This may apply more to people who are earlier in their career, but I’m interested to hear opinions on this.
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My advice as someone who is in a hiring position is to elude to it in your cv but don’t get to into detail then when asked about it in the interview talk about it enthusiasticly. I personally will hire a person with a good homelab story ahead of someone with huge educational experience
Oh! My home lab was one of the reasons I stood out against the competition. They wanted to hear details of what I was doing with it. It’s a great thing to bring up in interviews if you get to interview with IT people.
As someone who hires IT staff, ABSOLUTELY put it on your resume. Don’t go crazy, just a one-liner, as a talking point for your interview.
No, but frequently in interviews. My rack is right by my desk, so sometimes it’s a “show and tell” type deal
Talk about it through the lens of deploying on-prem business services for SMBs and it feels more like professional experience to the interviewer.
Hey guys, I’m a hiring manager and owner of an IT company. I would absolutely encourage you to make some sort of mention on your résumé that you have a home lab though I wouldn’t go into extensive detail. I had one gentleman who said I have a home lab and I would love to talk with you about what I do, and that peaked my interest because that told me that even at home he was learning and playing around with the same technology for the position he was applying for.
It’s not on my resume but I always bring it up in interviews. I actually ask candidates I’m interviewing what their home network looks like. It gives me an idea if they have any passion for tech or not.
My homelab got me my last 2 jobs and the one I’m switching to for significantly more money.
I gave it a passing mention in my resume and a couple of sentences in a cover letter. It got brought up in interview and I was able to talk through all the tech I had experience with, which sold them on me and got me an offer. Job I’m moving to, we only had a casual interview where I discussed my lab, and it turned out 90% of what they use, I’ve played with at home. Got an offer the same week.
Yes I did. I applied for an entry level security researcher role and I had zero security experience and def put my home labs on there. I had an Active Directory lab for pentesting as well as Docker containers running vulnerable web apps. They said my passion and drive demonstrated by the home labs and my blog is what got me the job
If you confident in the technologies used mention then in the resume
Absolutely. I stood up a HA k8s cluster from scratch, and had it all working with ingress, SSL, etc… plus I can transition the conversation from k8s to microservices architecture
I didn’t put it on my resume but my setup did come up in a recent interview. I’d like to think it helped seeing as they called me less than 24 hours later to offer me the job.
I read a lot of mixed things about putting it on my resume or not. I decided to make a hobbies section on in and put a few things on there. To my surprise it came up in every interview and I believe helped me land my current role.
As a hiring manager I would love to see it. It tells me you’re passionate about IT outside of work and how you’re constantly learning.
I hire in software development but I would concur; it means you’re “into it” and those people are almost always a cut-above the unwashed masses.
We sort resumes based on things like this and these go to the top and get called first.
I would say it’s a lot more important if you have limited experience and if you are looking to make a change and get into a new area that you lack direct experience with.
Also we are a small, private company so the hiring is done a lot more directly than in a large one.I wouldn’t elaborate in any detail on your resume about it - whatever you write is going to be out-of-date anyway right? - but as a bullet point at the end of personal projects is nice to see.
If you are working in IT, one of the implicit requirements is ongoing learning. Homelabs probably address that. It’s good to see an indication that you are actively learning on your resume. Homelabs aren’t the only way, but in some cases might be the best way.