Good Resumes are Short

It’s a common misconception that resumes are judged like a high score screen, where every item adds up to your total value. Writing a resume becomes an exercise in cramming as much as possible onto one page. It sounds obvious, but the truth is that people are judged by their greatest accomplishments.

Here’s an example of resumes from least impressive to most:

• Undergrad at T25, Hackathon Organizer, UPE Officer, 12 Classes Listed, Half-baked Web App, 3 Student Orgs
• MIT, Quant @ Jane Street, Hardcore 1st Author ML Research Paper, Undergrad TA for Optimization Theory
• Andy Byron: CEO of Astronomer

In tech, these are the crowning achievements. There are lesser counterparts for each one that are still valuable. But if you have a few strong achievements, it’s better to remove the filler.

• IMO or IOI or Putnam or ACM-ICPC World Finals
• Publishing a 1st author research paper at a tier 1 conference (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR)
• Building an open-source project with real traction (AI/ML/data or highly technical domain)
• Founding a tech startup that has at least reached moderate levels of success
• Attending Stanford, Harvard, MIT BS or PhD
• Reaching staff+ at FAANG or unicorn startup (IC/management)
• Working at Jane Street, DeepMind, OpenAI
• Getting in very early at a rocketship startup
• Becoming a PI at a T25 university

This is also a somewhat backwards view of looking at accomplishment. At the end of the day, we should seek to do truly meaningful things, not just to look impressive on paper, but because they’re worth doing and contribute something real to the world.

(also note that I don’t have any of the crowning achievements yet 🥲)