Let me begin by saying: I do not particpate in social media.

But then I did. I made a post on LinkedIn. I wasn’t sure I’d even submit it. I do not like opening myself up to criticism on a platform like that.

I was in the running for a job that I am very qualified for. Here is the job description:

Essential Functions

  • Design & Implement CDN solutions to enhance performance, scalability, and reliability
  • Create architectural frameworks to reduce latency, optimize load balancing, and support global traffic
  • Identify and implement automation efficiencies within workflow processes
  • Set routing policies to pre-determine and automate responses in case of failure, like redirecting traffic to alternative zones or regions
  • Create, visualize, and scale complex routing relationships between records and policies with easy to use global DNS features
  • Manage multi-cloud DNS networking routing including latency-based routing, geolocation routing, and health checks

####Akamai and/or Infoblox

  • Experience in multi cloud environments (AWS, Azure, or GPC)
  • Automation & Scripting (Python, Ruby, or Javascript)
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines
  • Experience with IaC

What a great match for me! Sure, my last role was as Director of IT for an open source software company, but I love getting my hands dirty in the work and this job is right up my alley. I got a call from the recruiter and he set me up with an interview with the hiring manager and one of the team members. When I joined the call, I was the only one of the three of us who had a camera on. More than five minutes had passed before the one of them also turned their camera on, and the hiring manager was the last to do so. They didn’t say anything about it, they just sort of turned them on quietly. I thought it was odd. The rest of that interview went very well. I was asked a number of questions related to the position and how my work history applies, and I honestly felt like this was going extremely well in my favor. I didn’t hesitate to answer any questions, I knew all of the subject matter and answered very clearly. They seemed impressed. So impressed that I was asked for a follow up interview within an hour after the first interview was over.

Sounds like [hiring manager] felt really good about the meeting. Is 10:30 or 11:30 AM EST tomorrow an option for a follow up?

The next day I had a the first follow-up. There was a new person on the call this time and the hiring manager. The hiring manager did not turn his camera on for the entire call and remained completely silent after introductions. The new person quizzed me on some automation and even asked me to write a simple Python script in front of him. I don’t have the exact example we worked from, but it was rather simple. He provided an array containing the names of states, and wanted me produce an output that would count how many times each state was in the array. A short version of what he provided might look something like this:

states = [
    "Texas",
    "Ohio",
    "Maine",
    "Texas"
]

The solution was simple. It took me a few minutes, and the solution was something like:

states = [
    "Texas",
    "Ohio",
    "Maine",
    "Texas"
]

output = {}

for state in states:
    if state in output:
        output[state] += 1
    else:
        output[state] = 1

print(output)

Pretty straightforward and simple script. He wasn’t even interested in seeing it run, he actually didn’t even let me finish it. I assumed he was just checking to see if I knew some basic python and I passed his test. When the interview ended, I once again had an invite to another round within an hour after the interview ended. They seemed very excited to move me forward, and the recruiter shared the enthusiasm.

[hiring manager] also want you to chat with [engineer] a [company] Cloud guy… Can you do that call tomorrow afternoon for 30 minutes 1-4p?

Yup, lets do it. We set a time. I join the call, once again the hirining manager does not turn their camera on. The “Cloud Guy” I met this time also never turned his camera on. I stared into the void, trying to keep my smile on for the entire call. “Cloud Guy” quizzed me on DNS and some other specific AWS questions, like “Where can you find DNS logs in AWS?”. Nothing crazy. I answered them so well, after 15 minutes he said “you’ve already answered the rest of my questions before I could get to them” because I was so thorough in my responses. I felt like he tried asking his hardest question and I aced it. I got the feeling from his voice that he knew I was good. He offered to end the call early because he was out of material. I thanked them for their time, said I was excited to hear their decision and we ended the call.

Sweet – we may have an answer by EOD tomorrow if everything pans out. These particular guys don’t hire all that often so it wasn’t a straightforward recruiting workflow. If you guys get into the weeds tomorrow and they both like you (can envision a solid relationship in working with you) then HR will fire out an offer by Friday. Typical background check and drug panel and onboarding for 2-weeks……….

EOD tomorrow (Friday) came and went, no answer. I gave them the weekend and shot an email over on Monday politely seeking decision.

Sounded like things went well —- there is another gent doing a deep dive technical call right now so I hopefully will get an answer by EOD.

Ok, so now there is another “gent”. First time I heard about it. But last week the recruiter more or less suggested I’d be getting an offer as long as they both like, right? Days go by and I hear nothing. I don’t want to bug them, so I hold off on another email until Thursday. No response. I e-mail again on Friday and I get an out of office automatic response from the recruiter.. the guy took a long weekend. Monday comes around and I finally get a response

Hi Chris —- hey traveling this weekend but I did get a note that another gentleman blew them away on Friday. No negative takeaways they really liked you. I’ll be keeping an eye out for other opportunities to get you over here….

After another exchange of emails, he shares the resume of the other candidate with me.

I want to reiterate though, zero negative takeaways from your conversations. If this gentleman was to decline the offer I am fairly certain they would want you for the role……….and even beyond that if another chair comes available. Below is the resume of the other candidate, full transparency.

Hope to connect with you again soon. Take care, [recruiter]

Motivated AWS Cloud Network Engineer with 6+ years of experience in designing, deploying, managing and securing AWS network Infrastructure. Excels at designing and implementing highly available, resilient, scalable and performant solutions that meet the needs of customers. Offers a proven track record ensuring network services are 100% compliant and optimized for cost.

Skills

· Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) · EC2 & CloudWatch · Internet Gateway (IGW) & NAT Gateway · Direct Connect (DX) & Transit Gateway (TGW) · Route 53, VPC Endpoints & Private Link · Virtual Private Gateway (VGW) & Site to Site VPN · Firewalls (Security Groups & Network ACLs) · Akamai (DNS, GTM, CDN) · DevOps (Terraform, Jenkins, Git, GitHub & AWS CLI)

Network SRE Lead

Guided DevOps practice to improve network services delivery speed, scalability, collaboration, efficiency and improved security. Introduced Jira (Scrum and Kanban) tool for project delivery, break/fix, tracking and forecasting. Influenced and advised security engineering and operations on Wiz cloud security for 100% improved security posture and vulnerability management. Coordinated Apptio Cloudability to track, analyze and optimize cloud cost for network services reducing cost by 15% Designed aws managed kubernetes network architecture. Improved cloudwatch aws monitoring service MTTI and MTTR by more than 40%. Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation providing timely response and resolution for priority 1/2 incidents and outages. Established terraform and jenkins for IaC and CI/CD standards. Oversaw several mergers and acquisitions for network services.

Senior Network Engineer

Designed, deployed and managed aws cloud network across 7 regions providing 99.9% uptime and increasing performance for application workloads by 30%. Oversaw aws public cloud network transformation projects. Completed transit vpc to transit gateway migration. Completed vpn to 10G hosted direct connect, improving network performance by more than 30%. Overhauled route 53 hybrid dns architecture improving dns resolution performance by 20%. Designed and implemented vpc endpoint and private link architecture improving network performance by 20%. Launched cloudwatch monitoring and developed dashboards. Completed migration of 100+ on-premises workloads to aws public cloud vpcs. Transformed solarwinds observability to aws cloud from on-premises improving monitoring performance by 30%. Created aws standard operating procedures. Designed and implemented akamai gtm and dns across enterprise. Participate in 24/7 on-call rotation providing timely response and resolution for priority 1/2 incidents and outages.

Senior Platform Engineer

Designed and implemented akamai edge cdn, gtm and dns solution to improve transaction times by 20%. Completed the configuration, implementation and support of 25+ production solaris application servers, and 15 nonprod servers to handle 30% revenue channel traffic increase. Completed the configuration and implement of 100+ production Red Hat Linux Servers and 50 nonprod servers to handle 30% revenue channel traffic increase. Led performance tuning project for java applications, apache load balancers, mysql databases and cdn configurations to achieve a performance increase of 20%. Introduced subversion version control system to manage code across the enterprise and improve workflow by 50%. Participated in 24/7 on-call rotation. Responsible for the design and deployment of the enterprise three tier architecture for revenue generating applications (Apache, Tomcat, Oracle).

Am I the only one seeing flags all over this resume? DNS is capitalized in the skills section, but then not in the experience. Other things are not capitalized either. DNS, MySQL, AWS, Route 53, CPV, Cloudwatch, Solarwinds, Akamai, CND, GTM. Its SO inconsistent. Every percentage is made up and has nothing near it to quatify how those performance improvements were made. I have LinkedIn Premium (free for now, thanks to Amir Satvat’s community!). I’ve used it a few times to try and tailer my resume, and every time its a huge dissapointment. I’ve never been more convinced that AI just playing Madlabs at the speed of 1000 GPUs. I read what it creates, and the things it will just make up. Its very bad. It might be a “template” you can follow, but you cannot trust what it creates on its own, even from your own resume and the provided job description. One thing I see it does, is it does not make up percentages, but it leaves a space for you to fill in the blank yourself. I even got it to spit out indentical lines like:

Overhauled route 53 hybrid dns architecture improving dns resolution performance by 30%.

Only mine was better, I actually got it to capitalize Route 53 and DNS as they should be. Instead of 30% it gave me ??%. Looking at the numbers on the sample resume, they all seem pretty “safe” on the surface. That’s because they are.

This person beat me for the job. I have 4 times the experience they have specifically in this set of skills. And the recruiter used the words “blown away”. I felt like I was blowing them away. It was going extremely well. Even if someone inched me out for this role, were they “blown away” compared to me? Something doesn’t make sense here.

I posted on LinkedIn about this experience. I’ve gotten mostly positive responses, but a few are mixed, and the people in “talent aquisition” are the most controversal responses.

We don’t hire based on a resume, a resume just gets your foor in the door

Thats the most common response from the recruiters responding to me. This simple sentence says so much about the recruiters using it and I don’t think they realize it.