Last week, I had to find the resume I created when I was in college. It was funny and weird to look at it after so many years. In fact, since this was something I had created every before my experience at IBM, the only interesting parts about my resume was my Google Summer of Code and other open-source projects.
I started wondering what will I add in my resume, if I had to create one now. I will surely list my experience from HackerRank. I’ve spent almost all my time of my professional career here at HackerRank and it is reasonable to assume that my resume will have almost everything from HackerRank. The thought experiment went further, where I was confused if I should list my “achievements” or “failures”. While it makes sense to list the achievements, I believe the failures are the ones that might be more meaningful. I did learn a lot more from my failures than the achievements.
Then I recollected this standard interview question. “What is your biggest weakness?”. The idea is to state your strength as the biggest weakness. For example, something like I focus on too many details, I have a hard time saying no, and so on…
Along the same lines, if I ever have to create a resume, I’ll try my best to mention these three points in my resume
- Never got promoted in the entire 10+ years. Ended up with the same title with which I joined the company.
- Had a lot of ups and downs in my salary. There were times when the salary reduced by 10x.
- The owner for a lot of failed experiments which resulted in many hundreds of thousands (thankfully not millions) of dollars.
The above three might work just for me. Not sure if this is something others can use. I do believe every resume should have a section mentioning the failed projects/experiments. We all can learn a lot from the same.