Make it clear what your passion is, what you've learned already, and what you want to learn. Then apply everywhere that looks good. You'll do fine.

The best actionable advice I can give you is: put Caltech on your resume with your years of attendance, leave off your GPA entirely, and indicate in text under that that it's incomplete. You'll need a compelling narrative around why it's incomplete (which is admittedly difficult and usually circumstance-specific) or why it doesn't matter too much given that you've done X. X is something impressive, uncommon, and shows intelligence and initiative. As an example, my Xs were getting press in lifehacker for a side project and doing well in a FANG hackathon while in school.

For jobs, I think a common myth is that your credentials/resume is hugely important. From what I've seen, this is both true and false. The _specifics_ of your resume don't really matter 99% of the time, only that they're interesting. Also, keep in mind most resumes are screened by a real, live human - being authentic and passionate can help out as a break from the BS a recruiter sees day-to-day (but do think about what a recruiter would be looking for at a glance). After you clear the resume filter, you're on a similar playing field vs. every other candidate. And then it's up to you and your ability to pass interviews - that's a whole other topic which I won't cover here =P

If it helps, feel free to reach out through linkedin or email in my profile. Stay focused and keep your chin up!

1. Don't include graduation dates in your resume, just the University/School name and Major(s) 2. Truncate your resume to just slightly over the required years of experience. e.g., include past 12 years experience for a job which requires 10+ years 3. Keep your resume to under 3 pages (max). Nobody has the time to wade through an 8 page resume, even if you have worked on the most awesome projects at the start of your career

Seemed to work for me

1. Think of what you'd like to be doing and accentuate those achievements that reinforce your past success in the areas that will allow you to do more of what you want.

2. In my experience, generalist experience often helps you in tricky situations once you have the job. But, it doesn't win you jobs. Recruiters will gloss over that stuff or even simply reject your CV. Accentuate your strongest skills and achievements that clearly demonstrate them.

In the current job market, you want to position yourself as someone who consistently delivers above average results that can't be off-shored. So all those learning experiences (failed startups) are best papered over.

You can see it here: http://russelluresti.com/resume/ (it prints basically the same way).

Most of what you hear in terms of resume rules is kind of nonsense. The whole "one page only" thing I think works fine for the start of your career, but I'm not going to limit myself to it. I also believe that talking about specific metrics, while it can be helpful, is really the opposite of what matters.

I believe that what got me my first couple of jobs was my cover letter (or the content of my website - they're usually pretty similar). Resumes don't usually excite people. There are a few extremely clever resumes out there that make you take notice, but the rest are usually a collection of bullet-points, and bullet-points aren't exciting.

If you want to to get noticed, don't tell people WHAT you do (every resume does that), tell people WHY you do it; this is what will make you stand out and has a much better chance of creating excitement. Specifically, talk about ethos. If you and your potential hiring company align there - on your beliefs and motivations - they're going to be excited for you.

This generally goes against the normal advice people give for cover letters where they tell you to focus on talking about what you can do for the company and how you can be an asset. That advice is bad advice for this community (development, design, anything at all in the creative field). Instead, convince them that you care about the same things; that the passion that drives them as an organization is the passion that drives you as an individual. That's how you stand apart from your competition.

And if you can't, with a straight face, say how your values align with the values of the company you're applying to, you're applying to the wrong company.

Note: I originally started communicating this way on my own material after watching this - https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_insp...

- Your tag line claims you’re an ML expert but you say you have 7 years of work experience and your LinkedIn doesn’t have any educational experience. I disagree with the necessity of degrees but 7 years of largely several month stints and no degree is hardly enough experience to be considered an expert in anything. If you’re into ML, that’s fine to put there but it’ll be off putting if there’s a stolen valor element to your profile.

- You have way too much written for some of your experiences. You were at CRATUSTECH for 7 months. If what you did was amazing enough to warrant what you wrote there, your previous managers would be knocking at your door right now. Pair things down so you don’t come off as inflating your contributions.

- You’re presenting your experiences in a confusing way. You have so much overlap that it’s hard to ascertain what your career narrative was. Most people who are experts in something weren’t able to reach expert level knowledge while jugging multiple jobs. Focus on your narrative so employers can determine if you’re the right fit.

- You’re commenting too much on stuff. No one is ever impressed by people’s comments online and the more opinions you share in comments the more liability it is for employers who already get to be picky right now. This isn’t to say you said anything wrong but if it were me, I’d just delete them to now have a busy activity section.

- Lastly, you need a better profile picture. If you want people to take you seriously put a better foot forward here. Even just a decently lit selfie. Don’t crop some photo of you and someone else out on a hike or whatever. Doing an activity is fine, but pose, smile, be by yourself.

Hope this helps.

Here's what I would see as a hiring manager if this was distilled down to a resume:

1. H.S. Diploma

2. Worked help desk and wiring jobs for 15 years with little to no upward career progression

3. No particular portfolio of work you can point to

4. Personally, given this background, you've ended up with a new family. I don't know if you're struggling to support them or not, but I'm guessing with help desk jobs it's probably a struggle.

All this together can read to a hiring managers as "not responsible or forward thinking enough to trust with a chance. May not actually know how to do the kind of long-term hard work I need for more senior/higher paying positions."

Even with a change in any of those four bullet points, you would read as a better candidate.

1. College degree instead of H.S. Diploma

2. Upward career progression

3. A portfolio of work

4. Family issues are not part of the conversation since your personal issues are not the hiring manager's concern, this bullet doesn't even exist.

I'm not saying you need to have all 4, but any improvement in any of them would help. You don't have to have a college degree if your 15 years of experience showed a progression in roles and responsibilities. Or none of that would matter if you had a bunch of awesome projects up someplace for an employer to look at.

Or with no changes in 2,3 or 4, in 15 years it never occurred to you to go hit the local community college and start on what might even look like a degree path? (I say this one with lots of authority since I was once in a similar situation as you, but I finally got the clue after only 4 years of suffering in shitty jobs).

You can't change #1 quickly, even if you started today, that would be years of hard work. Harder than you can realize right now (I'm speaking from personal experience)

#2 might be a framing issue, you might need to rethink how you present your prior work so that if there was any kind of increase in roles and responsibility it's reflected in your work history (and in how you present yourself during interviews.

#3 is also long-term, but even some github projects that do automatic security audits or test for vulnerabilities, things that a few weeks of learning shell scripts or python could probably get you, those would be huge on your resume. Being able to talk intelligently about those things during an interview would be even better.

#4 here's some tough talk. Your personal issues are of no concern to prospective employers. They honestly don't care, and anything they know about is likely to make them concerned about your reliability as a corporate asset.

#5 Finally, certificates are touchy things, they might open some doors, but not as many as just having a college degree would. Most certifications are barely worth the paper they're printed on. If you are really interested in computer security (a very good, fast growing industry with excellent pay and plentiful job openings waiting for you to apply) you need to get into a college degree program and work towards at least a B.S. in Computer Science, Computer Security or Information Systems and then get CISSP certified.

Here's some even tougher talk, to even be considered for a CISSP certificate you have to have had 5 years of 40-hour/wk work experience in 2 of 10 work domains. https://www.isc2.org/cissp-domains/default.aspx This is the level of candidate that professionals in the field are looking for, full-stop.

You can also become an Associate of (ISC)2 and you'll then have six years to get the necessary experience. https://www.isc2.org/associates/default.aspx

If that's too much, remember an employer is going to think "this guy can't even commit to a real certification program, why should I hire him?". Scout job postings you want, and look at the requirements, that's your guide for what is being looked for. Talent is not one of them.

If this is what you want, you need to start today and do everything necessary to make it happen. You're 15 years behind at this point. But you can make it up.

If this is all too much, you might rethink and go a different direction. A portfolio of tools, a blog on your topic of interest, participation in communities of interest (start networking NOW) all need to be there when you apply for that next, better, job.

#6: okay really finally. You need to start thinking in terms of career and not job. A job is where you go exchange labor for money. You go from job to job, the pay might be better, it might be worse, but they aren't building blocks that get you anywhere in particular. A career is a tower, each place you work gives you building material for that tower and you slowly build up as high as you're capable of going. Jobs are what you do when you're just out of highschool and looking to score some gas money. Careers are what you do to prepare for eventual retirement and raise a family.

I know I'm being harsh, but I know lots of guys in your same place and can't seem to connect the dots, even after decades of walking in place.

Also, make sure what you rock at is big and clear and up-front and featured. Because you hope your resume is being read by somebody who doesn't just read resumes all day.

Then put keyword soup at the bottom for recruiters, if you need to.