In fact, the first 800 words or so were already written a month back, hence some of the “flow” in the writing seemed broken. Writing that blog post was an attempt at finally allowing myself to find some closure and write it off as an experience that will make me better equipped to deal with (heaven forbid) similar issues in the future.

As it’s probably quite apparent, I quit that job without having another lined up. And for some reason, I’m perfectly at peace with that. In fact, I’ve made very little effort to look for another full-time job; I’ve done an on-site interview with Amazon (rejected), a phone interview with Facebook after solving their coding puzzles, and a few others which I decided wouldn’t be a good fit (I’m much more wary of potential red flags now after that experience).

The time since leaving that company has been mostly a recharge, reflection period, sprinkled with continued freelance work with my clients. I wasn’t aware at the time, but I’ve felt the burnout hit long after I quit that job, and I finally feel “well”.

Now, about actually hitting #2 on HN. I’ve always been curious what being top 3 on HN looked like, and I will say the response to my post has been mind-blowing (336 points, 201 comments as of this writing). I expected a few people to skim through it, write it off as another typical poor experience in the industry, then fall deep into the abyss where posts never get past the “newest” section. For the first hour or so, the post was stuck around 2 points. By the second hour, it started to pick up and sit around 30 points, with still no comments. At this time it was already #10, and I thought that would be the end of it. I left to go play badminton with some of my friends from my previous-previous job at SAP.

That’s when the post started shooting up. I received texts from friends saying my blog post was #4 on HN (I don’t have a data plan). “Well, it’ll die down soon, kind of wished it would hit top 3 though”, I thought to myself. I couldn’t be more wrong. 3 hours later, my post was sitting at 80 points and 23 comments, and I was starting to worry if my site would crash while I was away.

When I got home a couple hours later, it had already accumulated more than 200 upvotes, and a ton of helpful comments to look through. A bunch of comments on my blog (yes, even the one saying I sound like a boring wanker), and some tweets from bots and actual readers. My inbox had exploded from HNNotify, along with some nice people who reached out to see if I would be up for coffee/looking for a new job at their company. The new comments were coming in so frequently that I had to install the hckr news Chrome extension to help my eyes filter the new ones. I’d been looking for something to help me track new comments in HN threads, and this time, I had enough incentive to.

For most of the night, my site had ~300 concurrent visitors; the most I saw was around 349. From Thursday night (the time of the post), to Friday night, my site received 31,960 unique visitors and 79,447 pageviews. This traffic was more or less all from HN, I don’t actually have many humans reading my blog. I haven’t seen this many people reading my writing since my Windows7Center days!

Alexa ranking jumps by 21 million.

The response on HN has been tremendous, not only in helping me recognize the different options available to me at the time, how other people may have dealt with it, and the stories of many people who have been in (or are currently in) similar situations.

I have received many requests to expose the name of the company/PM. I do not wish to reveal that information because:

1. I do not wish to start a witch hunt, and I do not wish to taint their name forever as there’s a possibility they will change (I hope).
2. For reasons jacques_chester has pointed out. More trouble than it’s worth.

That said, I understand there are people who may live in the area and would like to avoid a similar situation. Contact me privately and I will let you know, your discretion is appreciated.

And with that, I can say I have found my closure.

P.S: If you or your company is hiring, or you just want to have a chat, feel free to reach out.

The post The HackerNews effect: Hitting #2 on HN first appeared on Jay Huang.

One would mean I would be moving to Palo Alto, California, where I would be joining a well-known, highly successful, technology company. The pay was great, and working there would make any future job hunts virtually non-existent. The only possible downside to it was having to move. A few weeks prior, I had just completed the final steps of becoming a homeowner, and moving to Palo Alto would mean having to put my place back on the market within a few short weeks. Nevertheless, I was not too concerned. Having lived for extended periods of time in Taiwan, Australia, and Canada, I’m very open to moving and even embrace the thought of living in a different country, with major differences in culture.

The other offer would mean staying in familiar old Vancouver, in a company that had one claim to fame (a relatively impressive one at that), and noticeably lower pay. If that were it, I would have moved to Palo Alto in a heartbeat. But that wasn’t all. The product that I was offered to work on was something that I was extremely excited, and passionate about. In fact, it was something that I had been giving a lot of thought prior to hearing about, and not only was I excited to hear about its existence, I was even more excited to be one of the two developers working on it.

After weighing my options and deciding that I didn’t really want to pass up the chance to build something I was so passionate about, I happily took the lower pay (and prestige) to join the team. I was not too concerned about money because it was something I had been dreaming to build. I certainly did not think about much else at that time, I just couldn’t wait.

The team consisted of 5 people. The PM, copywriter, UI/UX designer, myself, and the other developer. Everyone else in the company was working on other products. In terms of the executives, they were very much detached from the operations of the team.

And so began my short 9 weeks at the company. Within days, a big red flag was placed in front of me, but I was still so oblivious and excited that I shrugged it off and pushed it aside. Two unfamiliar names were mentioned in passing a few times. Curiosity kicked in, and naturally, I asked who those two people were. It was always glossed over with something like “they used to be here”, and very little more. After a couple meetings, I was able to slowly piece together some information about those two people. One had worked for around 3 months, the other worked for around 5 months. No one was able or willing to drop hints as to whether they left or were fired. But either way, after the first one left, the second one came, then when that one was about to leave, the other developer I worked with came along.

It seemed weird to me at the time, that for whatever reason, people were coming in and whether quitting or being fired, leaving a product that was solving a big problem, with quite the market — so soon. But I didn’t worry too much about it, as all I could do was speculate and probably come to the wrong conclusion.

Soon after, there was an “optional” beer party. It was a Friday (I believe) night, and this beer party was from 5~9. My mother being in poor health, I stayed for maybe 45 minutes, spoke with a few people so as to not leave so abruptly, had some water (I don’t drink), and left. It was a pretty tame party anyways; there were maybe 8 people sitting at the kitchen table (including our PM), talking loudly about random gossip, 2 or 3 people re-filling their beer cup, 4~5 people around the ping ping table, and the rest were just sitting at their desks browsing whatever they were browsing, and looking bored. After all I thought, it was an optional beer party, it wasn’t celebrating anything within the company in particular, and I already saw some other people leave. Surely it was perfectly fine for me to leave around 6 to look after my sick mother? Apparently not. A few weeks later I would find out that this party wasn’t quite “optional”, but more on that later.

So the next week, it was more code, code, code, preparing a working demo for our investor, code, code, code, racking my brain and its terribly short term memory on what I worked on the previous day for our daily morning scrum meeting. Near the end of the week, we had another push from the development to staging environment. After doing some testing and resolving some bugs, I came across a XSS vulnerability in the product. Now, depending on the vulnerability, XSS may or may not be a huge issue. However, our product was dealing with large amounts of money from customers’ bank accounts, and this vulnerability made it possible to break large portions of the application. Most importantly, it allowed the transactions of users to be skewed, allowing malicious users to cause other users to essentially lose money, or worse yet, put them in a potential dispute, and ultimately, cause our product to lose customers.

“Stop fucking around and get shit done.”

I brought up the discovery of this vulnerability, how critical it was that we resolve it, and the horrifying impact of it. But no one seemed to really care. The other developer said we don’t really have time to fix it, but it was clear he also recognized the potential dangers (and at the same time, the PM was pushing us hard to make more “pretty stuff”). The PM said “stop fucking around and get shit done”. Those were his exact words. Another red flag just whacked me in the face. At this point, I was frustrated, but what was I supposed to do? If I went ahead and allocated time to fix it, I would have to deal with an already ticked off PM who seemed to think fixing critical vulnerabilities is “fucking around” and non-productive. I decided to put it on the back burner and bring it up again when an opportunity presented itself.

Code, code, code, demo, meeting, code, code, code, meeting, code, code, code. On it went. Deep down, I felt that something wasn’t quite right, but I continued to ignore the red flags that seemed to constantly appear. But hey, at least the work life balance seemed okay. I mean everyone was leaving after 8 hours a day, and sometimes I would work a bit longer than everyone else, but that’s okay, because it’s on my own will and it’s usually a feature or bug that I just have to get done.

“You are not 100% committed.”

A few days later, the PM says he wants to speak with me. What I thought was going to be a nice conversation turned out to be anything but. One subjective issue, and 3 questionable points. “You are not 100% committed”, he said. Weird, I don’t understand how that can be. Surely I am the best judge of whether or not I’m committed? And it’s quite apparent to me that I am 100% committed and truly care about the product. He would repeat this 2 times before finally enlightening me on why he felt I was not 100% committed:

1. Apparently, I wasn’t committed because I had not updated my LinkedIn profile since starting this job a mere 8 weeks ago.
2. My website is still up, and my website is (still) selling my freelance services to clients.
3. I also haven’t been working overtime on a regular basis (aka every single day of the week). “I’m not saying you should be working 80 hours a week, but 70 is not ridiculous to ask, and if you were committed you would do more”.

I didn’t understand this at all. I asked him if he felt my performance was lacking. No. So somehow, these 3 points are telling him that I am not committed. Here’s my problem with these “points”:

1. I hadn’t yet bothered to update my LinkedIn, because it takes up more of my time, something I’m not yet ready to do, and I’ve been told that updating your LinkedIn tells an employer you are on the hunt for a job again. I definitely did not want to give that impression. Furthermore, being a co-worker, he stalked my profile multiple times yet never added me? That seems more of an issue to me than anything. The other developer, who I worked quite well with, added me the day I accepted the offer. I’m not saying adding someone on LinkedIn should be a requirement, but if you’re going go off worrying about my profile, wouldn’t it make sense to send me an invite to connect? To each their own I guess.
2. Why would I take my website down? It’s part of my brand and it gives people easier access should they need to contact me. As usual, it hasn’t been re-designed for a while, because I simply do not have the time. The simple truth is I do work with clients as a freelance developer, so why would that not be on my website? The funniest part about all this, is when I was discussing the offer with the HR lady (the PM was also present), I brought up the topic of side projects outside of work, and my freelance work. As I do have some clients on retainer, it would be impossible for me to suddenly end my agreement with them. They both said “Oh no no, we definitely do not want you to stop your freelance work, in fact, most of us in this company have side projects outside of work, and that’s something we love and embrace”. I’m not kidding. That was part of the reason I didn’t move to P.A too. Yet in a short 8 weeks, that’s suddenly a problem.
3. I’m not new to this industry. I’m well aware that overtime happens, and in fact, it’s quite common. I’ve worked till 10:30 PM once or twice when I was at SAP. And sometimes some critical bug or release has to be finished at all costs. I get that. There is a reason for the overtime, usually a good one. But what my PM was talking about, wasn’t about any release in particular. It was simply “you’re not committed because you’re not working 70+ hours a week”. It’s been proven time and time again that constant overtime produces less value, and in fact, may even cause you to break more than you build. It’s simply impossible for someone to code for 70 hours a week and not break things and eventually shutdown due to burnout.

I tried to address these points with him in an amiable manner, but it was impossible. All he would say was “well…” then go back to talking about how I am not giving him the impression that I am committed. He also brought up the fact that I left the beer party early and that further reinforced his idea that I wasn’t committed.

A few days prior to this incident, I had already been thinking about that job. And the red flags I previously mentioned, plus a couple other things, made me wonder if it was even a good fit for me at all. It’s against my nature to not work at resolving issues, but in this case it seemed he wasn’t receptive at all to my opinions, or simple logic, for that matter. After this “discussion”, I went home and thought a long time about it. I would speak with him the next day, and try once again, to resolve the issue. If he was still not receptive, I would give notice to leave.

The following day, I worked hard to make sure that if I were to leave, I have left my work on the product in a good place, then I went to speak with the PM again. He was completely unwilling to discuss anything, and repeated the same accusation of me not being committed and the 3 feeble points to back up his statement. At that moment, I submitted my resignation. He was indifferent. He said “well if you don’t hand off your work, some people are going to be fucking pissed”. I told him that I had every intent to make sure all of my work was accounted for and that there would be no difficulties to progress without me. I had already documented large portions of my work, and it was all very transparent. He said come in tomorrow to do a knowledge transfer.

That night, I was going through my email, Trello board, and JIRA issues to see if there was anything I still needed to hand off to the other developer. While I was looking through my email, I was suddenly disconnected from all services (Google Apps, Trello, JIRA, Bitbucket). This left me a bit confused as to whether my fob still was able to get in the door, I did not want to travel 1.5 hours just to realize I was locked out. But I went the next day anyways, assuming he was just trying to protect company resources.

The next day during scrum, he announced to the team that I would “no longer be working here”. I did not care much about it, but it brought me back to thinking about the 2 previous developers on the team. I guess that would be how things would be explained to the future developer too. When I sat down at my desk, he told the other developer to make sure I didn’t make any code changes. At that point, it really felt like he was giving the impression that he had fired me. But I chose to remain as professional as possible, doing my knowledge transfer, not causing any drama explaining to people why I am no longer working there. Around noon, everything was done, and he told me to leave, and give my (personal) password to the other developer. I told the other developer that I would like to wipe the desktop myself (with his supervision of course), and change the password, then give him the new one.

It was time to leave, and the HR lady came to me and said I would have to sign a release letter and send it back within 2 work days (the following Monday was a holiday), otherwise I would not get any of the remaining pay, including my “stock options”. Apparently instead of full-time as stated in my offer letter, I was a “Contractor” and the agreement between us was “terminated”. I guess that’s to protect them somehow. And the “stock options” that she said I would be paid amounted to $0 (as expected).

To this day, it remains difficult to explain to people why I left that job after a short 9 weeks, and I make sure not to paint anyone in a bad light, and not name the employer or anyone else. Yet somehow, I feel that everyone else besides the PM thought that I was fired instead of leaving. I’m pretty sure that’s what he’s been telling people anyways. Oh well.

Join the discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6693066

The post A culture of beer and overtime first appeared on Jay Huang.

During this time, I have had the fortune to establish great relationships with some great people. On a few occasions, these relationships have forced me to overcome my anxiety when it comes to public speaking, and have an audience of 200+ listen about my (boring) work and (faulty) advice. Yet somehow, the confidence I established by producing consistent and high quality results for clients have failed to shine through my interviews for full-time positions. I have been massively underselling myself.

“If you can get 99%, why can’t you get 100%?”

You see, despite my mixed heritage, I grew up with an Asian mother in an environment where 99% was a horror. All my life, I have been competitive. Not in the sense that I was smarter than everyone else, but in the sense that I just had to win at everything. It no longer became something that was expected of me, it became something I expected of myself.

When I was 9, I placed 2nd in the Canadian National Chess Competition U-12 Division (2001). That’s amazing, wow! Was the reaction when adults found out. To me, it was a failure. A big black mark on my perfect scorecard in this life that had just begun. In that same year, my soccer team placed 1st in the B.C Junior Boys Soccer U-12 Division. Surely I was happy? Nope, I expected this of myself, and all I had done was accomplish what I should have. A few years later when I moved to Taiwan to learn Mandarin, it was dreadful. I didn’t know the alphabet. Yet these adults placed me in 5th grade. “You should be grade 5 in Canada, there’s no point starting from scratch again”. This was the time where I first learned how to fail, and hard. As a 10-year-old kid, I was already studying late into the night, till around 2~3 AM everyday. Still, my marks barely hit 60%.

If I remember correctly, this is the time where I transitioned from a somewhat energetic, outgoing, and chubby kid, into someone who was anxious, shy, and not-so-chubby. I was a failure. The marks that were commonplace were impossible now. I begged to return to Canada. To this land where I could feel normal and at home again. To this land where being 50% white did not make you look like an alien to other Asians. But it didn’t happen. I was to stay in Taiwan indefinitely. Eventually, I did get my report cards back to 100%, and I returned to shrugging off being 1st in a competition, and I returned to Canada, but I was no longer that smiling, outgoing kid.

Back in Canada, the friends I had in elementary were now also in high school. But they didn’t remember me, they had their own group of friends now. This was also the time I touched a computer for the first time. And despite judging myself for every imperfection, this thing never judged me. It let me experiment, it let me break things, it let me fail, anonymously. I spent huge amounts of time learning how to will this thing to life. At one point, I got involved with the “wrong” community of internet users, but that’s a story for another day. I was later introduced to my co-founder. This would be the first person on the internet who knew my real full name. Even during the early days of Windows7Center, no one knew my name.

3 years later, due to personal difficulties, I left Windows7Center. A few months later, my co-founder shut it down. Once again, I had failed. I’ve worked on this thing for 3 years, and we ended up shutting it down. I wrote it off as a failure, hidden away from everyone in my personal life, and tried to move on. But instead, I went back. I went back to my pseudonym. The handle which many more people in certain communities have come to recognize. The handle where I already had somewhat of a reputation, and a few people who looked to me for advice. They didn’t need to know my age, where I lived, or my name. All they needed to see, were the articles I had written, the tools and experience I brought to the table. The late nights breaking things, and learning how things really worked. It was all exhilarating, and comfortable.

Then I realized the path I was heading down had no great future for me. Sure there were successful people who shared a similar past, but how many of them ended up staring at the same 3 walls day in day out? As much as I hated to, I decided to leave it behind, and cut off any contact with people who may tempt me to go back, or bring back exciting memories. I focused on finding some part-time jobs to make me more employable, school, and instead of freelancing under a pseudonym, using my real name.

I still remember getting my first full-time job in this field. Some major software company with 3 letters. I remember how hard I tried, to show what I knew. To show the value I could bring to the table. But all that went through my mind was how to not let slip the things I worked on before. The 3 year long failure that was Windows7Center. A few exciting but frightening encounters with the law. My sweaty palms and my stuttering. Oh and “don’t forget to smile!” the interview prep articles advised. I went home knowing I had bombed it. Once again, I had failed…
I still got the job. From what I later learned, one of the people who interviewed me saw a lot of similarities between myself and him a few years prior.

My contract was to end after 16 months, and I was ready to move on. At that time, a few clients knew I was on a job hunt and offered me some positions. I was happy to work with them as a freelancer, but I wanted something new and different for my full-time job. So in the last 3 months working there, I applied to a lot of companies I was interested in. What made me special compared to all the other talented applicants? Nothing. Windows7Center was a failure, so I left that off my resume. The experiments and projects I worked on before that was something I was ashamed to be associated with. Freelancing was included, but I was unable to disclose many of my clients due to NDAs. Essentially, my resume told the story of how I am an average person who wants a job but has nothing to show. No one called me in for an interview.

Well then, I guess I’ll just return to school and figure it all out later. So up until the last week upon leaving my job, I had no plan. Returning to school was only a temporary solution, and an escape. If having recommendations from my co-workers and clients could not get me a job I wanted, I would still face the same problem once I leave school again.

At this point, a friend from one of the teams I worked with as a freelancer brought up the name of this one company in Palo Alto. He seemed to have quite a few good things to say about them, and he was definitely someone skilled, someone I trusted. After doing some research, I decided that company would be an exciting place to work. But my problem still persisted. If none of the major companies I was interested in even wanted to interview me, there was something I needed to change. I was underselling myself on my resume.

After 16 months at the 3 letter company I worked at, I noticed some people who sell themselves really well, even oversell their skills and accomplishments. People would gravitate towards, and support these people without any hesitation. There was no proof of their skills, no indication that these accomplishments they brought forward were true. Yet people embraced it and, for some of these over-sellers, their claims (lies?) became a self-fulfilling prophecy. For me, I feel like over-selling is the equivalent of lying. However, I didn’t have to oversell myself. What if I presented myself and my experience more accurately?

I decided to ignore all the insecurities I had about putting my 3 year long failure of a start-up on my resume. Since it was already the last week before I left my company, and had already registered for classes as a backup, I gave my job hunt one last try, having my mind already set on returning to school. I found 4 more companies that interested me (along with the one in Palo Alto) from Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, and applied. 3 out of the 5 companies ended up interviewing me and giving me offers. Surprisingly, what I thought was a major failure was one of the topics they were most interested about. We spent more time talking about my work on Windows7Center than almost anything else (aside from technical tests). 1 of them turned out to excite me a bit less in terms of the culture and work, but the other 2 (including the one in P.A) were very exciting to me.

Despite wanting to try something new and move to Palo Alto, I ended up picking the other one. The product they wanted me to work on just happened to be similar to an idea I had been giving some thought lately, and so I was willing to take a pay cut (compared to the other) and join the team.

After that week of interviews, I realized the value in my experience with Windows7Center. The qualities and knowledge I took for granted were not as plain and common as I had imagined:

• to continue with something that showed no results after 8 months
• to work on a project for 3 years, not jump to something new and shiny
• to identify what is most important to users, and put that on the forefront
• to monetize and live on a project
• to drive down costs
• to grow a project and find ways to sustain that growth
• to connect with users and to develop closer relationships with them
• and much more…

We all have valuable experiences and skills that someone, somewhere needs. Underselling is not only detrimental to yourself, it can be a major loss for many many people around you, including those you haven’t met yet. Do everyone a favor and don’t undersell.

The post The cost of underselling first appeared on Jay Huang.

So, he dropped out (actually, he failed with a GPA of 0.33) of college. What did he do? He cried, complained, and demanded success in return for zero effort. Nope. He put in all his effort to determine his own success; despite not having a degree.

I taught myself Rails and Linux. I freelanced on the side. I resold computers and camera lenses on Craigslist and eBay. Whatever it took.

He did web design, for 10 dollars an hour. Living in Vancouver, this kind of wage is pretty much only going to pay for rent. I’m sure it was more or less the same for him.

During his job search, he left college off his resume (of course), and he was offered a job at 45k, then another at 60k.  He believed (as did I), that you would only get minimum wage jobs without a college degree. 60k? Take it, right? Actually…

Unfortunately, I’m only able to consider offers over $100k at this time. If you’re in a position to negotiate, I’d love to talk more.

Crazy? Yea, definitely. Yet somehow, this company saw that he was valuable enough to settle midway.

I saw a lot of myself in that post. I got my first computer at the age of 14 (and it was a retired 8 year old corporate desktop). I decided to learn web development for fun around 15~16. I started doing freelance web development work fulltime almost 3 years ago. This was all because I was too poor to pay rent, and McDonald’s paying $6.25 per hour at the age of 16 was far from enough to support my family.

High school ended. I applied to 2 schools. The University of Victoria where I would pursue my life long dream of practising marital law, and my local technical college in case I suddenly changed my mind. I told myself that if I was unable to get a decent scholarship to UVic, I would go to college. I got a full scholarship to UVic, thanks to my GPA, community involvement, and the multiple reference letters from my teachers. That’s when reality and fear kicked in. If I moved from Vancouver to Victoria to attend UVic, how would I manage supporting the living costs of my family in Vancouver over so many years?

I did 1 year in college, and am currently doing co-op at a fairly sizable company and have been asked to stay for a bit longer. I am definitely planning to finish my diploma, but seeing how things have been so unpredictable, I cannot be sure. Besides working full-time and doing freelance work after hours, I am constantly educating myself in hopes that maybe, just maybe, I will find my success like Steve.

I have been asked by many older professionals why I am so motivated; working multiple jobs since 16 and trying so hard to quench my never-ending desire for knowledge. I haven’t been able to find an answer, and perhaps finding that answer is not at all important. Perhaps, for me, it’s about perseverance and the high I get from learning for myself and not for grades,  and of course, the amazing stories so many great people have to tell.

Thanks for sharing, Steve.

The post Success is very far away, but perhaps we can make it. first appeared on Jay Huang.

Working with this client gave me the opportunity to take a look at how developers may see me when I am only represented by my resume.

This particular client wanted a revamp of their current website, which was still fairly new. They had their own UX team onboard which really helped with the outcome of the product.

Anyways, since they did not have their own team of web developers, they asked if I could help find another freelancer who would be suitable to work with me and their UX team on the project. Given a generous contract, I went and posted free postings in many job boards seeking for someone who was experienced in the technologies used for this revamp. I posted a fairly generic ad, much like many of the ones looking for a fulltime developer but I made sure to state that it was a short-term contract with great pay.

Not only was I looking for a great team member to work with, I wanted to see what kind of competition I would be up against from a skill set point of view, and which resumes failed to grab my attention so I would have a better idea how my resume would look to an employer.

I received a total of 56 resumes over 5 days, 9 were generic letters from hiring agencies (these were ignored).

Here are some of the traits of resumes that made it hard for me to hold onto:

1. Too much information/clutter. If your page is 80% text with thin margins, it may be too much effort to read.
2. Few or none of the relevant skills are highlighted. Make sure your key strengths are easily identifiable.
3. Listing FAR too many technologies that the applicant is experienced in. If you’re listing out so many technologies, it’s hard to grasp how comfortable you are with all of them. I saw one resume where the applicant had 3 years in web development, and claimed expertise in about 20 technologies while project experience highlighted no more than 5.
4. Suggesting that they are “not good enough” for the position. If you’re going to point out that you do not have a college diploma, don’t make the recruiter think that makes you any less capable. There are many amazing developers who do not have a diploma/degree. Show WHY you are a great fit for the position or don’t apply.
5. Vague or no description regarding each of the past projects. If you’ve created a CMS for the company, or implemented a system for sales tracking, put that down. Don’t just give a generic URL and expect that to make you a great fit for the position.

Surprisingly, almost all the resumes had little or no grammatical/spelling errors. Errors have actually been fairly common in some of the other times I’ve had to look at resumes. Grammatical/spelling errors really stand out and say something about your attention to detail.

I ended up finding a great fit for the position (yes this person had a degree) and have enjoyed working with them. The UX team was also amazing, huge thanks to them for such an amazing and successful site revamp!

The post Is this what your resume looks like? first appeared on Jay Huang.