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
• PhD at T5, First Author Research Paper, TA for Optimization Theory
• Andy Byron: CEO of Astronomer

In tech, if you’re feeling lost or wondering which direction makes sense for you, these are the crowning achievements to aspire to.

• Excelling in tough academic or competitive settings (IMO, IOI, Putnam, ACM-ICPC World Finals)
• Publishing meaningful research as a first author at a top conference (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR)
• Building an open-source project that others actually adopt and contribute to
• Starting a company that reaches a real user base or solves a tangible problem
• Pursuing advanced study at a university with strong research culture
• Growing into senior/staff roles at major tech companies or high-growth startups
• Working at research-driven orgs where the frontier is being pushed
• Joining a startup early and helping it scale into something impactful
• Leading a research lab or becoming a PI at a strong 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.