How To Write An Effective Software Engineering Resume

Alex Chiou
7 min readJan 26, 2020
This 1 single document can make or break your career

A recruiter reading your resume is the first step of the funnel for any job opportunity, making this 1 document arguably the most important one for your professional life. Unfortunately, it seems like many struggle creating an effective software engineering resume as I have clearly seen across my 5+ year career. I have read hundreds of resumes for a variety of jobs, and I have tossed out the vast majority of them within 30 seconds. In this article, I will teach you how to write a strong resume that doesn’t get immediately thrown in the bin.

Keep It Short And Focused

Every decent software engineering job has way too many people applying to it, making the recruiter behind it stressed out, overloaded, and only able to spend a few minutes tops on any given resume. Please don’t make this poor recruiter’s life even worse by having a 5 page, meandering resume that talks about the bronze medal you won in a karate competition in 6th grade. Your resume needs to make a tremendous amount of impact in a very short amount of time; remember that you need to edge out dozens if not hundreds of other candidates for any good job. Similar to what I talked about constantly with my side project apps, quality over quantity is absolutely vital for resumes.

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Alex Chiou
Alex Chiou

Written by Alex Chiou

Empowering thousands of engineers @ Tech Career Growth. Ex-Robinhood, Facebook, Course Hero, PayPal. Built apps with 2.5 million+ installs for fun.

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