When I owned a consulting firm, I was also shocked at how low resume quality was. If you just spend a bit of time making your resume look good or stand out a little bit, it will go a really long way. There is a such thing as “too much information” or “too detailed.” I never had a problem of “too little information” because, as a human, I was able to fill in the blanks and if something didn’t make sense, I’d often interview them just to hear the story (and in a couple of cases, actually hire).

When I lived on a sailboat, it was often mentioned in my cover letter just to hopefully stand out. I’d get interviews just because I sounded like an interesting person (what these coworkers said later at company parties) and it would get my foot in the door.

On the flip side, when I was on the interview for a small startup a while back, I started learning to distrust resumes that were too good. I eventually figured out that it's because they used a resume preparation service. They weren't lying about anything, but it's amazing how different the same experience can sound. (Ok, quite a few were telling some white lies, but the strength of the resumes did not depend on lying.)

I'd say that the bottom 20% and the top 20% of resumes (that made it past the HR screen) were disappointing during the interview. The best people usually had decent but somewhat awkward or unclear resumes.

I think this is really down to the few companies that have "taken a chance" on a bootcamp grad in the past and are able to see past the lack of experience after one or more good experiences - which feels like something large companies can do more (and more often) than smaller ones.

It's also a product of my inability to really and truly master interview coding challenges and the pressure of whiteboarding. It's absolutely nerve-wracking and I've choked every single time regardless of how well-prepped I was. At a Google on-site, I was asked to traverse a binary search tree on a whiteboard and then, after doing it successfully, I was challenged to do it without recursion and I was unable to reason about how to do it and I choked completely and utterly. The rest of the interview went pretty well, so I would guess that my whiteboarding fail was the main thing that prevented me from getting hired there.

O'Reilly's interview process did not involve whiteboarding or things like trick questions, toy problems or algorithm stuff. It was a straightforward coding challenge and then a fairly low-pressure conversation about my code, the decisions I made and how I might modify what I implemented if I had more time, or was confronted with a specific challenge.

I think if I now were to enter the job market with the experience I have, I hope that I wouldn't be immediately confronted with things in an interview like traversing binary search trees, or implementing a Fisher Yates shuffle on a whiteboard.

I think I've been pretty lucky with the jobs that I've had so far in my career where none of them have required extensive whiteboarding for their interview processes. I completely empathize with you though, as I feel like every time I've encountered whiteboarding in an interview, I must've seemed so incompetent to the interviewer.

It's definitely possible to find jobs that don't require whiteboarding for their interview process - best of luck when you look again!