articles to their social networks. Your conference talks are going to be filmed and put up on YouTube, and from there, shared to as many sites that require content pertaining to your topic.

A book is simply the next step in building this portfolio, the next level in confirming your legitimacy as an expert in your subject. A book with your name on it instantly creates credibility, visibility, and perceived expertise. I’ve seen developers go from regular developer jobs to constant conference speaking and being offered CTO positions, simply because they have a book to refer to and use to boost their profile in the industry. I can think of more than a few peers in my own communities who have leveraged a book — or multiple books — into large-scale opportunities. One has leveraged his catalog into the title of Technical Fellow at a major software company, and maintains a simple website housing his book titles, his online courses, his blogs, his GitHub projects, recordings of his talks.

Ironically, book publishing used to be an industry where the made-up rules really did prevent you from participating — that “exclusive club” mentality was actually a real-world obstacle. Because it’s expensive to print and distribute paper books, and publishing houses used to hold the keys to the kingdom, if they rejected your manuscript, your book didn’t get read, period. That’s no longer the case. The advent of e-books and self-publishing means that anyone, literally anyone, can produce a book and sell it on Amazon and iBooks, promote it through their networks, and distribute it through the seemingly infinite collection of media channels that is the internet. It used to be that you had to get permission to be a book author. Now, there’s no one stopping you. My favorite book on self publishing books is Nathan Barry’s Authority.

The reality is that the bar to writing a book is way, way lower than we imagine. The perceived vs. actual ratio of effort to value is strangely large. We assume that to deliver value, we have to do something either unique or extraordinary; in reality, there’s immediate utility to simple concepts explained thoroughly and well, even if it’s the fifth time the reader has seen those concepts. After all, there’s a reason our collective shorthand for expertise is “He wrote the book on _______”. There’s simply no greater tool in boosting your professional reputation.

Effective Networking

Effective networking isn’t a meaningless exchanges of business cards, endless LinkedIn requests, or awkward requests to “keep me in your back pocket”. You can build a better network organically, through consistent, valuable work without ever having to go through the motions of traditional networking because it’s “good for you”.

If you can add value to someone’s life or work, no matter how small — and especially if you do it while asking for nothing in return — you’ve just added another connection to your network that is going to repay that value to you in the future. When I say networking, I mean it in the computer science way. You’re creating a link, a channel, through which information and value are going to flow in both directions. The network is based upon adding value into a community, and receiving value in return.

Instead of thinking of this as simply doing favors that will be repaid, think of it as an economy all its own. You’re building social currency every time you help someone out, and currency circulates, just like in any other economy. Set aside time in your schedule simply for contributing value into your various communities, with no expectation of return. Actually write it into your calendar; block out a couple hours a week for solving other people’s problems, or providing useful advice. Far better than a collection of business cards, people remember a real solution you provided to an issue they were having, or a half hour you spent on the phone with them giving them your take on a roadblock they were up against.

The quality of these interactions is far more important than the quantity. You may interface with over a thousand people per week, depending on the types of communities you’re a part of; your aim is to make as many of these interactions as possible as high-quality as possible, with the value supplied squarely to them, not to you. Focus on giving. People will want to give back. You increase the quality of the connections in your network by continued interactions over time. Most networking doesn’t work because it’s shallow. When you’re focused on adding value, it’s easy to add someone into your network in a meaningful way because when you think of something that might be useful, you send it over and check in on how they’re doing.

Even if it never comes back around, it’s still worth it. There’s distinct life value to you in just being a generous person. It seems like we’re constantly fed the idea — mostly through movies — that nice guys finish last, that to get ahead in your career you need to focus on yourself, and carefully weigh any move to evaluate what it’ll bring you. In the the engineering world, this just simply isn’t how it works. Or, maybe it works that way on Wall Street; in open communities like software, it’s not how it works. The tech industry is built on the foundations of collaboration.

Bringing It All Together

If you take one thing away from this post, I want it to be the belief that you already have all the tools you need to make your goals happen, fast. There is no bouncer letting VIPs in and keeping people like you out. What’s more, the Expert Club is inclusive and generous; they want you there with them. They’re waiting for you to join them.

Just start. That’s all. Maybe you need to see results happen before your self-perception can be reset; so, start doing the work. Set aside an hour a day and produce some content. No matter what that content is, put it out there. Get it seen; construct the reference point that will lead people back to you, like breadcrumbs. You have nothing, literally nothing, to lose by doing this. You have an entire career to gain.