This past year, I knew it was time to move on from my current position to another position in Microsoft. It was the right thing to do. As part of that, I wrote my resume from scratch for informationals across the Microsoft campus for people I didn’t know who were open enough to have me drop by.

I decided to put a public version of it up: Eric Richards (EricRi) Resume.

What did I learn?

  1. I’m still not a very good resume writer. I’m wordy. I admire people who have worked developing software as long as I have (16 years, whew!) and can still write an appropriate one-page resume.
  2. I’ve done a lot over the years, justifying the gray in my beard.
  3. I’m very proud of my time working at EPOS, which was a crazy start-up environment company that was always cash-short. I learned an incredible amount there… good and bad.
  4. At EPOS, I met with customers regularly. At Intel, I met with customers regularly. At Microsoft… only on rare occassions have I met with customers directly. That’s worth changing.
  5. There’s no way to sum up all the cool stuff I’ve had my hands in. I comfort myself in remembering that most application developers get their hands deep into really cool code and really cool situations.

I always tell people on my team to keep their resume up-to-date, usually after their yearly review. You never know. Anyway, I’m going to take my own advice and do my best not only to keep the resume up to date, but also to craft it over and over to be more precise and more brief.

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