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Comment by fishtoaster | Hacker News Reader

> Impact is King

This seems to be common advice. Whenever I'm reviewing resumes, I can always tell when someone's been given it because their past job descriptions are littered with "...causing a 30% drop in whatever" or "...thus doubling our blah blah blah."

Honestly, I've always found those to be pretty content-free. I have no idea if those numbers were actually measured or if you're just guessing. I have no way to know if that project was actually your idea or if you were just implementing someone else's initiative. I have no idea what the team was like and what your actual contribution to the project was. The numbers are meaningless without a ton more context.

Sure, I can ask about all of that context in the interview, but I'd do that anyway. It doesn't add anything (for me as a hiring manager, at least) to have it on your resume.

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> I have no way to know if that project was actually your idea or if you were just implementing someone else's initiative. I have no idea what the team was like and what your actual contribution to the project was. The numbers are meaningless without a ton more context.

is there anything that isn’t meaningless, then?

their idea of knowing X, Y and Z likely differs from yours, as well. what will you believe or trust from a resume?

(personally i don’t trust any specific element and just look for an overall tone, and then ask about the specific interesting bits.)

> is there anything that isn’t meaningless, then?

Invert a binary tree.

I wish there was a job board where the interview process only entailed actual context specific take-home tests (think create a real-time analytics board consuming an example internal API), instead of these leetcode games which I can memorize and then spew out like a mindless robot.

> Then spew out like a mindless robot.

I think you just explained extremely clearly, why hiring managers aren't really into that sort of candidate.

What do you mean? Forgive my lack of nuance

Once I sunk a day into a take-home test. It went well, and I got to chat with a manager for half an hour. They said they weren't interested with no added context. Setting aside that take-home tests favor people who have time on their hands, the time investment can be very asymmetric, and it doesn't scale for the candidate.

Pretty sure GPT4 can do that trivially. Think harder.

> is there anything that isn’t meaningless, then?

Well, now that you mention it... no.

But that's just fine. "Meaning" doesn't have to be some big ol' thing. So the whole universe is meaningless; so what? Big whoop.

And in this big, empty universe, maybe all that matters is finding something beautiful, something rare, something brilliant and destined for greatness, something like... a candidate who can code a few lines worth of decent code on the spot.

The truth is, if you give the candidate a moderately realistic problem and a blank canvas, the first 5 minutes of watching their hands on a keyboard (or equivalent, if they don't have hands) will probably tell you 80% of what you need to know. If you know what to look for.

The number opens up the conversation to:

* Why this metric and not another? How was this number related to the overall goals of your company?

* What was the initial benchmark for how much you wanted this number to change? Did you meet, exceed or fall short of this benchmark? What do you think was the reason for that? In particular, what did you learn about your org's benchmarking process from meeting, exceeding or falling short of the benchmark?

* What resources were required to make this number change? Who were all the people involved? Why was it logical for their involvement to be a part of this number changing? More crucially, were there any people not involved that, in retrospect, you wish could have been involved and why?

* Knowing what you did now, if we were to put you on a similar effort within our company, what do you think you would do differently and how much do you think that would have an impact on that number?

The bullshitters will quickly wilt under the pressure of not knowing enough details to give well thought out answers while the people who drove real impact will get excited to talk it through and lay out both what went well and poorly.

edit: A big part of what I'm looking for with "Impact is King" conversations is the ability to take ownership of impact even in the face of dysfunctional organizations because, surprise, all organizations are dysfunctional!

I don't care about the actual impact you made because that's driven much more by the environment you were placed in than your individual performance. I care that you have a good mental model on how to drive impact and that you can perform at a reasonable baseline where you're significantly above average vs peers at your experience level.

>reasonable baseline

>significantly above average

I don't mean this in a confrontational way, but I am curious how you establish what a reasonable baseline is.

You have enough of these interviews with people across a range of experience levels and you kind of get calibrated to what to expect at however many years into a career. Usually you get a small group of people who are operating far and above the level of their peers and it's pretty obvious.

The purpose of providing statistics in my resume isn’t to convince you of any one thing, but to exhaust your critical reasoning capabilities

“The numbers are meaningless without a ton more context.”

Just keep thinking in this direction and apply it to any and all hoops you make employees jump through.

It’s the same with coding challenges, quizzes, and any other evaluation you give. They are meaningless without more context and the only way you can get those is working with a person for a few months.

I find percents bad, hard numbers are much better.

- Automated process 'x', saving company x thousands/millions per year - Automated process 'y', reducing engineering time from 1 month/year to minutes per year.

"Automated process 'x', saving company $10,000 per year" is meaningless without knowing whether $10,000 is a significant figure or a drop in the bucket. Also, if they paid you $100,000 to automate it, it'll be 10 years before they see a return on that investment, and by then your code/process/system may have been rewritten.

I'd much rather see percentages, and if they can want to clarify with hard dollar amounts, so much the better.

that's a good callout, My resume has more context I removed too much trying to anonymize it.

Agree with this to some extent - I was careful not to parrot the common advice of "use numbers as much as possible" because I always smell some level of BS. But qualitative stuff gives you enough to go on to ask about in the first-round interview.

These sorts of claims tend to appear on the lowest quality CVs I've reviewed, often with suspiciously round and large numbers that suggested guess work.

> It doesn't add anything (for me as a hiring manager, at least) to have it on your resume.

Sadly without it it doesn't get through the recruiter / HR before it even reaches the hiring manager. Recruiters will tell you to edit your resume and add all sorts of things also.

> I have no way to know if that project was actually your idea or if you were just implementing someone else's initiative

This is huge for all resumes, especially product manager resumes. I've seen some PMs get through interviews by talking in depth about their previous company's product, just to end up flopping on the job because they can't function without top-down hand holding.

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