There are always going to be things in life that we regret.
Just think about the concept of New Years resolutions if you want a great example.
Why is some arbitrary day on a calendar a catalyst for use to start doing some of the things that we should have been doing every day?
We use it as an excuse to start something that by all indications is a task that would have been much better started yesterday.
Working out?
Reminds me of the idiom about the best time to plant a tree.
If you haven’t heard it, it goes like this: When is the best time to plant a tree?
The best time to plant a tree was 30 years ago. The second best time to plant a tree is now.
Which brings me to the topic at hand today.
I achieved a milestone in my career earlier this year that was not a good milestone.
I was laid off.
This was a rather shocking event for me. I had been through reductions in force. In fact, I had experienced them many, many times before in my career. I had been an observer, a news deliverer, and a participant in the process before.
But I had never been included in the event.
But that isn’t what this post is about. While that was a shocking turn of events in my life, it was something I think I managed to get through with a bit of grace and a lot of support from my family.
No – the reason we are here today didn’t become apparent to me until almost a few months later.
You see, I had started applying for jobs and it was apparent that the job search landscape was radically different than the process that I thought I knew.
But even this realization that AI had taken over many aspects formerly done by humans wasn’t the thing that shook me.
No, this was a mistake that I had actually been making for years. It is a mistake that most of you are probably making this very minute.
The mistake was in not writing down my accomplishments.
Seems easy, right?
I started my job search process with an old resume. That was a big mistake. Took me quite a few applications and research and a lot of reading to realize that a resume built for humans, last really touched around 2020 absolutely would not cut it in today’s ATS-driven world of auto-scanning every document for keywords.
Yet, I am an engineer. Figuring out how to redo my resume while a challenge, was definitely something I was capable of.
The problem was, what information should I put on an updated resume?
At one of my old roles we did something called 360 Reviews. These were biannual reviews that collected feedback from you, your peers, managers, and many others and generated solid feedback for someone.
While they were a pain in the ass to write as a manager, especially when you had to write 20+ reviews for others, then write 12 360s for your direct reports, overall they were very valuable glimpses into how you were viewed within the organization. I always enjoyed receiving my 360.
Yet time and again, we had engineering leadership discussion on how to make them better and more actionable, and recency bias was always one of the top complaints. We also agreed that to really fix this, we all needed to try and find a way to generate feedback throughout the six month cycle and not wait until the weeks leading up to the 360 Review process to scratch some feedback on paper.
Yet to the best of my knowledge, none of us ever succeeded here.
I have thought about this lack a LOT as I have worked and re-worked my resume. I am on iteration 6 or 7 now.
Honestly, what I have is a masterpiece, if I do say so myself.
The resume has gone down from visually cool-looking (in my own eyes) to a stripped down and more focused 2 column approach. Then Key Impacts were added. Then a migration to a single column. Then another formatting round. Finally, I have arrived at a very solid, visually striking 2-pager with minimal colors used for accents and spacing that is pleasing to the eye.
Oh yeah, it seems to parse pretty good in ATS validators as well.
But all throughout this work there has been one constant. I have been continually adding stories and additional work, expertise, and technical achievements as the process has moved along. I add them as I remember them – and I am still uncovering stories and strengths that I have!
The moral of the story is that in today’s tech world, things are uncertain. While I truly believe that AI will settle into a complimentary tooling role, the mere existence of this constantly-evolving tool/developer/something is causing upheaval in this space.
You might not be looking, you might not be afraid that AI is coming for your job. I will be honest – the layoffs that I were a part of were, in my opinion, more financially-based than anything to do with AI. But they absolutely were a shock to me.
This uncertainty can crystallize quickly in many companies. Just read the headlines and it is easy to find another round hitting some company somewhere right now.
The question I have for you today is: when is the last time you gave yourself and your achievements a true 360?
When is the last time you wrote down a few cool things that you did or a few numbers about user count or releases?
What is the last hard technical problem that you solved? Can you write down some details about it now? How about in 6 months? How about in 18 months when you get the totally unexpected email that “you are affected”?
To help, here is a quick checklist that you can complete as often as you want, but ideally this would be 2-4 times a year. If this doesn’t work for me then create your own! The actions here are worth way more than the structure.
[ ] What have I accomplished and released in the past (1/3/6) months?
- replaceme
[ ] What is my biggest accomplishment in the past (1/3/6) months?
- replaceme
[ ] What technology, tools, and methodologies have I used recently?
- replaceme
[ ] What is the best prompt I have written and why was it the best? How did it work/change things?
- replaceme
[ ] list any new certifications or things that I have learned recently
- replaceme
[ ] add any notes that are fresh in my mind now but that I might forget details on later
= replacemeYou future self will thank you – and even if you never need this – your current self might just thank you as well. It never hurts to step back, fight that imposter syndrome and realize: I got this. I do some amazing work!
What are you waiting for? Get going!
As always, thanks for reading and have an awesome day!