DEV Community: Severin Wiggenhorn

Not a technical writer yet, but want to be? How to build your portfolio of writing samples

Severin Wiggenhorn — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 04:16:22 +0000

When people are interested in pivoting to tech writing, one of the largest obstacles is not having a portfolio of writing samples, often required as part of the job application process.

Building a portfolio can actually be very straightforward and a useful exercise to confirm you’ll enjoy the role if you do get hired.

Portfolio basics

What does a portfolio include?

This varies based on how senior you are and what type of roles you’re applying for, but target 2-3 pieces to start.

Ideally, they’ll be an assortment of different types and lengths such as 1 short Quickstart/README, 1 medium how-to, and 1 longer doc. At least one doc should utilize code samples/snippets or bash commands.

Format the docs using Markdown.

Apply a style guide to your portfolio

Larger companies typically have their own style guide. It doesn’t particularly matter what style guide you use, but apply it consistently across your entire portfolio. Google and Microsoft have detailed publicly available style guides.

Where to put your portfolio?

A common (and simple) approach is to make a public GitHub repository and store your writing samples there as markdown (.md) files. A public GitHub Gist is also a simple way to provide someone a URL to read a rendered version of your Markdown.

GitHub and Markdown are basic skills expected of most tech writers. If these aren’t familiar to you, spend some time searching online as there are many tutorials available.

Crafting your writing samples

What writing have you already done?

Depending what role you’re pivoting from, you may already have writing samples that could be lightly tweaked and be suitable for your portfolio.

Many folks transition from some other writing heavy job such as academia, science writing, grant writing, or law. You could use one sample of this type of work in your portfolio.

Make sure you edit it so it doesn’t contain any confidential or sensitive information from your previous (or current) role such as customer or product names.

If you’re pivoting from software engineering, ideally you’ve already written documentation for features (or side projects) you’ve built. If not, now is a great time to do that. Documentation from my software engineering bootcamp capstone project was one of my initial portfolio pieces. On-call runbooks also make great writing samples as long as they are concise and clear.

Creating new content

There are many opportunities to draft new technical content just for your portfolio.

Find an open-source project and write some READMEs and basic documentation for it. Take existing technical docs and reorganize and rewrite them (just be clear about that in the writing sample, such as adding a note at the top with a link to the original source).

Document how to play tic-tac-toe

A common prompt if someone lacks a technical writing sample is having them document how to play tic-tac-toe. This sounds straightforward and can be done in a brief document, but an experienced tech writer will glean lots from how you structure and organize the doc and how clearly and succinctly you can describe such a familiar game.

Brush up on your editing skills

Editing is a key part of technical writing, whether you’re self-editing your own drafts, peer editing another technical writer, or doing more intensive editing of content drafted by engineers or other subject matter experts (SMEs).

Take some time away from your writing samples and then re-edit them again once you have fresh eyes. Look for any words that aren’t absolutely essential and cut them. Evaluate whether you’re presenting the content in the most logical order. Put the most important idea at the beginning of the sentence rather than the end.

Make sure you actually enjoy the writing and editing

If this exercise wasn’t a fairly enjoyable way to spend 5-10 hours, then technical writing probably isn’t the right choice for you and it’s much better to find that out now!

Heads down writing and editing isn’t the entire job, obviously, but it’s a big part of it. Sometimes people like the idea of writing more than the actual writing, which is totally understandable but an important signal to listen to.

Don’t be tricked into thinking tech writing is just “a less technical version of coding” or “kind of like program or product management but a bit more writing.” Tech writing isn’t just a slightly less stressful, slightly less technical version of being a software engineer. It’s an entirely different career where you’ll be evaluated on a different but overlapping skill set. You will spend A LOT of time writing as a technical writer, untangling thorny sentences, re-editing the same document 3 or 4 times, and meticulously applying a style guide.

There are many similarities to any knowledge worker/white collar job: Going to meetings to understand the problem and what needs to be done. Sitting at a laptop doing stuff (whether code or Google docs or excel sheets or .md files). And nagging people to approve and review stuff.

But that part where you’re sitting at your laptop doing stuff will be many hours of your life, so make sure it’s something you generally enjoy. Writing and coding feel different. Coding may feel more interactive and more tangible and thus much more satisfying for some people. They’re both amazing fun some of the time. But make sure it’s something you enjoy most of the time!

Interview with a recruiter: Everything you've wanted to ask about resumes

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 19:45:02 +0000

Dan Thompson, Recruiter Extraordinaire

Dan is the Managing Director at Vaco Tampa, overseeing a multi-million dollar technology consulting and recruiting practice in the Greater Tampa Bay Area. Since joining the team, he’s helped grow the technology practice into one of the largest divisions at Vaco. He’s passionate about giving back and serves as Chairman of the Hillsborough County Academy of IT and sits on the Advisory Board for Cyber Security Education at the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida. Dan graduated from the University of Florida (Go Gators!) and co-hosts and co-founded Stadium and Gale, the number one-ranked Florida Gators podcast.

What are the most common resume mistakes? What advice do you give over and over?

The biggest thing is showing the results of your work, not just copy and pasting the job description. I know what the job description says, but what were your responsibilities specifically? What value did you bring to the organization? That’s what recruiters and hiring managers are looking for.

I don’t want a bullet that says C# and Angular. I want to know what were you building? What did that project accomplish within the organization? How big was your team? How big was the budget? What were your responsibilities: were you managing or leading teams? Did you have an intern you were directing maybe?

Quantify your work with numbers and facts. But also be clear about the story you’re telling.

What’s most important is that somebody can read your resume and understand what you did.

I love that. One of the ways I try to frame this for people is that everything on your resume should be specific to your experience, like the bullets should be so specific to your projects and impact that no one else could put them on their resume. The bullets are setting up the stories that the recruiters and hiring managers are going to ask about. Because ideally your resume is a story of, I built this thing or had this impact, and that should be what gets the recruiter or HM excited to ask you questions. Does that resonate with you?

Yes, that’s a great way to think about it.

Any very tactical advice on resumes?

Name, city and state where you live, no need for a full address. Have a professional email address and have a working phone number. I’ve encouraged people to get a Google number that they can control a little more, that’s not their personal number. You can control when you take calls and you know every call to that number is related to your job search, which is especially important given the prevalence of spam calls. You don’t want to not answer a job search related call!

Also, and I suspect people aren’t as aware of this, these resumes usually get pushed into a database or application tracking system (ATS). Usually all the formatting gets stripped out and so the content can get a little jumbled, so keep your resume formatting as simple as possible.

Yes, I’ve seen that on the inside, from the hiring side, where the formatting gets messed up. That’s a great call out!

Ok, Dan, I have to ask you this because I see so many LinkedIn posts and hear people talking about this. Are robots auto-rejecting people? That’s not been my experience at any of the 4 companies I’ve worked at where I had a role in hiring, but I want to hear it from an expert.

No! There’s no robot that’s auto-rejecting resumes.

There may be knockout questions, where companies are looking for certain skills, or you need to live in a certain place, certain salary expectations, but every ATS is being controlled by human beings.

What other common mistakes do you see?

Be able to talk about everything that’s on your resume. It happens a lot that people are like I took a course on this or I’ve seen a demo of this or it was a long time ago. I know candidates are just trying to show the breadth of their experience, but if it’s on your resume you need to have professional-level experience with it and be able to speak comfortably about it in an interview.

One of the first things I do when talking to candidates is pick something obscure on their resume and say, tell me about your experience here.

Dan’s Recommendations

▶ https://www.stadiumandgale.com/

▶ https://www.vaco.com/

Dan Thompson on What Recruiters Do and How to Make it Work for You

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sun, 06 Jul 2025 18:03:50 +0000

Dan Thompson, Recruiter Extraordinaire

For people who aren’t familiar, what exactly does a recruiter do?

There are a variety of kinds of recruiters. Some work inside a company, hiring directly for that company. And some are third-party recruiters, where the companies are their clients.

Here at Vaco, we do 3 primary things:

The biggest one is helping connect businesses with top talent. People may be most familiar with this in the context of headhunting where a company wants to fill a leadership or very senior role—Hey Dan, we’re looking for a new CTO for our organization—and they give us a very specific profile of what they’re looking for and we help find the right candidate.

But this sort of direct hire doesn’t just happen at the executive level, we help companies find candidates for all kinds of roles.

And since I know people are probably curious, we get a fee based on the first year salary. [Editor’s note: we’ll talk in more detail about the incentive structure and how recruiters get paid later in the interview.]

Then there’s staff augmentation or contract staffing. Sometimes companies need extra hands on deck but not permanently. Maybe someone is out because of FMLA (Family and Medical Leave Act) or the company is building a new application or doing a big system upgrade and they want a team of developers for 6-12 months, or a tax firm needs extra help for just a couple months during tax season.

And again recruiting firms are paid either through a mark-up on the candidate’s pay rate (and cost of employment) during a staff augmentation assignment, based on hours worked over the course of the contract, or as a percentage of the individual’s salary in a direct hire. It’s important to note that this is a business expenditure, not something that’s “taken” from the candidate’s salary. Recruitment firms are paid out of operating expenses, not payroll expenses.

We also do project-based consulting work, helping companies through digital transformations, building data warehouses, data migration projects, that sort of thing.

If a recruiter reaches out to you about an opportunity, you don’t necessarily need to do the interview, but at least listen! Recruiters are a great ears-to-the-ground source for what’s happening in your local market, how your salary compares to the market, what companies are hiring, who is going through a big growth spurt etc. You can glean a lot of information and knowledge about your market or industry from a recruiter.

[Editor’s note: Whether the idea of recruiters reaching out to you is expected or surprising likely depends a lot on your job and level of experience. In tech, especially software engineering, it’s very common. It’s also very common for mid-level BigLaw associates and above. But in the early part of my career, I had no idea recruiters existed and had never been contacted by one.]

This sounds like a basic question, but why talk to a recruiter at all? How can they help people looking for new opportunities?

Recruiters read hundreds of resumes a day. They can give great feedback on how to improve your resume to make it more competitive. Ask any recruiter you talk with how can I improve my resume, how can I improve my interviewing.

They’re great at giving advice on salary expectations. With helping you understand, hey am I fairly paid? What does someone with my years of experience normally get on the market? And understanding trends in work expectations, are roles remote, hybrid, fully in office.

They have more access to market data than most candidates, but that doesn’t mean they always have good news for you. Still it’s a really helpful second opinion where they can say, if you’re on the higher end of the salary data, it might be a good idea to stay where you’re at because there might not be many opportunities or the opportunities might be slimmer/the process might take longer.

The recruiter can offer all kinds of insights you wouldn’t have otherwise: What’s the interview process like? What’s the company culture like? What’s the hiring manager like? What kind of experience do they have placing people at this company? How long do those people stay there? What do the benefits look like? Which can save you a bunch of time going through the full interview process for someplace that isn’t going to be a good fit.

People at small to mid-sized companies can get pigeonholed only using a certain tech stack and a recruiter can tell you what other tech companies are using and what skills or experience are most in demand. You can try and look up national data, maybe even local data, but it’s pretty limited. A recruiter can share with you what the market is saying for your specific skill set/location/years of experience. They will tell you clients in this industry are looking for XYZ. And armed with that knowledge you can figure out if you can build those skills in your current role or do outside education or what.

What career mistakes do you see people making? What advice do you give your clients that you want more people to hear?

I recommend people try to connect with a recruiter within their first 2-3 years of work experience. It doesn't mean you have to switch jobs, but this information helps you level set against the competition. A lot of people don’t do this enough and end up staying too long at jobs where they’re underpaid, or they aren’t aware of what’s happening in the market and so don’t know there are opportunities available that might be better career investment or might offer better work life balance or whatever your priorities are.

Recruiters can help you understand what skills you need to make the leap to the next level. If I’m in a senior role, what skill set do I need to be a team lead or a manager or a director?

What would you say for folks shy about reaching out to a recruiter? Or worried the recruiter will have no interest in talking to them?

A lot of recruiters, especially at third-party companies, have metrics about how many people they have to meet in a week. If you’re a good candidate that’s interested in exploring more, I would try to connect with them on LinkedIn. In most cases, they’ll be excited to hear from you! Just say, “Hey, I’m interested in exploring the market” and if the recruiter sees potential, they’re going to want to work with you.

I’m interested in exploring the market.

How do you find a recruiter?

A combination of doing your research and going to the places the recruiters are.

For example, if you’re in accounting or finance, research what recruiting firms in your area work in these areas. And then try to get on their radar. Recruiters often go to user groups and meet-up. Ask other people in your network in your field (maybe not your coworkers so they don’t sound any alarms internally haha) if they’ve worked with recruiters or know of any.

The job market is tough right now. There are a lot of folks searching, especially in tech, people coming from the federal workforce. What mistakes or mis-assumptions do people make? What do you wish people knew about job searching?

My number one tip is to stay in touch with people in your network. The best way to get a job is through an internal connection at a company. Talk to your peers. Connect with people on LinkedIn. Go to networking events.

It doesn’t have to be the largest user groups in the area, but go places where there are people who do the same thing you do. The same way talking to a recruiter is valuable, talk to your peers. Ask people how they got into their current company.

Every conversation with someone teaches you a lesson, there’s always something to learn from talking to someone. Take that and figure out how you can apply that lesson to your own job search.

A lot of times people get so focused on “I’ve got to apply to a bunch of jobs” and you do need to do that, but you also need to talk to people.

Referrals work because the company has already vetted that person and if they’re willing to put their name behind you, not only from a skill set perspective, but from a personality, a team fit/company culture perspective, those are really valuable. It saves the company money if they can hire faster or candidates that work out better.

I feel like there’s more you want to say on applying.

Yes! Avoid the easy apply button on LinkedIn and Indeed. Go to the company’s website. Read the job description.

Remember, for LinkedIn and Indeed the client is the job poster, not you, the job seeker. They can charge more for posts the more people they can say are applying. So they’re incentivized to get 1000 people to apply for a post rather than the 400 people who are actually a good fit for the role. This also means the number of people they say have applied may not be fully accurate.

[Editor’s note: One thing I think Dan is particularly insightful about is always seeking to understand the business model and the incentives created. I think he does a great job demystifying that for recruiting and also here. If you understand how the money flows, it helps you understand where the incentives are aligned with yours and where they might diverge.]

Companies are getting spammed by bots and fake resumes, so they’re putting in little tests. Like the job description might say, “don’t put in this phrase in your application,” knowing if you’re using ChatGPT/AI it’s easily confused and might add that phrase instead.

Take the extra step and go to the company website and apply that way. I know it’s frustrating filling out a bunch of different job applications. And then try to find the internal recruiter and just say, hey I just wanted to let you know I applied. And then maybe 2-3 sentences about why you’re a good fit.

How do you find the recruiter for a specific job?

Sometimes the affiliated recruiter is listed on the application. You can try LinkedIn. At smaller companies, you might even be able to figure out who the hiring manager is for a given role.

Submitting a job application is the start of your interaction with the company. You certainly need to do that to be considered. If you have any path to have someone on the inside advocate for you, it won’t get you the job, but it can increase the chances that out of the 1000 resumes, yours at least gets looked at by a human.

Let’s just talk about how recruiters get paid. I suspect this is not super well understood and folks may wonder how well their incentives are aligned with the recruiter or what questions they need to be thinking about here.

Recruiting fees for third-party recruiters are built in as operating costs for the organization, they don’t come out of anyone’s salary. The recruiter’s fee is based on the candidate’s take home salary so the recruiter is incentivized to advocate for you there.

Now, there are some nuances depending on the circumstances. Sometimes it’s not beneficial to be at the higher end of the salary range if you’re not quite at that level. So for example, I would rather advocate a candidate getting $120,000 where I know they’re going to excel than trying to push the company to $140k knowing the candidate doesn’t have quite the seniority or experience to justify it yet.

Recruiters are also interested in ensuring the candidate works out long term. Most recruiters only get paid after someone has worked in the role for 90 days. And this is a long-term relationship business, so we’re really looking to make sure the company is happy because we’ll work with them again, and the candidate is happy because we might end up placing them multiple times during their career.

Should you talk to multiple recruiters, like you’d get multiple quotes to paint your house or get a medical second opinion?

Not every recruiter will have access to every opportunity. A recruiter might be new to the industry or the city. Also, I won’t work with someone leaving a company that is a current client, for example. Find someone you click with, ask for recommendations from people in your network, all the standard advice.

These can be fruitful long-term relationships—I just placed someone I’ve known for 11 years. I’ve never placed him once, but we’ve just kept in touch and I’ve followed his career. I met him when he was a junior developer and now he’s a senior data architect.

That’s amazing. I love stories of how networking pays off in unexpected ways. It’s not a one-time transactional thing. It’s just building relationships with other humans.

Final advice on working with recruiters?

At the end of the day, recruiters are there to work on behalf of clients. Recruiters aren’t your friend or advocate. But they’re a skilled professional who brings insight and perspective you might not have otherwise. They should tell you stuff that you don’t want to hear sometimes. And they’re also a sherpa, an expert, to guide you along your journey.

Subscribe and see other posts on job searching advice written for the engineering mindset: https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/

How to diagnose where your job search is failing

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 19:28:27 +0000

Job searches today are typically involved, multi-step processes that take an immense amount of time and energy on both sides.

A standard tech interview process might entail a resume review, recruiter screen, tech screen or hiring manager (HM) screen, a full loop or on-site consisting of 4-6 additional interviews, and a reference check. My thoughts here are limited to the full-time employment (FTE) interview process as I’m not personally familiar with freelance and contract work.

This lengthy process can be exhausting and overwhelming. How and where should you focus your energy? Revising your resume? Focusing on informational interviews? Heads down for hours on LeetCode to practice for coding interviews? Every rejection or ghosting is further discouragement and can send you spinning in circles increasing your stress and uncertainty.

Everything I say (and everything you read on the internet) should be taken with a healthy dose of salt. For example, while I’ve been deeply involved in the recruiting and hiring process for dozens of roles across multiple companies, I’ve never officially worked as a manager. And the interview process is a bit different for every role and company.

This is a light-weight data-first iterative approach to job searching that aligns with the natural engineering mindset.

Track your applications

Tracking your job search in a spreadsheet with notes about how each step of the process went can be helpful and provide better data for this analysis.

Too many times I've seen someone tell me they were doing a terrible job in interviews but then when we reviewed the data, there was something more specific going on. They were actually doing well in many interviews but having issues in a few specific circumstances. Once we identified a more concrete problem, they were able to fix it.

Review your job search data

Look back over your job search to date and get a sense of how you’re faring comparatively at each stage of the process. What ratio of interviews to applications are you getting?

What ratio of your applications are cold (you just applied online) vs warm (you have a referral or contact with a recruiter or employee at the company)? Are you getting recruiter screens from warm applications but not cold? You’ll always get fewer from cold, but if cold is zero, that’s something to investigate.

How often are you advancing from the recruiter screen to the tech screen? Tech screen to onsite?

Once you have a sense of the first big failure point in the pipeline, that’s a place you’ll want to shift more of your time and energy.

What to do if you’re getting stuck here

Resume review

At bigger companies it’s not unusual to get several thousand resumes for an open role. Typically a recruiter, but sometimes also a HM, will briefly review them to decide whether the applicant should advance to a recruiter screen.

This review is typically a combination of human review in conjunction with AI or other filtering software. Only a small percent of the resumes received will be reviewed by a human, usually those first identified by software as being a particularly strong match.

If you’re failing to get past this stage, two avenues to invest in are networking and revamping your resume. I’ll dive more deeply into common resume mistakes and how to fix them in other posts. But the most common issue I see are resume bullets that read like a job description instead of quantifying the unique impact you made during your time in that role. A good resume offers summaries of interesting stories that the recruiter and HM will be excited to dive into more deeply.

Recruiter screen

Especially for technical roles, recruiters are doing their best to translate from your resume to the job description, but they likely don’t have first-hand technical understanding themselves. As a result, you’ll often need to frame stories and your skills differently for a recruiter than a HM.

Recruiter screens can vary widely but are often a few “Tell me a time when” behavioral questions or asking about your experience with certain domains/tasks/technologies.

You should have 3-5 well prepared (but not excessively rehearsed) stories that you can tweak or shape to be responsive for many common questions. Common pitfalls here include forgetting the details of stories or projects mentioned on your resume, getting too in the weeds and losing the recruiter, or not having a polished succinct narrative on how your experience is relevant to the role. Your answers should not meander or drag on.

Your interviewer is aiming to get as much signal as possible in a limited time. Many folks are too polite to cut people off repeatedly when their answers are circular or unfocused. They just don’t move forward with the candidate.

Once you’ve covered the basics of the story, you can pause and ask what direction the interviewer would like to go in or what specifically they’re interested in hearing more about. “I could speak more to the impacts of the project or the challenges we encountered if that’s of interest?”

If you’re failing to pass recruiter screens, your resume is working but how you’re speaking to those stories could be revamped. Maybe you need to be more succinct. Or maybe you need a clearer narrative for how to speak to your interest in the role and how your previous experience makes you a great fit.

Tech screen / on-site

Went well but you didn’t get the job

Every hire decision truly requires an amazing number of things to all go right. So if you keep making it to on-sites, odds are high you’ll find a new role soon.

If you didn’t get the role but the feedback was positive (for example the classic, you did well but another candidate had more specifically relevant experience), add the folks you interviewed with on LinkedIn. They often won’t give it, but you can always try asking the recruiter for any feedback for how you can improve for the future. If you really hit it off, could thank the hiring manager and ask if they know of any other opportunities you might be a good fit for at that company or if they have connections hiring elsewhere.

The interview reps are also really helpful to gaining confidence and experience.

10+ people often have to say yes to a hire, plus exigent factors like the economy and hiring freezes all have to work out. I’m sometimes amazed that anyone gets hired at all as it feels like such an uphill climb even when you’re inside a company actively trying to fill a role.

Wasn’t great

You’ll want to assess how to split your time between revising for technical and behavioral interviews depending how each went.

Is there any interview type you’re struggling with more? For example, algorithms are fine but system design is hard. Focus your prep accordingly. Post on LinkedIn or ask friends for specific, concrete recommendations like their absolute favorite system design prep resource. Mine is: Grokking the system design interview The more specific your ask, the better advice and suggestions you’ll receive.

A small caveat

If you’re interviewing for a role where the on-sites require a significant amount of prep such as software engineering technical interviews or management consulting case interviews, you’ll have to parallelize and split your time smartly. But putting all your focus on LeetCode won’t help if you can’t get past the resume review or recruiter screens.

Subscribe and see other posts on job searching advice written for the engineering mindset: https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/

Everything you need to know about referrals

Severin Wiggenhorn — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 18:53:01 +0000

What exactly is a referral and why do companies use them?

A current employee of a given company submits the resume of someone they know for an open role (or otherwise vouches for/endorses), which may improve the odds or speed at which their application is reviewed. In essence, the current employee is personally recommending this other person as a good fit for the company/role (though there are nuances).

Are there different kinds of referrals?

Yes, I think this is the part candidates are most likely to misunderstand!

At some companies, especially larger ones, all referrals aren’t created equal. The referrer may have to share quite a bit of information about how they know the person they are recommending and/or sort the referral into one on of several categories.

Common categories of questions on the referral form include:

How do they know you?

Referrers often have to list how they know you. For example, socially or via social media (which means you can’t speak to the quality of the person’s work), worked together previously at the same company, or worked together in a closer capacity such as the same team or a sister team.

The closer the past association, the more weight the referral is likely to carry.

How good is your work?

Some referrals ask the referrer to rank your work on some scale such as is this candidate in the top 50% of people you’ve worked with.

Additional comments

Some referral forms allow the referrer to add freeform notes.

How much do referrals help?

It depends!

It depends on the size of the company, the competitiveness of the role, the current state of the job market, and the strength of the referral.

If the referrer can flag your application directly to the hiring manager, a referral can be super powerful. This is more likely at a smaller company or one where the open role is in close proximity to the referrers team.

If the referrer only knows you via social media, is only doing the referral to be polite, has never worked with you, it’s a larger company and a competitive role, the referral may do basically nothing and you might get a form rejection in under 24 hours.

I’ve personally seen both of these scenarios play out many times. Every combination in between is possible as well.

TL;DR: the better you know someone and the more they can speak to your work, the more powerful the referral is likely to be.

Should I apply first or ask for a referral first?

If you want a referral, try for that first. Some places it’s hard to do a referral if the candidate has already applied/is already in the system.

The two most common versions I’ve seen are the referrer sends you a “referral link” that you apply via instead of the public job posting OR you send them your resume and the job posting and they put in the referral via an internal system.

How can I get one?

This can be tricky. People at big, popular companies may get hit up multiple times a week for referrals.

Start with the people you know best and have worked with most closely as they can give the most helpful referral.

In an effort to be polite and seem less transactional, people sometimes ask to chat with me about how I like my company, how I’m doing, etc. when what they really want is a referral. This is actually a bigger ask on my time than just asking for a referral. Because the hiring process at big companies is so unpredictable, I usually politely defer on giving my thoughts on the company and chatting more about the role until someone actually has an offer. Otherwise the conversation is a waste of time for both parties.

Be thoughtful with your referrals. Don’t ask for referrals to more than 2 roles at the same company. Ask for referrals where you think you’re a strong fit for the open role.

Always provide the job description for the role you’re interested in when you ask for a referral.

A referral is no guarantee! Even when someone gives you a great referral, a recruiter may decide it’s not the right fit, there may already be lots of candidates in the pipeline, the role may already be filled, the posting may have been made with the plans of filling it via internal transfer and so on. There are so many reasons even with a referral that you may not even get an interview. Still, they can be a powerful tool and are worth trying for roles you’re really excited about!

The aftermath

This should go without saying, but bring your very best, most prepared self to any interviews you get out of a referral.

But also don’t stress! Anyone who frequently gives referrals is well aware that the candidate may not get the job for any number of reasons. Don’t feel bad or worry about embarrassing your referrer if you did your best.

But do thank them even if it doesn’t work out! They may or may not already know the status from internal systems, but drop them a quick note along the lines of:

I wanted to let you know that unfortunately didn’t work out but thank you again for the referral. I hope I’m in the position to return the favor for you someday and that we get the chance to work together again!

Subscribe and see other posts on job searching advice written for the engineering mindset: https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/

The two biggest networking mistakes when job searching: How to turn strangers into lasting connections

Severin Wiggenhorn — Tue, 27 May 2025 16:33:31 +0000

The internet has lots of advice on networking that ranges from painfully self-evident to makes-you-feel-sleazy. But networking doesn’t have to be transactional, awkward, or burdensome.

Your network is really just the people you already know. All the people—your mom’s coworker, your college roommate’s little sister, your old boss.

And networking is simply the act of meeting new people through the people you already know. Informational interviews (Zoom or IRL) or coffee chats are traditional ways of doing this, but you can meet people anywhere (on the bus, at a party, buying groceries). There’s lots of useful advice out there on how to build and maintain relationships (and ideally you invest in this at times you aren’t job searching). Here’s a resource I’ve been recommending to folks for years: How to Become Insanely Well-Connected.

There are four main phases to an information interview: the reach out, the conversation itself, the ask, and the follow up. I’ll talk more about the mechanics of how to conduct high-value, low-stress informational interviews in another post. But there are two common mistakes I see job seekers commit over and over again in the last two steps of the process that are easily corrected. They don’t:

Have a clear ask at the end of the meeting or call
Let folks know how the story ended/keep the relationship warm

What to ask for?

Job seekers often think/hope the point of the informational interview is to get a referral from that person.

But this risks tainting the entire conversation with a transactional vibe, both parties know the only goal is a referral and the conversation itself is a pretense. And it also misunderstands how referrals work at many companies (I’ll get into this more in another post).

Instead, ask them if they can introduce you to 1-2 of their connections. This is a far more doable request for them and will benefit you more in the long run.

If you truly hit it off with the person, they will often offer a referral unprompted. If so, great! But otherwise give them as specific a request as possible for other folks you’d like to meet.

I’d love to be connected with other folks who transitioned from law to software engineering.

Do you know of anyone else who switched practice areas as a mid-level associate? I’d love to hear more about their journey and approach.

I’m interested in meeting more folks that went from management back to an IC role to better understand the pros and cons and how they made their decision.

Tell people how the story ends.

Don’t only reach out when you need something from someone. If they’ve taken the time to talk with you at least once, they’re a bit invested in your story, like they’ve watched one episode of a long-running TV series.

There are three great points to follow up with a new connection.

Shortly after you talk.

Thank them for their time and tell them something specific and helpful you learned from them. This makes them feel great about themselves and will encourage them to share that useful information with others in the future.

This is also a natural and non-cringey moment to follow up on any action items discussed during the conversation.

Dear Sidney,
Thank you again for your time. It was so helpful to hear how you used transitioning between teams at the same company to gain experience on multiple high impact projects and how you leveraged that into a promotion. You mentioned a couple contacts who had done similar things at other companies that might be willing to chat with me? I’d love to be connected with anyone that you think would be helpful.

After you meet with the people they introduced you to.

Send a short email thanking them for the intro and sharing something specific you learned from that conversation.

Dear Sidney,
Thank you so much for connecting me with John and Jane. John offered great insight about what it’s like to work at a mid-sized company and how to frame my startup experience so it will be relevant. Jane had some great resources on preparing for technical interviews that I’m excited to dive into.

Once you find a new position/other milestone in your career or job search.

Folks love good news! People love to hear how the story turned out and especially that they were helpful in your search. It also provides an opportunity to reach out where you aren’t asking for anything. And now they also know they have a connection at your new company. You never know, they may have a question or request for you before long!

Thank you again for talking with me back in June. I’m so excited to let you know that I’ve accepted a role at X working on Y. John ended up introducing me to the Hiring Manager, so I never would have heard about the position without our conversation. I think this will be a great chance to grow both my leadership and technical skills.

These approaches may feel formal or old fashioned, but they can be translated to your own style. Like anything, the more you practice, the easier it gets. Networking and job searching often involve asking for help which is uncomfortable and scary, but these approaches make it easier and more enjoyable for people to help you.

Subscribe for more posts on job searching: https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/

Do you know what happens to your resume formatting when you apply to a job and how it can get garbled by an ATS? 🤯 https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/p/interview-with-a-recruiter-everything-you-ve-wanted-to-ask-about-resumes

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:58:58 +0000

Do you know what happens to your resume formatting when you apply to a job? I’d never heard of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or how it can garble your beautiful, fancy formatting. 🤯 https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/p/interview-with-a-recruiter-every

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sun, 25 May 2025 18:54:04 +0000

What is technical writing? Or the most fun job you’ve never heard of

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:44:42 +0000

But before understanding what it is, why should you care?

My personal hot take is tech writing is an under-considered gem in the corporate tech world. You don’t have to be on-call like a software engineer. It’s better paid than other writing roles like UX, copy, or marketing. And involves less nagging and fewer meetings than a TPM. Because the combination of skills required is unique (but developable for many people) it can be a less competitive space (smaller pond, bigger fish).

What is technical writing?

Newspapers and blogs are for information. Novels are for entertainment. Technical writing is to help someone complete a specific task.

IKEA assembly instructions are a kind of technical writing. But in terms of the modern job market, the most common example of technical writers are the people who draft, structure, and polish a SaaS company’s API integration guide aimed at helping their customers call their API.

The goal of technical writing is to be clear, concise, and get your user through their task as quickly as possible. This requires the ability to ask the right technical questions—what’s this for, why does someone need it, what users won’t this work for, how do you test it’s working as expected. And then take that information and present it in a readable, organized, logical, and crisp way that speaks on an intuitive level to software engineers and how they think.

What kind of roles are there?

I’ll limit this to the software space as that’s what I know best.

Technical writing roles can fall into a few different buckets depending on the audience you write for. Most roles are external facing—you author API references, how-tos, and integration guides to help your customer’s use your company’s products.

For more technical products, docs might cover what they do and how to use them more generally (think Kafka, graphQL, Prometheus).

External tech writing can also include support content focused around debugging or resolving common user issues (and might cover less technical issues like how to configure a certain flow via UI vs via CLI/code).

One downside of external facing work is that writers may be subject to deadlines for product launches. And everyone always leaves documentation to the last minute, assuming “that’s the easy part” much to the writer’s (and user’s) chagrin.

Much rarer are internal facing technical writing roles, where you help software engineers within a company write better documentation to improve adoption of tools they’re building, to reduce the time engineers spend answering questions from other engineers, to help incidents get resolved faster, and generally to improve developer productivity.

My former manager Dave Nunez, has a great deep dive on why internal documentation is vital: Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups.

Personally, transitioning from software engineering to an internal facing technical writing role was perfect—being internal facing meant we could move fast, take an iterative and creative approach, and add in touches of whimsy and humor to get and keep a user’s attention. I could immediately leverage my ability to think like, relate to, and talk with software engineers. And I had direct access to my users to understand what they needed and whether what we were doing was working. I also got to do lots of teaching others to write (office hours, curriculum development, templates, style guides) in addition to writing myself, which I really enjoy.

Example Slack post for internal tech writing role

This doesn’t sound like that much fun?!

Fun is in the eye of the beholder. And there’s likely a ceiling on how fun any job can be.

Compared to software engineering

I love getting to talk to and think like a software engineer and enjoy finding creative ways to convince them writing matters. Pattern matching, building mental models, and thinking about/understanding software at the architectural level is fun.

I don’t have to write yet another CRUD API, write tests, or implement detectors.

I get to interview super smart engineers about the things they know best. And then I have the freedom and creativity to explain the things I learned in words. I get to help people directly—the subject matter expert (SME) will get to work on other things instead of answering repetitive questions and other engineers will be unblocked and able to complete their tasks more easily.

I’m not going to break anything or take down a service. I’m not on call and don’t ever get paged.

Unlike coding, where after 4 hours of work you might be in a worse state than when you started (your devbox broken, an upgrade borked), with writing input generally equals output. After 4 hours, I almost certainly have a solid draft, even if it’s not perfect and will need further revision with fresh eyes.

And after lots of struggle, when you finally lock in on the right structure for information either within a doc or across a series of docs (information architecture in tech writer lingo) it’s as satisfying as winning at Tetris. For me, that’s the same endorphin hit as solving a logic puzzle on the LSAT or fixing a bug with code.

Compared to writing and legal jobs

It’s not adversarial. Despite my background as a collegiate debater, I’ve learned I prefer a collaborative environment where we’re all (at least theoretically) rowing in the same direction.

Big tech job perks—salary, stock, (relative) stability.

There aren’t that many people with both technical and writing skills. There are also fewer tech writing jobs. But the competitive landscape is generally more favorable than many writing roles.

High novelty. I’m always learning about something new. The average project length is short. And people actually read what I write!

What other kinds of writing roles are there?

Lots!

Arguably law, grant writing, proposal writers (for example for Requests for Proposals – RFPs), scientists, science journalism, and financial writing are types of technical writing and could be framed as relevant experience to technical writing roles, but there’s lots of other writing jobs too.

Copywriting (blogs, white papers, case studies, brochures), UX writing/content design (the words that help users navigate a user interface) are two other common writing roles that most tech companies will have.

Alright, I’m curious and want to know more. What’s the interview process like? How do I pivot to tech writing? What are the pros and cons of tech writing? What about salary? What’s a day in the life like?

Great questions—these require their own post, coming soon! Subscribe so you don't miss out: https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/

What is technical writing? Or the most fun job you’ve never heard of

Severin Wiggenhorn — Sat, 24 May 2025 00:44:42 +0000

But before understanding what it is, why should you care?

What is technical writing?

Newspapers and blogs are for information. Novels are for entertainment. Technical writing is to help someone complete a specific task.

What kind of roles are there?

I’ll limit this to the software space as that’s what I know best.

For more technical products, docs might cover what they do and how to use them more generally (think Kafka, graphQL, Prometheus).

My former manager Dave Nunez, has a great deep dive on why internal documentation is vital: Investing in Internal Documentation: A Brick-by-Brick Guide for Startups.

Example Slack post for internal tech writing role

This doesn’t sound like that much fun?!

Fun is in the eye of the beholder. And there’s likely a ceiling on how fun any job can be.

Compared to software engineering

I don’t have to write yet another CRUD API, write tests, or implement detectors.

I’m not going to break anything or take down a service. I’m not on call and don’t ever get paged.

Compared to writing and legal jobs

It’s not adversarial. Despite my background as a collegiate debater, I’ve learned I prefer a collaborative environment where we’re all (at least theoretically) rowing in the same direction.

Big tech job perks—salary, stock, (relative) stability.

There aren’t that many people with both technical and writing skills. There are also fewer tech writing jobs. But the competitive landscape is generally more favorable than many writing roles.

High novelty. I’m always learning about something new. The average project length is short. And people actually read what I write!

What other kinds of writing roles are there?

Lots!

Great questions—these require their own post, coming soon! Subscribe so you don't miss out: https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/

DEV Community: Severin Wiggenhorn

Not a technical writer yet, but want to be? How to build your portfolio of writing samples

Portfolio basics

What does a portfolio include?

Apply a style guide to your portfolio

Where to put your portfolio?

Crafting your writing samples

What writing have you already done?

Creating new content

Document how to play tic-tac-toe

Brush up on your editing skills

Make sure you actually enjoy the writing and editing

Other recommended articles

Interview with a recruiter: Everything you've wanted to ask about resumes

Dan Thompson, Recruiter Extraordinaire

What are the most common resume mistakes? What advice do you give over and over?

Any very tactical advice on resumes?

Ok, Dan, I have to ask you this because I see so many LinkedIn posts and hear people talking about this. Are robots auto-rejecting people? That’s not been my experience at any of the 4 companies I’ve worked at where I had a role in hiring, but I want to hear it from an expert.

What other common mistakes do you see?

Dan’s Recommendations

Other recommended articles

Dan Thompson on What Recruiters Do and How to Make it Work for You

Dan Thompson, Recruiter Extraordinaire

For people who aren’t familiar, what exactly does a recruiter do?

This sounds like a basic question, but why talk to a recruiter at all? How can they help people looking for new opportunities?

What career mistakes do you see people making? What advice do you give your clients that you want more people to hear?

What would you say for folks shy about reaching out to a recruiter? Or worried the recruiter will have no interest in talking to them?

How do you find a recruiter?

The job market is tough right now. There are a lot of folks searching, especially in tech, people coming from the federal workforce. What mistakes or mis-assumptions do people make? What do you wish people knew about job searching?

I feel like there’s more you want to say on applying.

How do you find the recruiter for a specific job?

Let’s just talk about how recruiters get paid. I suspect this is not super well understood and folks may wonder how well their incentives are aligned with the recruiter or what questions they need to be thinking about here.

Should you talk to multiple recruiters, like you’d get multiple quotes to paint your house or get a medical second opinion?

That’s amazing. I love stories of how networking pays off in unexpected ways. It’s not a one-time transactional thing. It’s just building relationships with other humans.

Final advice on working with recruiters?

How to diagnose where your job search is failing

Track your applications

Review your job search data

What to do if you’re getting stuck here

Resume review

Recruiter screen

Tech screen / on-site

Went well but you didn’t get the job

Wasn’t great

A small caveat

Everything you need to know about referrals

What exactly is a referral and why do companies use them?

Are there different kinds of referrals?

How do they know you?

How good is your work?

Additional comments

How much do referrals help?

Should I apply first or ask for a referral first?

How can I get one?

The aftermath

The two biggest networking mistakes when job searching: How to turn strangers into lasting connections

What to ask for?

Tell people how the story ends.

Shortly after you talk.

After you meet with the people they introduced you to.

Once you find a new position/other milestone in your career or job search.

Do you know what happens to your resume formatting when you apply to a job and how it can get garbled by an ATS? 🤯 https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/p/interview-with-a-recruiter-everything-you-ve-wanted-to-ask-about-resumes

Do you know what happens to your resume formatting when you apply to a job? I’d never heard of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS) or how it can garble your beautiful, fancy formatting. 🤯 https://climbandpivot.beehiiv.com/p/interview-with-a-recruiter-every

What is technical writing? Or the most fun job you’ve never heard of

But before understanding what it is, why should you care?

What is technical writing?

What kind of roles are there?

This doesn’t sound like that much fun?!

Compared to software engineering

Compared to writing and legal jobs

What other kinds of writing roles are there?

What is technical writing? Or the most fun job you’ve never heard of

But before understanding what it is, why should you care?

What is technical writing?

What kind of roles are there?

This doesn’t sound like that much fun?!

Compared to software engineering

Compared to writing and legal jobs

What other kinds of writing roles are there?