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I am a software engineer two months into a one year contract as an employee with a company. In this company, I have run into a dilemma. No particular engineer is responsible for any given part of the code. Rather, everyone as a group is responsible for all of the code.

This concerns me because I will be job hunting again in earnest in about 6 months due to it being a temporary position. If I cannot claim features as mine or claim responsibility for large areas, what do I put on my resume? Resumes work best with tangible accomplishments and saying that one was "part of" something doesn't provide evidence of my individual capacity to contribute.

I also will not have any of the group achievements either as the current contract only runs as long as the development process is estimated to take, but I need to be job hunting well before then.

What is the best way to handle this? I am investing more time in outside work stuff, but this seems like it could be a millstone around my neck.

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No particular engineer is responsible for any given part of the code. Rather, everyone as a group is responsible for all of the code.

Nothing abnormal about this, being able to work in a team is a good thing anyway.

Resumes work best with tangible accomplishments and saying that one was "part of" something doesn't provide evidence of my individual capacity to contribute.

Hiring managers are aware of this and factor it in, they have other ways to gauge your ability to contribute. A solid reference would help as well. Depends if you're expecting more work after the contract or not whether to ask for a reference.

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  • Good answer, but could be improved with an example (e.g Company Name, Dates, Position - The list each project with a brief description of what it was about and which bits you worked on. The more projects your worked on, the briefer the description. Lastly (unless long list of projects) List of technologies used.
    – Justin
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 9:46
  • @Justin I'd probably just go with the techs used and experience. It's usually understood that you don't go into detail of a firm you are still working at.
    – Kilisi
    Commented Oct 22, 2019 at 13:33
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I like @Kilisi's answer a lot, but felt it was a bit abstract. Eradicant, I've been a contractor for a really long time and have found that a simple description of each project and the technologies used provide for a great CV (aka Sales Brochure)

Here's an actual example from my own CV (looks better in MS Word; Client and project names have been changed):

UK Life Insurance Services Limited, 05/01/2017 – 30/08/2017

(3 month contract, Renewals)

Position : Senior Developer

Repackaged UKLIS Quote, Results, and Apply functionality into reusable templates and modules, to allow rapid delivery of Life Insurance journey websites and WepAPI. These were made available to the developers as reusable, extendable Visual Studio project templates and Nuget packages.

Complementary VS project templates provided complete unit tests for the website, and custom Item Templates to encapsulate the multiple elements for a “screen” were also provided.

Implemented and improved data caching, which mainly uses wrappers around .Net MemoryCache. This has vastly reduced the load on the database servers, reducing the workload by 1 billion transactions/week (approx 20%), resulting in projected annual savings to the client of around £50k in AWS hosting fees. Further improvements have yet to be deployed and benchmarked, but are likely to yield additional similar savings.

Redesign of Quote Engines used to request quotes from multiple insurance providers which are then aggregated by the website. The existing legacy systems had been written ~15 years previously in VB6 and, over time, changes to the business have meant that the original design was causing significant performance issues. The rewrite provided a highly scalable, fault tolerant, event driven message based system, built on an nServiceBus asynchronous publish / subscribe architecture. C#, nServiceBus, Reactive Extensions, SignalR, Sockets, MSMQ, SQL Service Broker.

Technologies: SQL Server, ASP.Net MVC, C#, Jquery, Knockout.js, Bootstrap, CSS, HTML5.

Most listings are slightly shorter than this, and I only have the current position ("Current Contract") and the last five or so years worth ("Previous Work"), followed by a table listing Client / Position / Dates. I have a complete full-format list of these in a much longer CV which I also take to interviews or email when asked for more info.

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