Comment by cloudedcordial | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cloudedcordial | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yes, please ignore the cynical and negative folks. They are not doing you any good.

Like what a few other folks in this thread pointed out, your resume and your portfolio looks outdated and fragmented on my first glance. Most recruiters and hiring managers spend 5 seconds max during the first pass, so first impressions matter.

Here are the things you can do to bring your resume up-to-date: * "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact. For example, "pre-screen and match thousands of patients a day" could be rewritten as "pre-screen n patients per day and match them to m healthcare provider with 99.99% uptime" sounds impactful. * Self-rating of your skills is not necessary. Nowadays your description of your impact is implicit on how you learn and work. In addition, "expert" for one person may not be the same for others.

On your portfolio: * Listing your education is no longer necessary after the first job. Putting this in your portfolio site makes you look inexperienced. (Leave education in the resume, however.) * The screenshots for Nike and LG look outdated, which contradicts "cutting-edge internet experiences".

> Here are the things you can do to bring your resume up-to-date: * "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact. For example, "pre-screen and match thousands of patients a day" could be rewritten as "pre-screen n patients per day and match them to m healthcare provider with 99.99% uptime" sounds impactful. * Self-rating of your skills is not necessary. Nowadays your description of your impact is implicit on how you learn and work. In addition, "expert" for one person may not be the same for others.

I've seen this a lot online, but as someone who struggled to add this sort of data to my CV before, where exactly are people getting these stats?

Every company I've worked for either didn't know how changes affected things like uptime or conversion rate or page views or didn't share the information with the engineering team.

Do most people just make up these stats? Guess and hope it's somewhat correct? Work for companies that just happen to tell their engineering teams everything about the impact of their work? Actually go out and measure it themselves somehow, like throgh Google Analytics?

Just feels like it may be difficult for the author to show this sort of data, since they may not have access to it at all.

In the cases of uptime and conversion rate, might you only implement the change after looking at the desired metrics and verifying that they've improved?

re GP comment: it's more about the tone -- one should seem confident and well-acquainted with what they choose to show -- than the actual numbers. If you told me that you improved conversion rates by 2%, or 20%, I would barely know the difference, but I would see both of those very differently than just "improved conversion rates". If you don't have numbers, I would try to be specific in some other area instead (e.g. technologies used, names of big clients). Similarly, phrases like "had creative input across the full stack" might give me pause -- what does that mean? It implies a low amount of impact; why not say something more attractive, like "contributed and assisted others across the full stack"?

> where exactly are people getting these stats?

You can basically make them up - just make up something plausible for your field. It's not like everybody else isn't rounding up anyway.

Most are making up these stats. Don't say 100% improvement, though, unless you can back it up but 30% with a process improvement should be easy to justify in an interview. The point here is to make your resume "skimmable" since no one reads text anymore.

The product management team, or whoever was pushing for the project in the first place, should have this data, and will often be very happy to share. They might not themselves know 100%, but they should have some estimate of benefits. It's not always widely shared, but you could certainly ask.

The modern CV art is purely about how confident and fluent you are in answering anything on it. The actual roles and projects may be anything; you just base it as a biopic adaptation based on your life.

This is difficult for those of us with moral compasses... an obsolete form of navigation I suppose.

same here, i've never had any stats or measurements about any of the features i've built.

Then how can you know if building the feature made any sense?

Engineers don't usually get to decide which features to build.

Someone needs to have data to validate a feature has value. Otherwise the company is just operating on the GIGO principle.

I’ll admit, companies like that do exist and somehow survive!

I should think the vast majority of companies operate without data on the value added by specific product features. The cases where you can assign a dollar value to a specific feature are the exceptions, not the rule.

It's not necessarily a case of GIGO, either. Take VSCode, for example. Tons of useful features. How many of them can be linked directly to increases in Microsoft's revenue?

One would hope that the VSCode devs are trying to build a good text editor according to their own taste and intuition (while also listening to outside feedback). It would be a complete waste of time to try to 'validate' every feature added.

the business users asked for it, ergo it makes sense ipso facto

> Like what a few other folks in this thread pointed out, your resume and your portfolio looks outdated and fragmented on my first glance. Most recruiters and hiring managers spend 5 seconds max during the first pass, so first impressions matter.

From the blog post, it seems the author already received that feedback multiple times, but somehow failed to act upon it.

It is also baffling how, after receiving feedback to showcase his skills in places like substack and YouTube, the blogger somehow opted to post self-comisorating content and even lambast anyone who ever interviewed him for the audacity if picking someone else.

The blogger's knee jerk reaction of attacking anyone expressing anything but support as being "cynical" and "negative" also conveys the idea of someone being unable to receive feedback and even handle feedback well without lashing back. Handling feedback is a fundamental skill to work in a team environment. Attacking those who give it with ad-hominems such as "fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" screams out toxic personality.

And those are the good aspects the blogger cherry-picked expecting to portray himself as the victim. God knows what's the actual impression their peers got from him.

> such as "fresh-faced bay area 25 year old with a Steve Jobs complex" screams out toxic personality.

Well... that may as well be a very clinical observation; I've lost count of how many I've met in interviewing rounds, on either side of the table or in my own teams. It wouldn't surprise me a lot of tech people go through such a phase, at some (hopefully as shortest as possible) point of their early career. I probably have.

It reveals a mediocre mindset and likely self undermining too… since most of those types are in fact smarter than the ~80th-90th percentile.

So it would have even worse implications for anyone complaining against them, who isn’t clearly way beyond that threshold.

> It reveals a mediocre mindset and likely self undermining too

It could.

> since most of those types are in fact smarter than the ~80th-90th percentile.

But you’re skipping the very issue of this mindset. Being smarter along a very specific scale of evaluation doesn’t make one de facto « smarter » in general, neither properly adjusted to work and collaborate in an organisation.

Denouncing arrogance might not be the best move in some context, but it is not a show of weakness.

How would this matter to a random passing reader?

They’re not going to assume the author is any more virtuous/wise/etc… than the complained against, without some compelling evidence.

Why should people refrain from stating what they see? It's his blog, why should he refrain to express himself? Why should you decide in his stead, what does matter or not to him to express?

A minor signal is still a signal, that may, or may not, accrue to other converging ones.

How does this relate to my prior two comments?

I don’t see the connection to how any random group of HN readers perceive this or that.

And that’s the problem.Lot of people are not in the top 10% of intelligence spectrum but they do need to make at least 130-150k per yer to survive in USA and the only skill they have is related to computers.

Huh? median salary is much much less than that.

You mean “survive” in their desired neighborhoods?

> "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact.

And that's perfectly fine too.

Don't make up numbers just to satisfy the quantitative-obsessed people/recruiters, who won't make satisfying customers/bosses anyway.

Not only does it make no sense to make up numbers, but straight numbers are definitely suspect, depending on how they are put forward.

Both quanti and quali are important, and in some jobs, even engineering ones (especially in the glue/soft/transverse positions) quali is much more relevant than quanti.

If you have precise numbers, and it matches the discourse you want to put through, go ahead. If you don't, if your strength is not in this particular corner, there is no requirement to bend yourself into a box that does not fit.

Do not put in the key metrics unless you can stand behind them.

Most AI resume review services tell people to do this and it's the first thing I ask about. When the people can't explain how they are measured it's an instant no.

1000 times this! When I see a number in a resume, I don't care if the number is big or small, I care why they picked this number over any other. If they can give me a coherent explanation, that moves them highly up in my rankings. If it's clear they're bullshitting (and you really can't bullshit as well as you think you can), it's an instant no despite anything else they might have.

Agree! The metric, even if it's an intelligent guess, justify why you did such tasks. It helps to bring a coherent story about your professional work. The tasks are not for vanity.

100% this. I interview a lot of people for "performance engineering" roles, and ~50-80% of performance engineering is measurement. If you have a number on your resume, how you measured that number is often a lot more interesting to me than how you achieved that result. A lot of people have bad answers.

I also always ask how it was measured and if they published that anywhere. It's also informative to ask how it compares to other similar projects at similar companies and how (when applicable) it compares to state of the art in academia.

Company size matters of course but it is nice to see how a decision got made and how the results compared to expectations. Was this done thoughtfully and rigorously? If it's just made up that comes through really really quickly as well.

My advice for all getting hired is to try to skip the recruiting pipeline. Yes it's hard and there is no silver bullet but the standard pipeline is a brutal gauntlet to go through and I'd rather spend the time building rapport with a hiring manager or future peer instead.

The informal job market is very good to use. I got one internship through the cold-call process, but haven't been successful sending out resumes otherwise. Every job since then was a referral - all still involved interviews, but a referral is a nice way to bypass the resume shredder.

Ironically, every company I have worked for has said they get much better candidates/employees through referrals, too. Yet another sign that the "resume and a firm handshake" idea is broken.

Putting his education on his portfolio is not why 900 companies didn't hire him.

It's not because AI automated his job either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com