Well fellas, as I have posted elsewhere, I’m trying to look for a job as a developer, one better than the one I have right now anyways. I’ve been working for 2 years but I feel that the projects I have worked with at my current job, are not that impressive. My work consists of making parsing programs and they’re not really that complicated and/or outstanding I think. Anyways, when you apply for a development position, and they ask you to talk about the projects you have worked with, I tend not to consider the ones I’ve made for courses and college, I only put the ones I’ve done at my current job, which basically resumes to two important projects, and a bunch of small ones that are not even worthy of being in a resume.
Many people have advised me that I should lie and put everything that I’ve done, and include the projects for classes as job related things, and include that I have done freelancing job and whatnots, in fact, I taught my two cousins how to program, and they landed jobs earning more than I do right now, and they lied their asses off in their applications, even when they had no experience working in anything. I’ve always considered that I don’t have to lie and that my work will speak for me on my behalf, but most of the time, I feel that what I’ve done so far is not that impressive, and people at Human Resources seem to think that way because I keep applying and applying and so far I’ve gotten 2 interviews in two years, and no offers so far.
What do I do?
At work I have done two big parsing programs, one that parses a big PDF (relatively) 1.8gb, using the MVC pattern, which consists on extracting pages from the big PDF, and generating a bunch of small ones and an index, to be sent by email (I have nothing to do with the program that sends the emails, I just generate the files to be sent).
The other program is for parsing a new file format for a customer that changed it, and that’s it for the big projects (big in the sense that they’re critical for our customers, but not big in the sense that anyone is going to be impressed by them), in this second program I try to use Strategy pattern, and I am refactoring in such a way that I should be able to implement a DAO to it, and a Factory pattern.
The thing is, should I put everything I’ve done so far in programming as jobs and lie my ass off to make my resume seem more impressive or not? because I feel that this honesty thing is not working out so well for me…