Stop Putting Every Programming Language On Your Developer Resume
Your resume is the most important thing when searching for a job, not only in engineering. It’s your business card and determines the first impression that a company gets from you. A good resume is already half the work towards being invited for an interview, while a bad resume can lose you the race before it even started.
There are a lot of different ways to create your resume and in itself is a skill on its own. If you look for them, there will be an enormous amount of resources available that will teach you how to create an attention attractive resume.
This ranges from aspects like how to organise your resume, what kind of information to put onto it, how to be efficient with your space, what to prioritise, and the list goes on. If you want to increase the odds of landing a job, it’s definitely recommended to check out some of those resources that are available to you.
In the field of engineering, creating your resume is also an extremely important task before you can start serious job hunting. But arranging your resume properly is a very difficult task. There is so much information that you want to put onto it, don’t want to leave out, or feel like is a must to include.
Obviously, you’ll include information that is relevant to you, but that will be different for everyone. Maybe you graduated from an engineering or tech-related study. Maybe you don’t have a tech degree but have a different form of experience with engineering. Maybe you worked a side job during last year’s summer. Maybe you have personal projects that you work on regularly. Maybe you have your own engineering side hustle. Maybe you worked on an open-source project. Maybe you really honed your expertise in a certain framework or technology. Or maybe you don’t have specific experience yet.
You probably get the gist already: there’s so much information to put on your resume, but only so little room to fit everything in.
For this reason, it’s extremely important to be thoughtful of everything that you put onto your resume. All the information that you include should be relevant, attention attracting, and interesting for the recruiter. Otherwise, you’re basically wasting precious space that could’ve been used to tell something different about yourself.
Over the past years, I’ve come across a lot of tips and trends about engineering resumes. Some people claim that there are certain projects that you should do and include in your resume. Others claim that boot camps are the way to go, or that including as many technologies or libraries is the way to go.
All of them have their benefits and drawbacks, and in the end, it’s all about being thoughtful about what you include in your resume. But there’s one trend that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
For some reason, certain developers like to put every programming language they know on their resumes. It doesn’t matter whether they have 10 years of experience with it, they’ve only worked through one Udemy tutorial or created one “Hello World” project in that language. If they know about it, they are obsessed with including it in their resume.
In these scenarios, listing all the programming languages isn’t even an actual reflection of your capabilities. Although this might impress the recruiter at first sight and allow you to start the interviewing process, the success is very unlikely to last long.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone. Credits where credit’s due, some people have mastered several programming languages or are experienced in all of them. Listing all of them would be a proper reflection of their skillset, but still, there’s not much reason to list all of them.
There are several reasons for this.
The first is that technical skills, especially programming languages, are more often than not non-negotiable for any job opportunity. If a job description states that it’s looking for a Java developer, then the minimum requirement is that you know Java.
If you’re not confident in your Java skills, then it’s very unlikely that you will land the job unless they’re specifically looking for an entry-level developer. In that case, putting Java as a skill on your resume will help you get the interview, but nothing beyond that. Is it really worth it then?
Another reason is the fact that there’s really no need to list more than the necessary set of programming languages. Let’s take the job opportunity looking for a Java developer again.
When I apply, does it sound impressive to include experience with Python? Perhaps. Is it relevant for the job? Not really, they’re looking for a Java developer. Whether I know Python is very unlikely to affect my odds of getting the job as the only requirement is familiarity with Java. So what’s the point of including it then?
Lastly, there is so much more interesting information to put on your resume compared to all the programming languages that you know. Related to the previous points, the benefits of a long list of programming languages are limited, but the drawbacks are still present.
Instead of filling your resume with irrelevant information, you could’ve used that precious space to tell the recruiter more about yourself. Information that could’ve really differentiated you from the competition or highlighted some of the interesting things that you did.
All of that would have significantly higher odds of impressing the recruiter and making you land the job. In the end, that’s what we’re trying to achieve with our resume right?
If you liked this article or it was useful to you, consider checking out the other entries in The Junior Developer Handbook publication, my Twitter for future updates, or some of my other programming and junior related articles on Medium:
