Move projects above work experience?
Despite having a side project with 4k MAU, I'm not getting any interviews.
I am concerned it might be because my current job which is listed first is more QA and not SWE is unimpressive and the recruiters see that and gloss over it.
Also in the 2 interviews I got the recruiter/HM tends to overindex on the QA work instead of my project and other more impressive SWE experience
My work experiences #2 and #3 are also way more impressive than my current job (which is why I worked on side projects)
But I am worried that because my projects are listed all the way at the bottom the recruiter doesnt even see it and I get passed over.
But also i'm worried putting the project over experience makes it look weird
Questions:
-
Can I put my current work experience all the way at the bottom and my work experience #2 and #3 above? (I know typically people say to sort it form most recent, but in my case my current job is working against me).
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Is 4k MAU (measured by number of unique visitors) impressive enough? or do I need more in this economy? I've maxed out my organic methods and the only bottleneck is more inorganic advertising via social media and praying to SEO gods
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Is there maybe a way I can list the project under work experience but kind of say that its not a paid gig? I dont want to get in trouble at work or elsewhere by making it seem like its a paid thing or I am working 2 jobs or something. This is just a solo completely free side project but i put in 800+ commits
It would look something like this
Work Experience
Website Name Date
Software Engineer
- Built and scaled as a solo free side project: 4k+ MAU, 25k total visits, .....
Discussion
(8 comments)- 1
19 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroWork experience is king 👑, so it's better to optimize those. If I had to put a number on it, it's 2x - 5x more valuable than building a side project. This means that if your work made you build a feature with 100k users, it's 2 to 5 times more impressive than building a side project with 100k users. This is why side projects are particularly relevant for the many junior engineers who have effectively 0 work experience (and there will be even more of these folks in this market sadly).
Your situation is very different as you have 3 existing blurbs of work experience. Your time is best spent on how to optimize those. For your current job, can you spin it so it doesn't come off as too QA-ey?
QA is a huge spectrum:
- Primitive - Manual QA. Literally just getting spreadsheets of test cases and clicking through things manually. Not only is this draining work that doesn't teach you much, it's not respected by hiring managers. You can put "QA Engineer" on your resume, but most won't consider you an engineer.
- Advanced - Automation. You are writing infrastructure like CI/CD pipelines and integration testing frameworks, using code to assure the quality of a product at scale. At Meta, there are many engineers who do this, and they aren't called QA engineers. They are software engineers just like I was back at Meta, because they are building meaningful, complex, important software that just happens to be laser-focused on quality.
Many QA engineers fall somewhere in between. As long as you aren't entirely on the primitive, manual side, you can highlight the automation you did and make yourself seem more like a proper software engineer.
You can even change your job title:
QA Engineer -> Quality Infrastructure Engineer
QA Engineer -> Automation Engineer
- 019 days agoMid-level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
I am unfortunately in a position where a lot of the work is manual QA. There is some automation of things but it's honestly not a lot. I literally am blocked from having access to any real codebase and I need to wait atleast 5 months before I can request a change in teams
This is quite a pain because my current work experience is working really against me in job searching. The rest of my experience is all pure SWE but i fear most recruiters just see my current work experience at the top and then skip past me
- 119 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Argh, this is such an anti-pattern, sorry to hear that. For that small bit of automation, can you super highlight that and make it seem like it's most of your job?
You'll probably need to shrink your first work experience so the 2nd and 3rd shine through more and are likely even bigger blurbs. This is the opposite of what you should do ideally (i.e. get better jobs over time), but you don't have much optionality here.
Regardless, if you have done some automation, I recommend changing your branding with the suggestions above title-wise if you haven't already.
- 019 days agoMid-level Software Engineer [OP]Taro Community
Thank you for your advice. I have already squeezed out everything I can out of my current work experience to ensure it sounds as "SWE" focused as possible. I have done everything including bolding strategically and adding a summary section to highlight SWE experience.
But I have not been getting as many interviews as I used to before I had to take this QA role. Do you have any advice on other approaches to get more interviews? (outside of warm referrals, as I am wanting to use those strategically)
The reason being that I think given that recruiters spend 7 seconds on a resume I'm fairly certain most recruiters are not even looking past the first experience. So I'm not even getting a chance here to show my SWE skills especially this project that I worked on
Maybe HM reachouts?
- 019 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Do you have any advice on other approaches to get more interviews? (outside of warm referrals, as I am wanting to use those strategically)
Given this clusterf*ck of an economy, it's just the same old advice but like... more:
- 10x the size of your side project
- Do more networking to meet people, produce additional warm referrals
- Become an open-source hero
- Get big on LinkedIn
Everything here is long-tail. All the short-tail stuff is exhausted as enough talented, laid-off engineers are also doing them.
- 119 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Is there maybe a way I can list the project under work experience but kind of say that its not a paid gig?
This is awkward and slightly dishonest IMHO. I wouldn't do it.
Congrats on building such an impressive side project though! 4k MAU is solid, and with 800+ commits, you clearly put a lot of effort into it.
Another thing I recommend doing with this side project (especially since you have traction) is to build in public and talk about it on LinkedIn.
- 0
19 days agoThoughtful TarodactylTaro CommunityThinking aloud, what about potentially taking up some freelance work?
- 019 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Thinking aloud, what about potentially taking up some freelance work?
It's far better than nothing - This is a good thinking aloud thought 🙂.
If you can't get anything else, might as well. In general, it's good to always be coding, especially if you aren't getting interviews. When it comes to the job search, the prep is more time-intensive than the applying, and if the applying isn't working, you can't really prep. So might as well use the time building cool stuff.
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