The Bald Tech Coach

Your Career Story Is Not as Obvious as You Think

Before you apply to 100 more jobs, I want you to pause for a second.

Not to overthink. Not to rewrite your entire resume again.

Just to ask one brutally useful question:

Am I making people guess the song, or am I helping them hear it?

The tapping experiment

There's a classic experiment about communication that I think about constantly when I review LinkedIn profiles and resumes.

One person is asked to tap out a familiar song on a table. In their head, it's obvious. They hear the melody, the rhythm, the words, the hook. They're not just tapping, they're hearing the whole song.

But the person listening? They hear tapping. That's it. No melody. No context. No emotional buildup. No chorus. Just a random sequence of taps on a table.

And here's the wild part: the tapper usually thinks the listener will guess correctly way more often than they actually do.

Because once you know the song, it becomes incredibly hard to imagine what it feels like not to know it.

That's the curse of knowledge. And it's quietly wrecking a lot of resumes and LinkedIn profiles.

The career version of the tapping experiment

This shows up all the time in job search materials. You write something like:

"Built APIs."
"Improved workflows."
"Managed stakeholders."
"Worked cross-functionally."

And because you lived the work, those phrases are loaded with meaning. You remember the broken system you inherited. The vague requirements, the rushed timeline, the late nights, the edge cases, the difficult conversations, the production risk, the customer pain, the teammate who needed help, the weird dependency no one else understood.

You remember the actual complexity. So when you write "built APIs," you hear the whole song.

But a recruiter doesn't. A hiring manager doesn't. Someone outside your company doesn't.

They see the words on the page, and they have to guess. And most people won't guess in your favor.

That doesn't mean they're lazy or missing the point. It means they weren't there.

A lot of your best work is invisible

This is especially true in tech. So much of the most valuable work isn't flashy.

The risk you reduced.
The outage you prevented.
The manual process you removed.
The system you made easier to maintain.
The unclear thing you clarified.
The team you helped move faster.
The customer problem you quietly solved before it became a bigger problem.

But if your resume only says "Worked on CI/CD pipelines," the reader doesn't automatically fill in the rest.

What you wrote

"Worked on CI/CD pipelines."

What they need to hear

"Improved CI/CD pipelines so engineers could deploy with fewer manual steps and less risk."

That second version isn't louder. It isn't inflated. It isn't trying to make you sound more impressive than you are. It's just easier to understand. That's the whole goal.

The goal isn't to sound bigger

A lot of people get nervous when they start improving their resume or LinkedIn profile because it feels like bragging.

But good positioning isn't about pretending. It's about translation.

You're not trying to become someone else. You're trying to tell the truth more clearly. You're trying to make the value you already bring easier to see.

Technically true

"Built internal tools."

Actually clear

"Built internal tools that reduced manual account setup work and helped onboard customers faster."

Technically true

"Managed stakeholders."

Actually clear

"Coordinated with product, support, and engineering teams to align priorities and resolve customer-impacting issues faster."

Technically true

"Improved workflows."

Actually clear

"Redesigned onboarding workflows so new team members could complete setup with fewer handoffs and less confusion."

The quick self-audit

Before you send out another batch of applications, look at your LinkedIn profile or resume and ask:

5 questions to ask yourself

What context am I assuming? Would someone outside your company understand what this work actually meant?
What changed because of me? Did something get faster, safer, simpler, clearer, cheaper, more stable, or easier to use?
Who benefited? Customers? Engineers? Support teams? Leadership? New hires? Internal users?
What proof can I give? Numbers are great when you have them, but proof can also be scope, scale, frequency, systems, teams, or before-and-after context.
Would someone outside my company understand this? Company-specific language can make your work sound smaller than it really was.

The real job is translation

Your career story is probably much stronger than your materials are making it look. That's the frustrating part.

A lot of people aren't lacking experience. They aren't lacking value. They aren't lacking proof.

They're just expecting the reader to hear a song that only exists in their own head.

Your job is to make the song audible. To give enough context that someone can follow the melody. To show the impact without forcing them to decode it.

Because your best work stays invisible until you write it down in a way someone else can understand.

So before you apply to 100 more jobs, ask yourself:

Am I making them guess the song?

Or am I helping them hear it?