This may apply more to people who are earlier in their career, but I’m interested to hear opinions on this.
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
Talk about it through the lens of deploying on-prem business services for SMBs and it feels more like professional experience to the interviewer.
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.
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.
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
In my “About me” Blurb at the top of my resume, I speak to my professional experience, passions, and things I do in my spare time. That blurb swings from what I do in my job and career today, to also encompassing my homelab, 3d printing, and general tinkerings of various bits.
It seems to work. I get a lot of questions about it
I would 100% find a way to mention it and use it to describe your problem solving skills.
At home people have a choice to sit back and let the internet entertain you, or they can try to do something weird and risk breaking everything. I want the person that can fix things because they have broken so many things.
Don’t put it on, but talk about it. Not about having one, but why you have one. I roll around a lot in eve-NG, to lab designs out, test and verify behavior, replicate outages and just study in general.
LOL we interviewed and hired one guy because his home lab was literally similar to our environment. And it wasn’t. Case of bragging he knew exactly what he did and why things worked.
No, but frequently in interviews. My rack is right by my desk, so sometimes it’s a “show and tell” type deal
Absolutely. My home lab and other side projects i did in my spare time is how i landed my current job
I would not mention it on my resume, but during the interview, I would say it’s a must. If you can remotely log in to your lab and perform a demo during the interview even better.
Yes.
It’s not on my resume but I recently did a Teams preliminary interview that was over webcam. I made sure my rack was visible in my background.
damn. I spent all this time putting my rack in my basement turns out that was a bad idea lol.
jk I actually made a 3d corner office in Blender and took a picture of the empty desk chair I use that as my Teams background.