Reframe: successful companies, practical projects, mature and reliable tech.
Think of it like a resume pitch on a resume.
It should be possible to write those up in such a way as to be less boring. But the other reality is that 90% of all the jobs out there appear to be with "boring" companies, have "boring" projects, and use "boring" tech. Companies generally avoid things that are too exciting -- exciting has risky as its partner, and companies prefer to minimize risk.
However, it's also very common that there's really interesting stuff in all that boredom. If I told you what company I work for, the project I was working on, and the tech stack I was using, you'd very likely yawn. But the work is actually very interesting and exciting when you dig into it. When I put this on my resume, I will focus on telling what was interesting about it, because that will also tell what my contribution was.
Second, be honest. In your cover letter, tell your prospective employer that you feel like your resume seems boring. Tell them the exciting things you've worked on, and how it has helped you at work. Tell them how you're excited to learn new things and take on new projects, in addition to just getting better at doing the boring things. Express your interests, your passions, things about you that you think would make you a great co-worker.
This is actually a huge problem for me right now, and I’m not sure how to solve it.
My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech.
There’s all sorts of things I’ve done and worked on. In both my professional career and as a hobbyist I’ve hacked around with stuff, learned interesting skills that have helped solved all sorts of odd problems, picked up a lot of knowledge about different software and it’s internal workings, but it was tangential to my job at best and would feel out of place in a resume, but it’s a lot of stuff over the years.
I’ve experimented with putting some of my open source contributions in there (partly to fill space since I don’t have any education to add). To be honest, it feels like embellishment, given how small it was in reality, but it is something that looks impressive on paper. Unfortunately, it’s just not very relevant to the sort of work done in my professional career and at best it’s gotten me a jaded “that’s interesting” during a final round of interviews. More recently though, I’m just not getting any interviews.