Issue 8 - Marketing, Bat, and Résumé Polish

Ah, late August. In Wisconsin, it's the time of year when kids are gearing up to head back to school, football is gearing up, and the realization that the weather is about to start getting colder.

Summer is winding down, but this newsletter is just getting started. This month's issue introduces a new command-line tool you might find useful, explores effective marketing, and shares some advice about effective résumés based on my experience as a hiring manager and some patterns I’ve seen.

Let's go!

Marketing is good and good for you.

Developers tend to have a dim view of marketing. Some may outright say they "hate" marketing.

Despite that sentiment, I've observed that developers love being the target of effective marketing strategies. They even become fiercely loyal to a brand, a programming language, a framework, or a platform as a result.

However, it's also my experience that developers are quick to notice inauthentic developer marketing, and that's the kind of marketing they don't like. It's the most common, too. Automatic subscriptions to drip campaigns after you try out a product, random sales calls asking for a "quick conversation" just because you signed up for a mailing list, and the dreaded "sign in to read this article" popup that interrupts you're reading.

There are several effective strategies that resonate with even the most cynical developers, but one of the most powerful strategies is to focus on removing pain points. If you can answer the question "What problems does this solve for me" or "how will this make my job easier," you're going to snag their attention, but you have to be specific. Developers have heard promises and seen that the marketing doesn't match the execution.

Ruby on Rails, React, Visual Studio Code, DigitalOcean, Netlify, Heroku, Gatsby, and Node.js gained adoption due to showing developers that these tools and platforms could help solve developer problems. This message was core to their marketing strategy. Through documentation, community efforts, and direct outreach, they showed how adopting their technology helped developers work faster and smarter.

They then focused on building trust with developers by making promises they could back up. Some of the product offerings offered free trials so developers could get their hands on the product and verify things for themselves. This led to adoption and growth.

Others demonstrated technical excellence by leveraging experts in the field who could advocate for the technology at conferences. And others used technical content creators with subject matter expertise to connect with audiences rather than non-technical content marketers. This authenticity is easy to spot.

You can apply this strategy right now. Whether you're gearing up for the next job hunt or trying to launch your side business that you hope to grow into your primary line of work, being able to tell and show how you or your product can solve someone's painful problem is a quick path to success.

The book The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd is something I recommend you read if you want a crash course in marketing. The author offers excellent advice, although, at times, you might cringe at some of the statements. However, it's one of the best resources I've found that gives you a quick and directed overview with a plan you can implement immediately.

Combine what you learn in that book with what you know about the mindset of developers, and you can build a winning strategy for your product, even if you happen to be that product. After all, an effective job search involves a little bit of marketing.

Embrace marketing. You've put effort into the thing you've created. Let people know about it.

Speaking of things that solve problems, I have a tool I want to share with you.

The bat command

If you spend time on the terminal, you'll probably find yourself reaching for the cat command which lets you see a file's contents on the screen. If the file is large, you'll probably use the less command.

Those commands are great for quick glances at a file, but they're not designed to look at source code.

bat is a replacement for cat and less that displays your content with colors and line numbers and can even show version control changes.

If you're on a Mac and you've got Homebrew installed, you can install this right now with:

brew install bat

Then the next time you need to look at a file, use bat instead of cat or less. If the file is too long, it will paginate just like less does. It even supports Markdown documents nicely.

I've found this tool incredibly helpful over the last few months. I hope you'll give it a try.

Standing Out on Your Résumés

At this point in my career, I've looked at thousands of résumés. I've reviewed them as a hiring manager and a member of several screening committees, and I've reviewed them for students. I'm not an HR professional, but I have seen enough to know what gets you moved forward and what doesn't.

First, the résumé serves one purpose and one purpose only: to get you an interview with the recruiter. It's not going to land you a job. It's the conversation starter and often the only thing people on the hiring committee look at. It's their first impression of you. Make sure it's readable, well organized, and brief but packed with details.

Nobody agrees on the length of a résumé. We're not dealing with paper in most cases, so if you have enough relevant experience and need to go beyond a single page, I don't think this will hurt you, but you should still strive to be concise. Remember, if your résumé gets you the interview, you can go into more detail during that interview.

Second, your résumé needs to fit the job you're applying for. I don't think you need to have a specific résumé for each job you apply for, but if you're a software developer applying for a product manager role and your résumé only includes your experience as a software developer, it's unlikely you're going to move forward.

Look at the job posting. It's going to spell out what skills they expect you to have. Your résumé should have several of them listed clearly. A job posting is the hiring manager's wish list, and they know they won't find a candidate who has every skill listed, so you should apply even if you only meet half of the criteria. But if you only have one or two of the skills listed, you will most likely not make it past the initial screen.

Finally, when you do list the skills and experience, you have to put them into context. Your résumé should tell a story about what you did for your last company so I can see how you'll bring value to mine.

Tell me what you built, what tech you used, and what the result was.

I routinely see bullet points like this:

• Built websites for clients.

That's a job duty. Turn that into an accomplishment:

• Built websites using React that served over one million unique visitors per month.

By showing what you did and what the impact was, I can tell you've built websites that handle significant traffic, and then I can have a discussion with you in the interview about the nuances there.

Your résumé should tell a compelling story about what you will bring to your next company. It should get me, the hiring manager, to demand that my recruiter sets me up on a call with you so I can learn more.

These days, managers get hundreds of applications for a single role. Follow this advice and you'll stand out in the hiring process.

Parting Thoughts

This newsletter continues to be an experiment for me, and I'm hopeful you're getting value out of it as well. I'd love to hear from you about what's working and what you'd like to see. Reach out to me on Twitter. My DMs are open.

I've already started on next month's issue, but I have these things for you to consider until then:

1. What kinds of marketing tactics work on you to convince you to adopt a new product? What things really turn you off?

2. Is your experience section of your résumé a good representation of what you bring to the table? Or is it a list of the responsibilities and duties you performed? What can you do to turn it around if it's the latter?

Once again, thanks for giving me a little space in your inbox and some time out of your day. See you next month!

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