Spectacular sunset/beach view from the hotel in Lincoln City, Oregon – August 2011

Spectacular sunset/beach view from the hotel in Lincoln City, Oregon – August 2011

I’m far more of a software techie than a hardware techie. I pick computers for practical reasons rather than specs and to me, a lot of the specs look like mumbo-jumbo.
With this purchase, I finally understand the hype of solid state drives. They are simply fast. My example is that if I close Google Chrome with several tabs open, including Pandora, I will hear music playing out of the speakers within immeasurable seconds.
If it helps you, here are the specs on my unit:
The product description on Amazon.com suggests that it will be “love at first sight”. That’s about what I’m feeling right now.
There were three choices for this model on Amazon.com:
I opted for the 256 GB SSD so that I can dual boot Ubuntu and Windows while still maintaining sufficient hard drive space and the higher speed processor because with my last laptop (a Fujitsu S7110 purchased in August of 2007), I opted for the lowest processor possible and then I kept it around in active use for over four years, which ended up being quite painful.
Cool little features:
The main complaints that I’ve seen on Amazon circle around wireless, trackpad, and keyboard size. I have had zero wireless problems in my apartment or at my parents’ house.
The trackpad definitely took some getting used to. I am primarily a trackpad fan, but I can be converted to the ThinkPad “stupid red thing” as I like to say in technical terms if necessary like I was with my Lenovo ThinkPad X200 at work. The Zenbook’s trackpad is a pretty good size and I find that right-clicking takes some effort since it’s so far off the home row, but just tapping for single-clicks is fine. It’s also weird to right-click because there isn’t really much of a button outline at the bottom of the trackpad.
The keyboard is different than a normal one, but I’m pretty used to mobile laptop keyboards at this point between my old Fujitsu and my X series ThinkPad from work. I am a touch typer and I have minimal problems with the keyboard. Sometimes I don’t hit the ‘o’ key very effectively and have to hit it more forcefully, but my fingers can generally sense when I made a mistake, just like I can on any other keyboard. The home/end and page down/up buttons are a little annoying, but I had a similar problem with my old Fujitsu and I’ve definitely got my keyboard shortcuts with them down pat now.
I had a chance to test out the battery life this past weekend. I think I had it running on battery for over 4-5 hours without worrying about the state of the battery with a reasonable level of brightness and two browsers and Microsoft Excel running. That seems more than sufficient to me.
I haven’t had any problems so far with the laptop getting warm – it’s fine without a lapdesk. It also hasn’t been particularly noisy yet.
I have now had this machine for about a month. It is a great machine for what I wanted and I am keeping it. It was most definitely love at first sight.
I recently attended a career fair to recruit soon-to-be college graduates for my company. Having attended a university where it was drilled into us from the very first week of our first year of university how to write a resume, I found some of the same issues with the resumes that my school told us very specifically to not do or to do right off the bat.
Don’ts
First of all, there are a number of pieces of information that you shouldn’t list on your resume due to legal reasons. If we can’t legally ask you the question before you accept an offer, then you should not put it on your resume. This is a bit of a grey area once we do have the information, but we are supposed to ignore it if you give it to us. Some companies might not and then quietly just not hire you, saying you didn’t meet their hiring bar or some similar garbage. I know in other places, such as countries in Europe, it is commonplace and in most cases, required, to list these pieces of information on your resume, but employment law is different in North America.
Immigration information is also a big no-no. That being said, you should definitely ask the recruiter if the company sponsors for work visas and respond with which country you hold citizenship from if asked, but do not put that on your resume. Your resume is a document that will live in the company’s offices for a long time and in some cases, forever.
Some general tips:
What should you do?
Now that we’ve covered what you shouldn’t do, what should you put on your resume? How should you organize it?
I suggest that you use the following sections:
1. Header
At the top of your resume, you need to list the following pieces of information, mostly so that the potential employer can get in contact with you:
2. Objective
Personally, I’ve never used an objective statement when I’ve applied for a software job. Since I would list my expected graduation on my resume and my year, term, and program in the header section of my resume, it seemed irrelevant. If you do include one, you should keep it simple. This is a good example:
I am looking for a challenging software development position, starting full-time in January 2012.
A statement like this is especially key if you’re not a Computer Science or Software Engineering major, but you want to do software development or if it isn’t immediately clear from your resume when you are available to start working.
3. Education
Where this section should go is highly debatable. I think that once you’ve been working for a certain length of time, it should go after your work experience section. Others think it should always go on the top. I actually moved mine down after the work experience section after only my first co-op term. I would definitely not recommend that approach for everyone, but it worked for me. If you’re applying for jobs at a career fair at your university, I think that you should put the education section at the top because it makes it easier for the potential employer to find it.
In this section, you should list for each degree:
That means that you don’t need to and should not list your high school name, when you started and graduated, and any relevant courses you took. Unless you did something extraordinary, such as:
After a certain amount of work experience and/or time has passed, I would almost move these tidbits of information about your high school days to your Interests section.
4. Technical Skills
I used to have this section on my resume, but I don’t anymore. It was basically just a list of all of the different types of technologies that I had used and it just magnified like crazy. I still list this information on my resume, but I adjusted some of the bullet points from my jobs, like in these examples:
I feel like the above statements are stronger than just listing various competencies because they show how I used them instead of just listing that I’ve used them. That being said, every employer is different and some will care more about the specific technologies that you have used than others will. The important part is that you list the technologies you have used somewhere on your resume, not necessarily where or how you list them.
5. Relevant Work Experience
I would say that when you are just graduating, you should label this “Relevant Work Experience” to indicate that it is a subset of your work experience that the potential employer will care about. List any and all job-like positions that you have held related to software. For each job, have a heading with the employer name, job title, and start and end dates. For an internship, provide up to four bullet points describing your responsibilities and the languages and tools you used to do your job.
If you have no or little relevant work experience, you can have a “Work Experience” section at the bottom of your resume which indicates jobs like tutoring, camp counselor, and working at McDonald’s. Do not list more than one or two bullet points for each job. If you were a manager or crew trainer at McDonald’s, list bullet points about your responsibilities in that role, but if you were just a basic crew person, you don’t need to list any bullet points unless you feel like you did something special or really awesome.
After you have a certain amount of work experience, you can drop the word “Relevant” in the section heading. You could even consider dropping the word “Work” as well and just call the section “Experience”. On my resume, this section is definitely the longest section on my resume and longer than the rest of my resume (Projects, Education, and Interests) put together.
6. Relevant Projects
The same discussion on the word “Relevant” can apply to this section heading. I would say that if you have zero to little relevant work experience, this is going to be the most important section on your resume. Try to list one or two bullet points per project. If it was a long project, you can list more, but no more than four is really necessary. List a name for each project, dates, who you worked with, and a website URL if there is a relevant one.
Even with over three years of work experience, I have a “Projects” section on my resume. It’s still relevant because I do code outside of work. I use different tools and technologies for the coding I do outside of work and it’s a different type of experience, but I feel that it is still relevant.
7. Awards and Scholarships
My rule on this section is to not list anything that is more than three to five years out of date. Most of my bullet points were from when I graduated from high school and/or entrance scholarships to university. I removed this section entirely in my third year of university because I felt that it was out-of-date. If it is not out-of-date for you, then I would keep it until you leave university.
8. Interests
A lot of people say that you shouldn’t have an Interests section on your resume. My view is that you should, but you should keep it short and to the point – no more than one to two printed lines per bullet point. This section is a small way to show that you are an interesting person outside of your software development skills. By the time the resume reader gets to this section, he/she should have already decided whether or not to grant you an interview, but the question of team fit is important as well.
I used to list all of the different ways that I was involved in curling on my resume as separate bullet points, including playing competitively in high school, coaching in the juniors’ program, as well as the other sports that I actively participated in. Now I list three things:
Conclusion
Your resume is the tool that you have to sell yourself to potential employers to gain an interview. If you lie on your resume, we will be able to figure it out if we interview you, so you just waste both of our time. Don’t sell yourself short, but don’t exaggerate too much. Appear confident.
Organize the sections on your resume in the order that the potential employer would be most likely to care about. Three years of work experience? Work experience first. Just graduating from university? Education first. No relevant work experience? Relevant projects before work experience. If you aren’t a Computer Science or Software Engineering major, you need to have sections on your resume that prove that you are looking for and qualified for a software development position if that’s what you’re looking for.
If your university has a career center, take advantage of it. Do a resume exchange with friends to get feedback on your resume. If you are looking for a technical role, but most of your friends aren’t, you can still ask them to check your grammar and spelling.
Disclaimer: Some of these tips may be relevant to people in other fields, but I can’t guarantee that. All of these tips are my opinion and are based on bad resumes that I have seen and the resumes of me and my friends who have a track record of obtaining good software development positions.
2011+2012 -> 2013
2012 was by far my busiest year since finishing my undergrad at Waterloo. So busy that I’ve completely ignored this blog and didn’t get around to posting my 2011 in Review post.
2011
I last opened the draft in December of 2011, so I’m going to assume this list is complete.
2012
2013
Here’s to a less busy 2013!
Those three should about solve the problem. Oh, and enjoying some of my vacation days closer to home. Maybe I’ll post some photos from my trips. I might even write some blog posts.
Happy new year, everyone!