I know the projects listed are meh… for a candidate, but I feel like I have to start searching for job with whatever I have now. After all, I’d learn faster on the job rather than doing personal projects and learning at home, beside I’ll never catch up anyway with tech dev. and there’s never enough. Please review my resume (and or my LinkedIn) and give your harshest critics and suggestions. I’m all ears. Thank you so much! for everything.
I think you need one one major project to make this stand out… there just needs to be one attention grabbing project here not a bunch of small / tutorial based / fcc projects
The fcc projects tend to give off amateur vibes because they’re small trivial applications that take about a day to put together… you could have 50 of these on your cv and it wouldn’t make much difference.
To me it looks like a standard ‘I want to be a developer’ cv rather than ‘I am a developer’ cv.
Do you have any application in mind that you actually want to build? Something that’s personal to you? Something that could maintain your interest for a few weeks or months and develop into something relatively substantial?
As a side note keep the professional experience to a minimum if it’s not development related. Your cv is for a developer job but most of it is about previous jobs in law.
No harm in sending it out but I’ve sent cvs out like this before and it’s a waste of time - they don’t hook anyone’s interest.
Also why do you want to take the significant step down and loss of earnings from being a principal attorney to an entry level programmer? Genuine question, is this really worth pursuing?
My mother-tongue is not English. Indonesian legal system is french based, we work with codes not precedents. While legal logic is quite universal, I lack all the local knowledge to just “hit the ground and run”. And law in US is extremely complex (the written and unwritten rules). Law school is very expensive, and that’s actually only a start for law career, we still have to do internship and all that. I’m not young to do all that. Without license, I may be a paralegal, but just comparing the median salary, for sure it’s not as promising as trying to be a software dev, with the same amount of struggle, might be more.
On top of that, ever since I was in high school, I love computers, tweaking stuffs. Even in my previous office, I could spend time after hours troubleshooting office computers (it’s a small office, so my boss really appreciated it), installing softwares, networks, printers, figuring out how to enable our computers to still run DOS based Wordstar (for printing deeds) in computers that has to run at least Windows XP (where no professionals could/would do that anymore).
I like debating, reading law books, writing papers, and all that, but compare to banging my head leetcoding and debugging stuffs, I’d choose the latter any day without thinking.
It’s really worth pursuing. This is like my second chance to do what I like.
Thanks for your feedback. I really appreciate it.
Resume:
I think you need to beef up your project descriptions.
Right now, it just sounds to basic and you need to grab their attention better.
I also think you should deploy your projects instead of using codepen and replit.
You can deploy it using heroku for the backend projects and netlify for the react ones.
Linkedin:
You need to spruce up your linkedin and definitely add a picture.
Recruiters and other developers will hit you up on LinkedIn for work if your profile is good.
So it does pay to have a good profile.
I would suggest looking at Danny Thompson’s linkedin series.
Projects:
The junior developer market is really competitive.
Now is the time to stand out.
The last thing you want to do is blend in with everyone else that has the same projects.
Without a CS degree or work experience, your projects are the star of your application.
It is really important to stand out and catch their eye.
It is also important to remember that in the interview process they will ask you about your projects.
They will ask you questions like:
Why did you build this project?
What kind of features does this project have?
Why did you choose these technologies for this project?
What problem does this solve?
Right now, it seems like your answer is “it was a class project and I used the technologies they told me to”
Class projects are great for learning but when you are competing for a job, you need something you can talk about in your interview.
You spent a lot of time in law and I am sure you can build something that addresses an issue you encountered during that career.
And that would be something cool to talk about in interviews
No offense intended at all, but IMO you’re not quite job-ready yet if all you have to list on a resume are FCC projects hosted on CodePen and Repl.it. You need to take the jump and go further - can you make a multi-user web app on your own from scratch, i.e. a basic e-commerce type application with a front-end in React and the back-end in Express and MongoDB? If you can’t, I’d suggest making that your highest priority.
Repl.it and CodePen are fine for hosting “toy” projects and ideas, but can you deploy to actual tools that are used for production apps? Like Netlify, Heroku, or DigitalOcean? Or AWS, GCP, or Azure? And how well do you know Git? Git is one of those things that you’ll be expected to know the fundamentals on the first day of any dev job - do you know how to fork, clone, branch, commit, etc?
Even the most junior dev jobs will have certain expectations for you to hit the ground running, and from what I see on the resume, it comes across that you might not be able to meet those, given the projects listed.
I’d highly recommend deleting the line “Fully work authorized” from the resume if you are, since that’s usually assumed in the US.
However, the most important thing I see on the resume by far is the time unaccounted since 2020. What have you been doing since then? That’s probably the most immediate question that most recruiters/HR will be asking. Well and I’d also expect a lot of people would also be wondering why you’re jumping from law (because it looks like you even had your own practice?), which is widely considered to be a much better-paid field than any kind of software development.
