Experienced but barely worked the past 5 years, and struggling to to get back in

You're getting a lot of tough love in the comments here, and — from a quick skim — most of the comments look pretty reasonable.

Beyond the specific resume-writing advice in the bullet points, though, the bigger problem is the sum of the parts. There's no story here. There's no coherent narrative that says to a hiring manager, "Yes, every career decision this person has ever made makes them the perfect fit for this job." And, yes, that is what the ideal resume should do.

Normally, I try not to give advice, but in the interest of saving (months of) time, I'll jump straight to some resume advice and then some job-search advice.

Overall resume advice:

  • Delete the Technical Skills section entirely, or at least move it to the bottom.
  • That Skills section, if you keep it, also doesn't tell a story. Cut it down dramatically. C#, Rails, and PHP? Vue and React? WebGL, for some reason? Even if you really do know all of those equally well, no hiring manager can get a coherent story out of that pile of keywords. Who are you? What do you want to program in?
  • Consider omitting both dates on your Education section, but at minimum lose the matriculation date. Why are you provoking needless questions about why you took 6 years to graduate? Just say you graduated in '07 and leave it at that.

About the Experience section specifically:

  • I'd compress the whole thing into just three top-level jobs: "Junior Engineer (Internship)," "Career Sabbatical," and "Senior Engineer (Contract)." Let's run through each one in turn.
  • Junior Engineer: Ditch the "QA" bit. Consider putting "Internship" right there in the job title, since that's basically what any entry-level 3-month gig is. Expand into 3 bullet points what you did and what impact you had, following all the other great advice in the comments here.
  • Career Sabbatical: Just be upfront. You took time off to focus on your family, and you programmed for fun. Figure out how to say that in a way that makes you sound good. Leave out all the details about money and sadness; no one wants to hear that. Find three solid bullet points about amazing stuff you did — maybe 2 about fun little side projects that you built, and 1 about how you raised the greatest kid ever. Maybe the other way around. You get the idea.
  • Senior Engineer: Compress all your contract work into one block, with one set of start and end dates. Go up to five bullet points for this one since it's your most recent. That means you can get one great bullet point for each contract gig. Like this: "Verbed a noun by X% for an adjective adjective industry company by using Technologies A, B, and C to build a Foobar."

Lastly, the job hunt itself:

  • You need to figure out what kind of engineering job you want, and every single bullet point in your resume needs to speak to that job. Right now, this resume is just a random smorgasbord of keywords.
  • I'd like to write a bullet point here to give you some advice about what kind of job to go out for, but I literally can't because I have no idea from your resume what you want.
  • Once your resume is substantially less depressing and tells an actual story with an actual direction, you can get some interviews. You'll inevitably get instantly down-leveled because, well, you're not a senior engineer.
  • When they down-level you, eat the humble pie, negotiate just a little so they don't think you're a push-over, and then take the damn offer.

You say you've been Leetcoding for a year, so the issue isn't your coding skill. It's not your lazy eye, and it's not your name. It's your complete and total lack of narrative. Figure out what you want specifically, then overhaul the resume to arrange the facts of your career into a story that would actually make the hiring manager for that specific job want to talk to you.

/r/ExperiencedDevs Thread