Ask HN: 10 years experience, 200 resumes, almost zero responses. Do I give up?

I feel like there are some details missing here.

* Do you have negative things in your social media?

* How are your soft skills?

* Can you solve problems without superficial tools or frameworks?

* How are your writing skills?

Mostly C# web development. I've done some Xamarin too but I prefer web development. I live in Cincinnati. I've done very little hackerrank stuff because nobody here seems to care about it.

You mentioned being ignored so the obvious question is - how are you applying for these positions? If it's through something like LinkedIn's EasyApply or a similar system, not getting responses is fairly common especially if your CV is missing some of they key terms in the ad and it gets filtered out before it even reaches a person. Even recruiters do this if they aren't technical - I've had words like "statistics", "forecasting" and "machine learning" in my CV and a recruiter turned me down because I don't have experience with "predictive modeling".

Happy to email you with feedback on your resume, if you'd like?

The skills section seems poorly laid out, lots of old tech, no .net core. If you've not used .net core, go through the few hours of basic tutorials so you can at least answer basic questions about the differences and then add it any way. It's basically the same stuff you've already been doing.

The logical order of your skills makes no sense, why mention patterns like MVVM? Valuable skills such as React should be near the front, not the rear.

Try a skill matrix in a table, a bit like this (but better, I'm typing this on a mobile):

    C#, .Net, .Net Core. 7 years
    JavaScript (inc. React, Knockout, jQuery)  6 years
    SQL, EF   8 years
    Node.js   3 years
    SQL Lite  2 years

Drop all the unimpressive noise like MVVM, REST, IIS. Or add them at the bottom of the skills matrix in a catch-all other skills category. Might be worth it just to catch the right buzzword.

None of the jobs list the tech used or what you actually did, so it's not clear you have actual experience programming. Some of them make you sound like you are an amateur (and I stress sound, not saying you are):

Repaired and upgraded first-tier applications

Collaborated on agile team to successfully add features to the company's website

That's all you've said about several years worth of work. Nothing you've built, nothing you achieved. What features. What did you upgrade. What test beds did you implement as the automation tester?

Those are just general, extremely fuzzy, descriptions. You mention tutoring and teaching so much too, it sounds odd, especially because you're listing so little actual work. Also, you focus on some odd things. Used browserstack to check CSS. How is that relevant on a CV?

Have you tried something more descriptive, like:

Random Company LLC - Senior Software Developer

Working on our internal monitoring tools written in ASP.Net MVC with EF and SQL. Features implemented included:

- Built a BI performance tool allowing management at-a-glance overview of client-facing systems

- Built a quick report tool, allowing team members to add simple SQL files and have them automatically turned into a sortable table with CSV download

- Overhauled performance for 3 key pages struggling with large datasets, reducing avg TTFB times for pages with more than 1000 records from 15 secs to 0.5 seconds

- Part of the team responsible for migrating, championing and training the migration of SVN to git

- Regularly maintained a top 3 bug fix rate within the team

- Mentored the 2 junior developers on the team

That makes it clear the tech, shows what kind of programming you were doing, and still makes it clear you did some mentoring.

With the gaps you have I'd also be tempted to drop the months part of each date, just list 2018-2020. Not 100% on this, maybe some recruiters could explain whether this looks dodgy or not.