I recently saw this post about putting dev.to on your resume, and I thought it was very helpful! I had put dev on my resume for some positions that were more specific to writing, but now I think I will keep it on there for all jobs. Having top posts on here is definitely one of my greatest/most measurable achievements as a very junior dev.
Before this, I "had dev.to on my LinkedIn" but only as part of my "featured articles," the publications section, and a link to my profile.
So after seeing the resume post, I thought I could go another step in adding to my Experience section. I have the following currently:
But imposter syndrome always has me worried that this is somehow... dishonest. I've always thought the Experience section on LinkedIn was solely for employment where you were paid. But... maybe that's too strict. So I wanted to post this and get general thoughts on it.
Top comments (28)
Indeed, I think that the idea that "the Experience section on LinkedIn was solely for employment where you were paid" is too strict.
Try to see LI as a way for a possible future employer to get an idea who you are and what makes you tick. Nothing better for this person to see that you are passionate about a certain subject. I am a voluntary webmaster for my swimming club and I added it to LI. Also one of my open source pet projects is on my LI profile. It is so much part of me that I want it to be known if someone is finding out who I am.
In my opinion, this is a good thing. Also, if you're YouTuber and you are doing tutorials on youtube. It shows the passion you have for the field. The question is when do you put on LinkedIn? When you have a lot of views? Or have more than 100 posts? It really looks good on your LinkedIn!
I would say it depends on your previous experience and your goals..
If you are aiming for a job in very corporative big company then you should probably put it when you have already audiance..
But if you are junior and just stared I guess 10 posts and 5k views should be enough for you to put it there.. :)
Btw: I know one YouTuber who got laid off from Facebook becouse he had YouTube channel. :)
Yeah I would say it depends, put your self in point of recruiter and understand if it would be valuable in his eyes..
Here is video of that YouTuber: youtu.be/2pIJoPkh9IU
This Kind of Post is a Motivation for Me, as I started to write on the Dev.to but then after writing one or two articles I leave it due to some study and work reasons.
Now looking at this article I am thinking of starting to write new articles as well. I guess I should write at-least one article per week regarding different aspects of the Software Development.
By the Way a Nice way to show interests in reading and writing area in terms of Software Development.
LinkedIn is a joke.
Don't take the experience section that serious. The vast majority of profiles makes up titles for positions anyway.
Adding a section about being an author on Dev.To, and sharing the impact you have made on the platform is the furthest from dishonest that you can get. (Unless you are making the numbers up).
Excuse me, sir! My title is totes super cereal!
(specifically written to mock all the taglines stuffed with cringey buzzwords on LinkedIn)
My experience section is legit though. Education and certs too, but I use them to push back against the pointless obsession with them.
There was publications section on LinkedIn put your dev.to link there :)
I think for HR recruiters every bit of information about you helps..
If they see you are junior programmer but actively participating in this community and creating good content it will just be big plus for you :)
Yes I had my posts in publications and featured before this! The experience section is just the main part of a LinkedIn profile it seems, and is much more prominent than those other sections. I think even the publications section is one of the last, and you have to expand to see info, so it's easy to miss.
It's similar I guess to some people who recommend putting your coding bootcamp in your 'experience' section. Without one of these, my entire 'experience' section is non-technical.
I would guess it could get the job done while you don't have experience in IT field.. afterwards I would avoid it.. but that's my personal opinion..
Meanwhile while you are junior programmer without much of work experience that you can put on resume.. looks fine :) #goodluck
I completely agree with your Point of View. And What is your opinion for example 'bout a Senior Software Engineer with more than 10'yrs of experience?
Cause I'm starting here in dev.to yesterday. And my objective goal is that I thought "Is time to try to reserves sometime, and to expand sharing to all that I have been doing and updated for years in generalists areas". Cause so much of us Dev, certainly could be agregates value with knowledge and practices experiences.
Success!
Eh, I'm a little sketched out at the idea simply because of how LinkedIn uses those kinds of experiences across the site. If someone clicks on dev.to, they'll see you as an employee of the company because that's how LinkedIn cross-references the experience section.
On the other hand, though, since LinkedIn added "types" of roles to the experience section, you aren't implying full-time employment. It could instead be something like Self Employed which is more true being a blogger without specific quality metrics. I wouldn't say Freelancer since there's no one judging the merit and worth of your work blogging to the void.
Thank you for this! This is a good point, and I had left that field blank exactly because of what you said, I didn't want to imply that I was a hired employee of the dev.to company. I will change it to self-employed.
Could you share some tips for getting top posts?
Sure! Maybe I'll write a post on it 😂 and honestly - not just saying this to be modest - I've only had 2 'top posts' and I'm still not totally sure how I did it! I think tagging/writing about the most popular tags (you can view tags by popularity but definitely JS and react are up there) is the biggest factor. Use the 'manage' option to select an experience level and tweet suggestions. I'm not a big twitter user but I follow some accounts that usually retweet my posts, and definitely when the official DEV twitter shares my posts, that's huge. I try to put a lot of thought into format/using catchy cover photos and gifs throughout the posts. I generally feel like tutorials/"how tos" are the most popular topics. My only 2 'top posts' were a tutorial and an 'explainer' for beginners, so those seem like generally good categories. How-tos for things a lot of people are interested in making, and walkthroughs/explanations for some framework/algorithm/library that maybe a lot of people use but haven't had the time to deep-dive into the details of
Cool, Thanks for the reply
I always think it's a bad idea to use metrics like followers and view counts. How many people "liked" your post has very little bearing on how good quality it was. Having a lot of followers on one platform is often the result of bringing them over from another. That sort of thing.
If more people did this, then recruiters (or whatever the audience is) would start measuring one person against another. At that point suddenly it becomes a popularity contest and, by definition, 99% of us will lose.
I think it's good to be proud of what you've done, but to pitch it as a way you've contributed to the tech community at large, and how you have interests that persist after 1730 on a Friday afternoon.
I agree, but sadly, I hear so much that recruiters/employers are only looking at numbers in a resume :/ so I really focus on those things in my bullet points because it's impossible to add any differentiation to my accomplishments, unless I win some kind of additional award I guess? But I also link to my posts in my resume/linkedin, so it's like the numbers of likes/followers is just to catch a recruiter's attention, but hoping they will actually read my posts to assess their quality. I like what you say about how to pitch it though.
Thank you for this post. Your work and content is fantastic.
I’ve been writing a post a week for a few months now, but wasn’t quite sure if I could put it on my resume or LinkedIn. This has me rethinking that. 👍🏼
Personally I think if you have 250k rep on stackoverflow, or you have sold thousands of training programs on udemy or courseera, or have 2 million followers on youtube or twitch, it definitely belongs somewhere if you wanted to showcase it.
I'd probably list it under
Accomplishmentsthough, maybe as an "Organization" or "Project"