As a hiring manager, most of the “Increased revenue by 27%” type lines on tech resumes are clearly awkward attempts to implement generic Internet resume advice. When was the last time a company attributed sales growth to some developer making a change? Don’t try to take credit for things that the company, as a whole, accomplished.
The two places I like to see specific numbers are when communicating project scale or demonstrating some quantifiable change that was directly attributable to a person’s work. Good examples:
“Reduced AWS bill by 40% by profiling server code and implementing strategic optimizations”
“Architected cloud backend to support 500,000 daily users”
“Reduced average page load time by 57% percent”
If there isn’t an obvious, direct relationship between the person’s actions and the business outcome then I simply ignore it. If the person can only cite company-level achievements that don’t directly relate to their work, I assume they’re reaching because they can’t otherwise demonstrate how they personally contributed.
>>And do you think individual contributors have access to that kind of metric?
This actually goes back to a piece of career advice I read about a decade ago and was able to make use of to significantly boost my income: when picking projects or teams, try to move close to those that directly affect the company's bottom line. You'll have much better success when asking for raises and promotions because it'll be a lot easier to show the impact of your work (or at least have access to people who can pull up those numbers/reports for you, if you have been nice to them).
Of course they have access to the metrics. To take the 3 examples given, somebody removing AWS instances should have access to the billing, somebody running a web application should know how many daily users there are, somebody optimizing page load time would measure the page load time before and after.
Why? Great technical resumes make for better outcomes for professionals. We talk more about here: https://www.meetleet.com/#faq
Silly numbers: ok, if those numbers are silly, I agree, you shouldn't use them. What numbers are relevant to your professional success? How can you demonstrate, as a technology professional working in a commercial enterprise, that you helped improve the company, team, or product during this year?
The important thing is to find numbers that you don't believe are silly, but that are meaningful and relevant to your performance and share those. The nature of the accomplishments you cite, and the type of numbers you use, reflect the type of professional you perceive yourself to be. And that signal is meaningful to hiring managers in recruiting processes.
Fair enough, nothing wrong with that. I was interested if this is a startup or just your way of attracting clients.
Numbers are not silly per se but if i read a cv that tried so hard to quantify things, i‘d be sceptical. example: every developer knows that the number of lines of code can mean a multitude of things good or bad.
Well, that's exactly right: "every developer knows that the number of lines of code can mean a multitude of things good or bad."
So the goal is to display your sophistication and level of experience by showing your performance with numbers that are appropriate to your level and skill. Something that, when you're asked about it, demonstrates your capabilities, and your ability to delve into the technical details, in a way that only someone at your level could do.
Again, thanks for the feedback. The comments on this post, as usual for Hacker News, are phenomenal and informed. I think I've come up with at least 3 additional posts just based on everyone's feedbacks and critiques!
I would still like to have an answer regarding your business model. I think that beeing fully transparent here would benefit you in the end.
Are you storing those cvs?
Are you processing them?
Are you building a business around benchmarking CVs?
So why include such an obviously silly statement in your article? It just makes the applicant look inexperienced.
I am a single data point, but also someone who's interviewed 100+ developers across multiple companies, and from my perspective, after reading your article, you don't seem to be a person to listen to, and seem to be contributing to the already large amount of bad resume-writing advice online.
The main thing I have a feeling you misunderstand (the article makes me think you're not an actual industry professional) is that in most cases, to get hired, developers don't need to impress some technically-illiterate business person. The goal isn't to make some business guy swoon over how you managed to improve a metric a business person would typically care about. Instead, developers need to impress some very technical person, often multiple such people, to get hired. A resume should be written accordingly, and the goal is to make yourself appear to be a mature professional in the eyes of other mature professionals. You don't need to dumb things down - you don't need to do it for their sake, so dumbing things down just makes you look less knowledgeable or like you're trying to bullshit your way through things.
If I see "increased user engagement by rewriting into react" on a resume that just makes the candidate look like they're desperately digging for things to put in their resume that will make them look good. It is literally better to just write that you rewrote something into react. Of course, it's only a small part on my opinion of the candidate, but mentioning user engagement there, especially with a number attached to it, makes the person look like they're an inexperienced guy writing their CV by reading some bad "you need to show how you helped the company" internet advice.
"Measurable successes" are good if they're something I will see and it will think they are very intelligent and/or have a high level of expertise in some area, like solving a difficult problem / improving something in a way that's more efficient than I would expect. The fact that something they did was useful to the company means nothing on its own. You improved openh264 baseline encoding speed by 20%? Do tell.
For example, I once improved a part of a system, the slowness of which was causing big problems (things taking 20+ minutes to run), by 1000-10000%+. This was a huge thing. My boss was ecstatic and could barely believe it. He had asked me to look into optimizing it, but would have been happy even with a 100% improvement. I would never mention this on my CV though, even though I do mention that I worked on the system. Why? Because 1) an experienced person reading my resume would likely correctly assume I'm overselling what I did 2) I would get asked about it in the interview, and I would have to reveal I did it by going through the code and rewriting all the unnecessarily-O(N^2) parts into O(N). The fact that I had presented this as some kind of achievement would leave the impression that I am much less experienced than I actually am. It doesn't matter that I did something useful for the company, and it doesn't matter that I made a large measurable improvement to something. What matters is how much intelligence or technical prowess it proves I possess, and in this case that's very little. If I was in my early 20s, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to include something like that, as it would suggest I am at least a somewhat decent programmer and not stupid. But for me personally, it would be out of place. So it's good to think about what level of expertise you're trying to claim. But "I improved user engagement by 27%" will just always be bad, sorry.
> Don’t try to take credit for things that the company, as a whole, accomplished.
Skeptical about this one. Ostensibly, any result of value is achieved by the "company, as a whole" -- this seems like a tautological statement. Have you considered that committing to (and following through) being part of a long initiative that directly increases revenue for the company as a whole /is/ something worth mentioning on the resumé, and not merely par for the course?
It seems pretty pessimistic to reduce that to "awkward attempts to implement generic Internet resume advice." and I wonder if that has anything to do with what you see as a hiring manager. That is to say -- are you sure you're not scaring away candidates who actually /do/ accomplish these things? A technology arm of the organization that has increasing amounts of P/L responsibilities is par for the course at many quickly growing startups. As a hiring manager, I would be a huge fan of seeing these lines on resumés provided the follow up conversation I had with the candidate wasn't full of BS. If you're not, what does that mean?
To your point about not taking credit for things a company achieves: I think of this similarly to the advice about not always saying "in my opinion"; of course it's your opinion, you're saying it! Similarly, of course your contribution was just one part of a team effort, nothing is ever achieved in a vacuum! But I struggle mightily with this on both counts.
This is a great way of explaining it. I've often wondered why such claims have a bit of a cringe factor to them, and you nailed the reason why. Great distinction b/w nebulous claims and hard numbers. (Although I would exclude page load time which tends to be just a metric football in many companies.)
yeah for me it's a negative: they're misrepresenting themselves before we have even met. this is especially bad in stuff like dir/vp roles. ("... sorry buddy, you rode a unicorn, the 500% growth only means you didn't fall off. is that really your contribution?")
You’re going to miss a lot of talent by reading too much into peoples’ resumes.
There are dozens of possible explanations for any given bullet point that range from horrible to excellent.
Trying to draw too many conclusions from a resume isn’t all that different from reading tea leaves.
Well the opinion you form of a candidate is based on a combination of multiple things.
Also, in my experience, the candidates whose resumes contain questionable/silly things rarely turn out to be great; there is a negative correlation between questionable/silly stuff in the resume and quality. None of the top tier people I've interviewed (the kind where you start thinking "this guy should be interviewing me" during the interview, let's say I've had 5-10 of those) had anything questionable or silly in their resume, and for all of them I was sure the person was going to easily pass the interview based on just reading their resume. This correlation is in fact quite strong in my experience - I can't remember exactly, but I feel like the best candidates I've had who've had anything questionable in their resume were mediocre at best.
Note: just simply having a low-effort resume doesn't count as "questionable" here, I've had low effort resumes where the applicants turned out to be pretty great. Of course, that doesn't mean you should write a low-effort resume - it reduces your chances of getting an interview in the first place. People should just write honest, informative resumes. It's not really that hard to do as long as you're not thinking about how to manipulate the person reading the resume.
yep. it's a negative suggesting multiple potential issues: political/misdirecting, lacking positives that they could have instead highlighted, awareness+communication issues where they didn't realize the mistake, etc. none of those may be true, and even some they are, not matter for the role, so you're right, can be fine.
but in a startup scenario.. there's less room for hiring mistakes than in a bigco, so I wouldn't just ignore. I've definitely passed on folks after catching lies in their CV - trust is a pretty basic ingredient before asking someone to own something. overclaiming here isn't a 100% lie, but it is a warning sign on issues like the above that are worth understanding.
^this. refactoring into React or any tech stack does not correlate directly to user engagement or revenue. It sure does have impact; but perhaps it's more relevant to state something like improving page load time, developer productivity, time to market (or MTTR, etc) because of cleaner architecture that enables to iterate faster and so on
The two places I like to see specific numbers are when communicating project scale or demonstrating some quantifiable change that was directly attributable to a person’s work. Good examples:
“Reduced AWS bill by 40% by profiling server code and implementing strategic optimizations”
“Architected cloud backend to support 500,000 daily users”
“Reduced average page load time by 57% percent”
If there isn’t an obvious, direct relationship between the person’s actions and the business outcome then I simply ignore it. If the person can only cite company-level achievements that don’t directly relate to their work, I assume they’re reaching because they can’t otherwise demonstrate how they personally contributed.