I have heard about Google's XYZ résumé formula but I struggle to describe my experience with it.
Accomplished [X] as measured by [Y], by doing [Z].
The hardest part is ...as measured by Y... but sometimes I feel like X and Z are not that easy too.
A little bit about me.
I'm a software engineer with almost 5 years of experience. I’ve been working at my current company for 5 months. It’s a middle size company with 5 engineering teams, one product team, sales reps and a whole variety of other types of employees. So each feature that I work on is probably based on some client feedback, which is getting processed to some coherent features by the product team, broken down into tickets by the product team and/or team leads and architect, estimated on refinements by me and my teammates and only after that given to me as a ticket. For this reason I feel really uncomfortable listing any features that “I developed” in my CV, because they represent collaborative effort, and as far as I know CV is about your personal achievements.
At the same time, I cannot just deviate from my responsibilities and start developing some striking prototypes because it’s not what is expected from me. It’s even hard to set aside a couple of working hours a day to do this. Because managers track our performance each sprint, we are expected to work 8 hours a day on our scrum stuff and it would quickly become apparent that I went beyond the expected threshold. I’m certainly not a 10x engineer in terms of performance to get away with it
The only option I see is try and do some something outstanding in non office hours. But I’m sure it’s the dumbest idea cause it would lead to burnout. Let alone that I want to do other things in my free time like leetcode grinding, sports, social life, etc.
I'd love to hear any advice from someone who has experienced the same.