My last article did numbers I didn't expect. A lot of the comments landed on the same line: "okay but did it actually get you hired?"
No. Not yet. And I'm going to be honest about how that's been sitting with me, because the polished "here's what I learned" version of this post was easier to write than the true one.
Eight years managing a Trader Joe's floor. Two years before that answering phones and filing at a front desk. And now, at the bottom, two shipped Linux projects with real users and real GitHub issues from strangers.
Some days that reads like a coherent story to me, the same underlying skill, pointed at three different jobs. Other days it just reads like proof that I've spent a decade doing things that don't count as "real experience" to the people deciding whether I get an interview. I've had recruiters look at those eight retail years like they're a hole in the timeline instead of the thing that taught me how to stay calm when everything's on fire. That one still stings every time it happens, and it's happened more than once.
I keep having to relearn that the resume isn't a record of what I did. It's a translation of what I did into whatever a stranger, or a filter, is willing to recognize as real — and those are not the same document, and some weeks that gap feels less like a communication problem and more like a referendum on whether the last decade of my life mattered.
Writing the same thing twice, and hating that I have to
What's actually helped, even on the days I don't want to do it, is forcing myself to describe one project two completely different ways.
For a software engineer application, My small linux project becomes:
"I built KeyFlip, a Linux utility that disables the built-in laptop keyboard while letting an external keyboard continue working. I designed its safety behavior, tested it on real hardware, packaged it for Fedora, and am continuing to improve it with feedback from Linux developers."
Clean. Technical. No retail in sight, because the project doesn't need the backstory to prove it's real.
For a support or onboarding role, the same project gets reframed around the part where an early version had an edge case that could leave someone typing-blind on their own machine — and how I found it, sat with it, and fixed it before it got worse. Support roles don't care that I know Fedora packaging. They want to know I won't panic when a stranger is frustrated at me for something broken.
I'll be honest, some days rewriting the same work into a different shape for the fifth application of the day just feels exhausting, not clever. It's not always a fun puzzle. Sometimes it's just proof that I have to work twice as hard to be legible as someone with a CS degree would be by default.
The thing I lean on when the rejections stack up
I stopped trying to make my history look like a normal dev's, because it isn't one, and pretending otherwise made everything feel like a lie I was telling in a Google Doc.
KeyFlip and Mochi are real, they're shipped, they get real feedback. But in interviews I keep coming back to something less finished: a Creator Operations Dashboard I'm building on purpose as a capstone, not a side quest — session entry, SQL-backed data, filtering, real deployment, tests, documentation. Less "look at my cute desktop pet," more "this is what I'd actually build on your team." Recruiters who don't care about a keyboard utility sit up a little when they see something shaped like their actual job. That's the closest thing I have to relief in this process — not certainty it'll work, just evidence that I'm not building nothing.
The rejection that actually got under my skin
Most silence is just silence. Application-tracking-system noise, nothing to learn, nothing to feel — I've made peace with most of it, or I try to.
But one recruiter told me directly that the retail years read as a gap, not as experience, because nothing on the page connected the two for them. I sat with that one longer than I'd like to admit. It felt like being told the hardest, most exhausting years of my working life were invisible unless I did extra unpaid labor to make them legible to someone who'd never had to. That's not a fair thing to feel great about. I don't. I rewrote the top of my resume anyway, because being right about the unfairness of it doesn't get me an interview.
Where I actually am, no bow on it
Still job-hunting. Still shipping, some days out of momentum and some days out of stubbornness because stopping feels worse. The dashboard isn't finished. I'm trying to hold the line on shipping the small useful version before I let myself add more, because it's tempting to keep building instead of keep applying — building is the part that doesn't reject you.
I don't have the ending yet. Some weeks I believe the path is working. Some weeks it just feels like I'm shouting my resume into a system that was never built to hear it. Both of those are true right now, and I'm not going to pretend only one of them is.
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