Latest news with #RitvikaNagula
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
I'm a software engineer at Microsoft. Here are the résumé tips that landed me 4 job offers, including from Amazon and eBay
Ritvika Nagula, an engineer at Microsoft Azure, said these résumé tips helped her land four offers. Nagula said engineers should highlight individual projects and show their work on GitHub. See her full résumé below. This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Ritvika Nagula, a senior software engineer at Microsoft Azure. She's worked at the company since 2019. Her employment and job offers were confirmed by Business Insider. This story has been edited for length and clarity. I graduated around December 2018 and shortly after landed four job offers, including from Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and a startup. I chose Microsoft and joined in April 2019. I was not just cold-applying, I was applying everywhere: on LinkedIn, on Indeed, I was going to direct company portals to apply from there. I was reaching out to people on LinkedIn who were at those companies, or if I was able to find out who the hiring manager for a particular role was. I tried to use all my networking skills to at least make sure that my résumé got through from the initial phase, when it's just recruiters or just some hiring manager going through papers without actually knowing you. While cold-applying isn't the most effective, if you have a strong résumé, it can eventually work out for you. For software engineers, at least from what I've seen throughout my career, the résumé is definitely the most important thing. The cover letter is almost always optional. So I took extra care to make my résumé stand out. Highlight your individual projects, including ones you did on the side If you have any internship experiences or previous work experience, that should be something that you highlight at the top of your résumé because that immediately makes it stand out, even if it was just three or four months. Some companies also take co-ops, and I was a co-op intern at a startup for seven months. That was at the top of my résumé. You also should list individual projects you have worked on. For every project that I had listed on my résumé, I made sure to highlight the programming languages and tools and how I used them. This helps in two ways. It helps somebody reading your résumé understand that you have this breadth of tools and languages that you have used, and then, within the project description, you go into two to three lines of detail to explain how you used those particular tools. You should have three kinds of projects: One would be a project you worked on in your internship. Another is going to be the projects that you did as part of your coursework, in grad school or undergrad. And then the third should be all the extra projects that you did on the side, which show that you're really passionate about becoming a software engineer. This would be something you did on your own time. Nobody gave you grades, and you didn't have to submit this at a particular time. No deadlines, no assessment. Just something that you did for yourself. One of these I included was a Facebook chatbot I made, which you could use to get information about books. So you would essentially be talking to a chatbot and asking, "What about this book?" And it would give you a quick summary. I built it using publicly available APIs from GoodReads. Show your work with GitHub For software engineers, GitHub is like a substitute for a cover letter. It's something that everybody uses to maintain their code in, and you can have a private repository, or you can have a public repository. I leveraged it by keeping all the projects that I did as part of my coursework updated in my GitHub profile. I also made sure that I updated the code for all these tiny extracurricular projects that I had. Then I put my GitHub username on the résumé itself and hyperlinked to my actual GitHub portfolio page. That way, if a prospective hiring manager is going through your résumé, and let's say one of your projects catches their eye — if they want to go look at it, you are giving free and easy access to them right there. That automatically gives you an edge over somebody else who's just written, "worked on this chatbot for X and Y." Having the code out there in GitHub shows this website was actually coded by you, and you didn't use a website builder tool. This allows your work to speak for itself. It's not like you've just written down something on a résumé. When you put it out there on GitHub, it proves that you've actually done something about it. There are all these AI tools and AI agents now that can make your life a little easier, and vibe coding is definitely a phenomenon. But before you jump into that, it's always better to have a deeper understanding of the code that you're working with because there is only so much the AI agent is going to understand. See her résumé in full below: Do you have a story to share about getting hired? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@ Read the original article on Business Insider Solve the daily Crossword
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Techie shares 5 resume tips that helped her get job offers from Microsoft, Amazon and 2 other tech companies
Resume Over Cover Letter Highlight Personal Projects Use GitHub as a Portfolio Combine Cold Applications with Networking Understand the Fundamentals, Don't Rely on AI Alone About Ritvika Nagula As job opportunities in the tech sector become more limited due to widespread layoffs, professionals entering or re-entering the workforce are looking for ways to stand out. Ritvika Nagula, now a senior software engineer at Microsoft Azure, offers a blueprint for job seekers based on her own experience. Just months after graduating in 2018, she received job offers from Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and another major tech firm. Her strategy involved more than just technical skills—it was about how she presented them on her resume and approached the application told Business Insider that for software engineering roles, the resume matters far more than a cover letter. She tailored hers to highlight all relevant experiences at the top, including internships and short-term roles such as a seven-month co-op. She made sure to structure her resume in a way that recruiters could immediately assess her also recommended categorizing projects clearly—separating academic, internship, and personal work—and including the tools and programming languages used in each. This not only gave recruiters a full picture of her technical proficiency but also reflected her attention to of Nagula's suggestions was to add personal side projects to show initiative and genuine interest in the field. For example, she built a Facebook chatbot using the GoodReads API to fetch book summaries. Including such work showed she went beyond classroom assignments and explored real-world applications also placed a strong emphasis on using GitHub effectively. Nagula added her GitHub link to her resume and ensured that all her major projects were publicly available with clean, understandable code. This allowed recruiters to evaluate her skills firsthand—something that set her apart from candidates who only described their work without sharing any job hunt combined cold applications on platforms like LinkedIn and company career pages with direct outreach to employees and hiring managers. This two-pronged approach improved her chances of getting noticed and helped her build connections that turned into referrals and also addressed the increasing use of AI tools in coding. While acknowledging their usefulness, she warned against overreliance on them. She stressed that understanding the fundamentals of coding is still necessary and that relying too much on AI might hinder deeper learning and problem-solving to her LinkedIn profile, Nagula holds a Master's degree in Computer and Information Sciences from Northeastern University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology, Raipur. Before joining Microsoft, she interned in machine learning at Trifacta and worked as a teaching assistant in discrete mathematics, roles that added valuable depth to her guidance comes at a time when the Indian tech industry is experiencing significant cutbacks. As reported by The Times of India, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has laid off more than 12,000 employees, and further reductions are expected, according to industry group Nasscom. Nitin Bhatt, a technology sector leader at EY India, noted that even though around 1.2 lakh jobs were added in FY25, the outlook for FY26 remains uncertain.
Economic Times
4 days ago
- Business
- Economic Times
Techie shares 5 resume tips that helped her get job offers from Microsoft, Amazon and 2 other tech companies
Synopsis Ritvika Nagula, now a senior software engineer at Microsoft, shared with Business Insider the five resume strategies that helped her land job offers from top tech companies including Microsoft, Amazon, and eBay. Her approach focused on prioritizing relevant experience, showcasing personal projects, using GitHub as a portfolio, combining cold applications with networking, and maintaining strong foundational coding skills. Resume Tips That Helped a Microsoft Engineer Get Hired. (Representative Image) As job opportunities in the tech sector become more limited due to widespread layoffs, professionals entering or re-entering the workforce are looking for ways to stand out. Ritvika Nagula, now a senior software engineer at Microsoft Azure, offers a blueprint for job seekers based on her own experience. Just months after graduating in 2018, she received job offers from Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and another major tech firm. Her strategy involved more than just technical skills—it was about how she presented them on her resume and approached the application process. Nagula told Business Insider that for software engineering roles, the resume matters far more than a cover letter. She tailored hers to highlight all relevant experiences at the top, including internships and short-term roles such as a seven-month co-op. She made sure to structure her resume in a way that recruiters could immediately assess her capabilities. She also recommended categorizing projects clearly—separating academic, internship, and personal work—and including the tools and programming languages used in each. This not only gave recruiters a full picture of her technical proficiency but also reflected her attention to of Nagula's suggestions was to add personal side projects to show initiative and genuine interest in the field. For example, she built a Facebook chatbot using the GoodReads API to fetch book summaries. Including such work showed she went beyond classroom assignments and explored real-world applications also placed a strong emphasis on using GitHub effectively. Nagula added her GitHub link to her resume and ensured that all her major projects were publicly available with clean, understandable code. This allowed recruiters to evaluate her skills firsthand—something that set her apart from candidates who only described their work without sharing any job hunt combined cold applications on platforms like LinkedIn and company career pages with direct outreach to employees and hiring managers. This two-pronged approach improved her chances of getting noticed and helped her build connections that turned into referrals and also addressed the increasing use of AI tools in coding. While acknowledging their usefulness, she warned against overreliance on them. She stressed that understanding the fundamentals of coding is still necessary and that relying too much on AI might hinder deeper learning and problem-solving to her LinkedIn profile, Nagula holds a Master's degree in Computer and Information Sciences from Northeastern University and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the National Institute of Technology, Raipur. Before joining Microsoft, she interned in machine learning at Trifacta and worked as a teaching assistant in discrete mathematics, roles that added valuable depth to her resume. Her guidance comes at a time when the Indian tech industry is experiencing significant cutbacks. As reported by The Times of India, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has laid off more than 12,000 employees, and further reductions are expected, according to industry group Nasscom. Nitin Bhatt, a technology sector leader at EY India, noted that even though around 1.2 lakh jobs were added in FY25, the outlook for FY26 remains uncertain.
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
I'm a software engineer at Microsoft. Here are the résumé tips that landed me 4 job offers, including from Amazon and eBay
This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Ritvika Nagula, a senior software engineer at Microsoft Azure. She's worked at the company since 2019. Her employment and job offers were confirmed by Business Insider. This story has been edited for length and clarity. I graduated around December 2018 and shortly after landed four job offers, including from Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and a startup. I chose Microsoft and joined in April 2019. I was not just cold-applying, I was applying everywhere: on LinkedIn, on Indeed, I was going to direct company portals to apply from there. I was reaching out to people on LinkedIn who were at those companies, or if I was able to find out who the hiring manager for a particular role was. I tried to use all my networking skills to at least make sure that my résumé got through from the initial phase, when it's just recruiters or just some hiring manager going through papers without actually knowing you. While cold-applying isn't the most effective, if you have a strong résumé, it can eventually work out for you. For software engineers, at least from what I've seen throughout my career, the résumé is definitely the most important thing. The cover letter is almost always optional. So I took extra care to make my résumé stand out. Highlight your individual projects, including ones you did on the side If you have any internship experiences or previous work experience, that should be something that you highlight at the top of your résumé because that immediately makes it stand out, even if it was just three or four months. Some companies also take co-ops, and I was a co-op intern at a startup for seven months. That was at the top of my résumé. You also should list individual projects you have worked on. For every project that I had listed on my résumé, I made sure to highlight the programming languages and tools and how I used them. This helps in two ways. It helps somebody reading your résumé understand that you have this breadth of tools and languages that you have used, and then, within the project description, you go into two to three lines of detail to explain how you used those particular tools. You should have three kinds of projects: One would be a project you worked on in your internship. Another is going to be the projects that you did as part of your coursework, in grad school or undergrad. And then the third should be all the extra projects that you did on the side, which show that you're really passionate about becoming a software engineer. This would be something you did on your own time. Nobody gave you grades, and you didn't have to submit this at a particular time. No deadlines, no assessment. Just something that you did for yourself. One of these I included was a Facebook chatbot I made, which you could use to get information about books. So you would essentially be talking to a chatbot and asking, "What about this book?" And it would give you a quick summary. I built it using publicly available APIs from GoodReads. Show your work with GitHub For software engineers, GitHub is like a substitute for a cover letter. It's something that everybody uses to maintain their code in, and you can have a private repository, or you can have a public repository. I leveraged it by keeping all the projects that I did as part of my coursework updated in my GitHub profile. I also made sure that I updated the code for all these tiny extracurricular projects that I had. Then I put my GitHub username on the résumé itself and hyperlinked to my actual GitHub portfolio page. That way, if a prospective hiring manager is going through your résumé, and let's say one of your projects catches their eye — if they want to go look at it, you are giving free and easy access to them right there. That automatically gives you an edge over somebody else who's just written, "worked on this chatbot for X and Y." Having the code out there in GitHub shows this website was actually coded by you, and you didn't use a website builder tool. This allows your work to speak for itself. It's not like you've just written down something on a résumé. When you put it out there on GitHub, it proves that you've actually done something about it. There are all these AI tools and AI agents now that can make your life a little easier, and vibe coding is definitely a phenomenon. But before you jump into that, it's always better to have a deeper understanding of the code that you're working with because there is only so much the AI agent is going to understand. See her résumé in full below:
