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Comment by forgotusername6 | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see numbers like that on a CV I am immediately skeptical. There's almost no possibility that the numbers you are listing were a direct result of your contribution. Also, you were probably part of a team, so it was probably a group effort. The other thing is, unless it really was all your idea, who cares how well the feature did?

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Was going to come here to post the same thing, so glad to see this at the top. From the article:

    > I led a project to refactor the core code base and make performance improvements which accelerated development speed by 30% and decreased app size by 50%, leading to 10% in app installs.
    >
    > (please note all numbers are illustrative)

In my experience, it's more like "please note all numbers are bullshit". I agree with you, in that whenever I see numbers like this I would say 5 out of 10 people are totally making them up, 4 out of 10 are taking credit for a large team effort, and maybe 1 in 10 has a real right to say he was responsible for that metric change. So the problem is that even if you're that 1 out of 10 person, the interviewer may be coming at this with the attitude of "90% of people are bullshitting".

I feel like the article is "half right". Yes, I want to know how you drove business outcomes, but I really really care what you actually did. I've been in too many interviews where people could talk a good game but then when I tried to drill down into specific actions the interviewee took, I felt like that consultant from Office Space: "What would you say ya did there??"

Same here, I was going to post the same thing.

I want to know lots of specifics about how you approached the work because that is the only way I can read between the lines and gain a lot of information about your experience and general style.

I have no interested in the stats because they don't help me understand how your capabilities+style will actually translate to the role.

This is kinda what I always wondered about these "show the numerical impact of your work" stats.

How exactly do you know that? Unless you're a manager or something, how do you know that the company got say, 30% more users and 20% more repeat views after they changed the sign up process?

For an awful lot of companies, the tech department flat out doesn't know what the stats are like for their site/app, or care enough to track the direct impact of their work.

Is that a good thing? Absolutely not, but it seems like a depressingly common one nonetheless.

One time, I sent in a question to a panel of anonymous recruiters asking if they could tell that a quantitative number in someone's resume bullet points was bullshit, and if they even cared.

The only responses I got out of that were "generally we can tell if you're embellishing, and the hiring manager can probably tell, so don't lie!" without much further deliberation.

I was hoping that the anonymity would grant them the ability to say the quiet part out loud, but I guess I shouldn't have expected much.

Yeah that seems pretty accurate. It's probably something like:

Realistic: Redeveloping the login page for the site increased return users by 30%

Unrealistic: Reveloping the login page for the site increased return users by 300%

I think everyone knows the $$ numbers are made up but when you have millions of cvs to sort through, the $$ are more shiny and compelling to hr/managers who are making $$ based decisions.

This creates an opposite problem that will be picked up by readers of your CV - if everything is a "we", then they wonder how much you actually contributed vs just sat there watching a more senior engineer.

Discussing impact also communicates that you're impact-oriented, which often indicates maturity and seniority to many readers.

"who cares how well the feature did"

This indicates lack of seniority to many CV readers, especially startups. "Who cares"? Literally every single person who was at your startup before it failed because people were too focused on tech and not enough on the product, the business, or the users. How many startups have such a thing written on their tombstone?

To quote the article's giant pull quote at the bottom:

"The more you describe the “How”, the more Junior I think you are."

He said this is for leadership position, so obviously he didn't do it all themselves. The leader is telling you they're capable of leading a team that can achieve things like that. Finding people who can lead well and reliably is a lot harder than finding people who can just do a job.

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