How we communicate signals seniority

"When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where to get the best turpentine." (Picasso, supposedly [1])

To be generous to OP, I think their point is about how to communicate in an elevator pitch, or a resume bullet point, or the first few minutes of an intro call. And in those contexts, OP is pretty reasonably correct.

What it comes down to is details.

The person citing numbers about growth, hiring, or whatever is proving they know the details of the work. And that's a great start.

The next step for the interviewer comes in following up to find out whether they actually know the details of how the work was done, why it was done that way, what was good or bad about how the work was done, and why it's good or bad.

A good follow-up question would be something like: "Great, please walk me through the story of how you took ${METRIC} from A to B, what you think went well, and what you think went poorly." That should yield a solid 10-15 minute (or more) discussion where the executive candidate can prove they have the ability to handle both minute details and grand strategy at the same time, as well as the discretion to know when they're supposed to be doing which one.

Failure to do this on the part of the interviewer is how a company ends up with so many sub-par executives. And a failure on the part of the executive to push themselves in this way, in the first place, is how our industry has ended up with so many sub-par executives.

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/10/20/turpentine/

You can communicate understanding of the business without falling into BS slop.

Truly senior people have made such significant and real contributions that (a) their resume is mostly an afterthought and (b) the story

It is funny since one can make outrageous claims on one's resume about impact without needing to prove anything. This doesn't work the same for the "how".

Rustified a monolith with 99% SLA, SW.

Owned revenue stream that brought in 40MM with 20% YoY growth on 80% margin -> Business.

You can do either, but you probably don't have time to do both.

"""While it may be “useful” to do that refactor or redesign, or work on an annoying bug"""

Shortest but not sweetest time-capsule to an already-dead moment in our collective past, IMHO

> The altitude of your communication signals your seniority and experience.

It's not mentioned anywhere which is the superior (to the author) response. This article is so vague that, at the end, I still could not tell which one the author preferred.

I mean, I appreciate reading the concrete numbers because it gives a more detailed trampoline into interesting discussions, but don't for a second imply you, as an individual, had very much agency over the outcome at all. That would border on clinically meaningful hubris.

(I guess this opinion makes me low in seniority?)

"At a big IT company, I migrated the CRM to a new system and the revenue went up with 6%".

Right.

Frankly, neither.

The first is intentionally written to be as dull and disinterested as possible, and so comes off poorly (presumably because it was designed to).

The second is a meaningless out-of-context number and corporate speak soup that doesn't really tell me anything about the prospective hire.

Obviously, this was written by and for executives in product orgs... and maybe it makes more sense there. But I'd balk at hiring anyone who talks like this into an engineering org, even at the executive level.