What’s not on my resume

I don’t put everything-I’ve-done on my resume anymore. A few times I’ve had people complain about it being too-wordy, or even say something like “Look at all of this stuff. You must be a jack-of-all trades and master of none”. I guess that is a saying. So, when people see a lot of stuff, they often assume that I have a life, and therefore it is impossible to learn so much stuff with any real depth-of-understanding. Once that idea is in someone’s mind, it can be difficult to convince them otherwise.

One thing that certainly should occur to someone when they see a verbose resume is “This person appears to learn, a lot”. Which is why I also am a little surprised when someone says something like “Oh, I don’t see technology xyz in here”. As if, my head is a bus with 20 seats and all of them are filled. No more room for more technologies. Gotta catch the next bus, I guess.

It should be pretty obvious that at one-point-in-time, none of those were on my resume. I hadn’t learned them yet. Then I did. I dug in and learned them, and succeeded in using them in my project, and gained experience. Next project, I might deepen that experience, or I might learn more technologies, but probably both.

Last week we had a team-leader meeting at work. The topic came up about whether we should consider a few new technologies for future projects. As you might expect, somebody spoke up and suggested that “we are successful with our current tech-stack, and therefore, we should stick with what-we-know, instead of trying something-different and risking failure (or lesser-success)”. Since I’m new to this company, I didn’t speak-up, but it did occur to me that there must have been a time when nobody at this company knew our current tech-stack. Fortunately, back-then, someone took-a-chance on something new, and maybe had a lesser success, but we built upon it, and now it is our first-choice. Have we forgotten about that?

My point is this: If you or I don’t know some technology we might be hesitant to embrace it, because until we know it, it is a gamble. However, you and I have been successful with new technologies in the past, which is what got us here in the first place. We can do it again. And again.

That tech just isn’t on my/your resume yet.