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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

Your CV doesn't tell me anything you accomplished, it just lists things you did. Hiring managers want to know the impact of your work, not a page of bullets that all say: "I did a thing."

Picking one at random: "Worked on frontend and backend systems for this health tech company." OK... and what impact did your work have? Can you cite a qualitative improvement on the business due to your work? If not, can you at least cite quantitative facts like: "Released 6 updates to the product."

I'm going to make a suggestion that sounds negative, but is intended to help you realize if your bullet points read well or not -- For each one, imagine a hiring manager at an interview asking you, "So what?". Then throw out your original bullet point and instead type in your answer to that question.

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Why do hiring managers like such claims? They're all fake.

Because if you can or are willing to BS to make yourself look good, then you can or are willing to BS to make your manager look good.

Ultimately, people are hired to create an impact. People who can identify and communicate that impact are typically a step ahead of people who just do a skill. I always prefer the person who is less technically skilled but understands why and how they're making an impact. Better to have an B+ technical person working on the right problem, than to have an A+ technical person working on the wrong problem.

> They're all fake.

Sure, but they are semi-based in reality and give insight to the scope of your work.

* "Perfectly implemented [some feature] on [some project], resulting in perfect launch". Definitely an IC. Maybe not even senior.

* "Led organization-wide effort across 100+ engineers to migrate from X to Y". Might be an IC. Might be a manager. In either case, you don't do this type of work below senior level.

Your job isn’t to help the company make more money, it’s to convince people that you help the company make more money.

Your boss / hiring manager / everyone else has the same job.

This is the best advice here. You want to be able to say, “during the time I worked here, I did X and the company’s revenue increased by Y.” Swap in whatever metrics are particularly relevant to the job you’re applying for.

Not saying you are wrong, but when does management even know exactly which specific X caused how much increase in revenue, let alone a software developer.

It's not about saying you directly caused the specific increase in revenue, it's more about highlighting the value you can bring to a future organization – at least so you can talk about it in an interview. Remember, this game is not about determining if that increase was purely attributable to your work, it's about convincing an employer that you can add value.

For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year. Sure, there were probably other factors that helped, but when you can point at specific things and back them up with metrics, it's 100% better than just listing a bunch of skills and jobs.

Not only that, it shows that you understand and care about what matters (the success of the company).

Sure that's ideal but honestly I've worked on a bunch of stuff at several different companies but have yet to land in a place where I was able to collect these sorts of statistics that everyone is always going on about putting in your resume.

If you don't have specific data, you can still frame your work in a way that is more compelling than, "I can code in Python and I worked at XYZ company for 3 years." Whatever value you were adding, put that first, even if it's just "built new products that increased company's sales and helped expand to X new markets."

Numbers are ideal, and I'd think carefully on if there is a metric you can tie to a data point, but it doesn't have to be all about numbers. Example: maybe you streamlined a common app flow making it significantly easier for users to accomplish a task, or implemented accessibility best practices across your product making it usable by a wider range of people. Both of these have more pop if there is a statistic you can cite with them, but even without they speak to impact not just "worked on Python web application".

I have £19m to £75m revenue in approx 20 months bootstrapped start-up CTO on my CV.

In the UK market folks aren't particularly receptive to that sort of thing.

In that case, I wonder if that makes you seem overqualified?

I think it's a combination of the market and assumptions.

- Some think I'm no longer technical enough because I've done managerial stuff, despite recent work being hands on.

- Some think I'm not managerial enough because I still do technical stuff.

- Some think I've somehow failed because the specific role was only ~20 months ( it was actually equity shenanigans )

- Some think I'm too senior and won't stick around ( despite the role being top of the market pay wise )

Mostly, I don't really know, because when going through the front door, they typically don't respond, and in actual fact the only leads I get are the ones that contact me.

But I think our specific culture focuses on reasons to say no, rather than reasons to say yes, and the current market only helps compound this, even if the outcome is worse.

Of course, I might just be shit, but they also likely don't know that by not speaking with me. :)

> For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year.

Even if I did, it was probably someone else's idea, someone else decided it would be worth adding to the product, someone else made a UX and UI design, I wrote the code, someone else tested it, maybe there were some iterations of those. It's all team work.

Someone claiming such a increase as their personal achievement is spouting BS and would not get an invitation here.

It was a simplified example. Obviously on a real world resume you would say “was a part of a team that did X.”

Oh. You were "part of a team?" But what did you do? What? You mean your team added 20% more users with this feature, not you?

SMH.

Yeah, that’s not how real people actually communicate in real life, so your criticism is pretty baseless here.

It's about signaling to hiring managers that you are willing to play along with their bullshit.

None of the companies I worked at disclosed to the engineers what features led to what results. So I made shit up and nobody called me out on it.

I read resumes and that "bs" gets one negative point. Another negative point and resume goes to trash bin.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit.

"Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team".

There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, because... they were dumb moves. Do you put that on there? Or do you just put what you did, minus the impact?

I haven't worked on a successful product since 2017. But I have absolutely supported leadership who wanted to give an idea an honest chance by delivering the product they asked for. Their failure to find a market does not mean that my technical delivery was sub-par. So my work still offers value. So I say exactly what I did - "Delivered a new SaaS app.", "Modernized a legacy system to a new tech stack", etc. I did deliver what was expected of my role, and I can claim that regardless of the market success.

Now, would it sound better if those products succeeded? Of course! But there is still something that can be said for my work.

The OP was saying "don't just say what you did - say what the impact was!" (in so many words). Well... the impact was that this thing I delivered went way over budget, and the division shut down because we ran out of money.

Or... what if the impact is "user subscriptions decreased, cancellations increased, revenue declined"?

I was pointing out that "impact" isn't always positive - adding it to a resume might not be all that useful.

This happened to me. Was told to convert a lot of stuff to an XML database, which... no one had any experience with. But the owner wanted to be in the XML space. They sold a deal which was based on the XML database tech, but it was so bad, and so slow, and didn't actually take customer needs in to account, that we burned over $1m over 6 months, and half the company was laid off.

So, yes, I can put "XML database conversion" on a resume, but there's no positive outcomes to add to it. This is what the OP was being told to do - add positive outcomes. They don't always exist, and yes, it's outside your control.

It's also often outside of your knowledge. You just too often don't have anything close to useful statistics which you can refer to. Say, replacing one message queue solution with another, because the first was considered - you may not know or agree with all the details - too slow or too unreliable. How does it help if you don't have enough knowledge about how often the previous one failed? The new one has better performance, but you don't have enough traffic to feel the difference - then what? All you see on the justification side is several logs where the error is present and maybe some obscure post on the Internet complaining about similar issues, and then you have a decision from above. And such situation could be quite typical.

this. in one job as developers we never got to see any data from production side. we were just told what features to implement or what bugs to fix, without any feedback on their impact.

Welcome to marketing :-).

But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about?

There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead demonstrating your skills with something where you delivered value.

It's also worth noting that even where X flopped, you still hopefully contributed something positive. In your own example, you delivered X some (months?) early. That alone saves $.

I was once part of a Salesforce (god help me) implementation where we were moving all our analytics into this new Salesforce platform with the idea that it would be the central hub for all employees. When all was said and done, it flopped. It tried to do too much at once, be everything to everyone, and was useless for most. 80% of employees only logged in once. It was exactly as you describe, where from the beginning, I warned we were on the wrong path.

It doesn't usually land on my resume because, I mean, it's fucking Salesforce, but if it does, or if it comes up in an interview, I can talk about how I replaced our contractor's ETL with a custom one that ingested the data in 10% of the time making it possible for us to actually keep our data up-to-date, or how I was able to refactor the data model to take proper advantage of compression and save us around $30k/month in storage costs (Salesforce cloud storage is stupid expensive).

Sure, the whole thing was a major screw-up that literally cost the company millions, yet I can still talk about how I made that situation a little better.

The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures.

Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.

Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance."

It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say something about you. Looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, why would I want to talk to the guy who "built data analytics tools with SQL Server", vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers". I've got 100 resumes with SQL Server experience. The first one had a job; maybe they were good at it, perhaps they weren't, I don't know. I have literally nothing to go on. The second at least accomplished something (or is a liar; yes, I'm aware of this possibility). If you don't give me a reason to speak to you, specifically, you are just hoping you win the lottery and happen to be one of the ones I call in.

> but the OP was told to add the outcomes

Outcomes don't have to be the final outcome of the whole project. The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.

> The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.

How did you learn about that number? Where did you pull it from?

By taking the space I saved and multiplying it by the price per gig.

If your asking how I knew the cost, I asked.

> vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers".

I reduced a 25 hour process down to 30 minutes. Someone else at the company took that 30 minutes and reduced it to 25 and put "15% reduction in import processing time!" on his resumé. But... he was also the one who was insistent that there was nothing to be done about the 25 hours in the first place. It was "impossible" to get it faster, supposedly.

In the past, I've put that 25 hour reference on my resume, and I had a couple recruiter folks tell me it smelled of bullshit, advising me I'm not supposed to exaggerate that much. What do I do? It's the truth, and if I explained it to someone who understood the state of the art at that time, the 'fix' would make a lot of sense (not magic, just... a deep understanding of what the tech stack is doing under the hood).

Last year I fixed a report screen that took 50 seconds to load up; brought it down to .5 seconds. But the company had already told the client it would require a big rewrite to 'fix'. And I 'fixed' it without the big rewrite. FWIW, the rewrite wasn't necessarily wrong, but also wasn't necessary. Or at least the ordering could have been reversed - give short term saving up front to keep users happy, then provide the rest of the support for that shortcut in the rewrite ('refactor').

Anecdotes like this can get you filtered out of some places that think it's BS. And... it might not hurt to avoid those places in the first place, but... you can't always know ahead of time.

We're engineers, not MBAs. That's a good thing, and it should stay that way.

then you are just the labour force and disposable.

Because the relationship between individual things in what a developer do and financial results is not so easily measured.

There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to claim credit alone.

If you don't know, hiring managers won't know the number either.

Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume.

To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.

Yeah. I see your point, and you're right. But is fucking hard to me force myself to actually do this. My parents were that old style working class folks that had this belief in a inherently fair world (no matter how much that same world fucked them over and over till their deaths).

Rationally I know how things work. But emotionally I am still the same as my parents and this is a fucking wall I am so far unable to cross.

Maybe I should consider therapy. Which would be kind of funny: Making therapy to become more of a sociopath and survive and thrive in a sociopathic society.

How do you prove that X and only X cause the company's revenue or some other metrics increased by Y? And let's say you can just for sake of it, how does that metric gives you any idea how good an engineer is? When I read a resume, anything that is beyond his skills (soft & tech) and experience is just sugar coating. A little is acceptable, too much and it gives me a bad feel for the candidate.

As I said above, an interview isn’t about trying to determine if you were solely responsible for the outcome at your previous job. Obviously any intelligent person knows that it’s a complex situation, and that it may not translate directly to the new company.

The point is to convey that you’re capable of providing some value to the company, should you be hired. It’s like being on a championship football team: sure, you weren’t solely responsible for winning. But being apart of winning team is certainly a lot more impressive than just listing your dribbling and passing skills.

I think you are taking this entirely too literally and missing the forest for the trees. The simple point being made is that communicating your value is easier when you go beyond the basic Skills and Experience CV that every average candidate slavishly sticks to. It doesn’t need to be an exact calculation, it just needs to convey that you’ve achieved something.

Great advice, not negative at all. Thanks so much!

Not the OP, but yes - your CV should convey impact, not just you reliably showed up for work.

This is like saying your CV should be an equivalent of a million dollars which you could literally exchange in a bank for money.

In other words, it would be good to clearly show impact - it would be so useful for the reader to have the final result without having to figure that out himself - but unfortunately it's usually hard enough to find good data for such claims, so anybody actually putting them there is automatically suspicious.

Unless, of course, there's a plausible algorithm for getting such data which I'd like to hear.

The impact, from your words, is also important to determine what you enjoy doing.

Perhaps Gomde UK had you there just to drive the tractor (absurd example to get point across), but you really loved working with sqlite and you went on to create an event management system from back to front and received good feedback. How you interpret your value tells a lot, share it!

how am i supposed to measure my impact when i am one of several team members in a 50 people company all working on issues for a huge website the company is maintaining for a customer.

when we are all working together to push the work forward, no individual contribution has a chance to stand out.

You don't need to measure your impact. It's enough to describe it. "Helped a large client improving their web presence for achieving increased conversion rates." Of course, you were part of a team and of course, you can't show precise statistics. But if they existed, would those stats be worth anything to a recruiter? Your next job will be different in many aspects. No recruiter will read some stats and say, "oh, that person's work increased the company's revenue by 1.5%, so we expect the same result at our company."

In a CV, the impact you made is a story to tell, not a number to calculate.

i was not very clear. as a lowly developer i am so far removed from the outcome that i have no clue what the impact of my work is supposed to be. i don't know if the bug i fixed affects 1% or 90% of the user base, or if the feature, like that new credit card processing service brings in a few new users, or thousands or none at all.

if there is a story to tell, it doesn't reach our team.

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