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Comment by apwell23 | Hacker News Reader

> Replace adjectives with data

I think this idea got so pervasive all throughout tech that all the resumes that i now get are filled with so many numbers that i don't even know what to make of them.

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If I get one more resume from a “seasoned professional” who has “decreased X by N%” I am going to close hiring, quit tech, and go be a hermit.

N.B. I received such a resume while typing this comment and am absconding to Outer Mongolia as I type

What do you want to see, then? Colorful prose?

I and a few others really did save my company 10 million dollars one year. It was in EC2 spend for a hadoop cluster. I can tell you how we did it and who did what. Yes it was actual dollars we would have otherwise paid to AWS, it is not funny money calculated by looking at sticker rates and ignoring our discounts (which were large).

I'm proud of this and it was one of my largest impacts at the company. What would you have me put on my resume? "Decreased EC2 spend by a whole bunch!"? "Reduced EC2 spend"?

I don't get where this hatred of numbers on resumes is coming from. Is much of it probably bullshit? Yeah, just like most resumes. But I expect you to sort through it the same way you do the rest of the resume. Ask them about it. I can tell you the whole story of mine. I'd expect others can do the same. And if they stammer and crack, now you know how exaggerated it was.

You can complain all you want on here but it's not going to change the fact that most readers including myself just glaze over them. Because as you say most are just bullshit.

So keep doing it if you don't actually care. If you do, maybe try to think of a different way to communicate it that sets you apart.

I generally like it when resumes do this, and so do most people I know. I'd be interested to see surveys, I don't think it's anywhere close to universal. That said, I'm typically focused on very measurable domains (e.g. making code faster.)

I've read so many resumes over the last few years that I'm just completely overwhelmed by the practice. In fact I now judge resumes unfavorably if they use it more than very sparely.

The best resumes I read (and the strongest candidates) were ones which were very confident in their skills and experience. They showed a bit of personality (as much as you can).

If you try to impress a technical interviewer then they will be more interested in the smart idea you had and how you implemented it rather than how much money it made.

It's perfectly fine. The important part is that you can explain during the interview what you did to achieve that impact and demonstrate the skills. A lot of BS ends there. I never threw out a CV because it contained too many numbers or it was too precise. Quite the opposite. I flag CVs that are too vague and use big words without facts often repeatedly but do not provide much information.

Not sure about the author, but having a few hundreds interviews under my belt (as the interviewer) some of those statements are incomplete.

Your example is complete, but if I see statements like: "decreased latency by 5%" I will ask you if are we talking about median or long tail latency. Another example would be "developed a ML model that increased revenue by X%". Here it is missing how the population is affected. If you say overall then I will ask you things like: "For which slice of the population did you see the biggest improvement with the new model? Any regression?" or "Did you run any control group".

While I might or might not care about the technicalities of your answer the important thing is that if you can't convince me that you know what you are talking about then it is as parent said, bullshit and I will stop likely paying attention to you and mind my business as I will suggest a no-hire.

If, instead, it looks like you really did those things you mentioned it is a nice ice breaker and genuine candidates seem to perform well when they get the tension out of the way by answering something they know.

PS: If I were to interview you I would ask "How" because as I mentioned it is a complete statement in my mind :)

You want all that on a resume?

No, but hints work. Like the latency one adding "on p99" makes me think it is a specification that adds a lot with just 2 words and the credibility weight it adds is huge (IMHO).

I've only been a hiring manager once, and it was for a junior-level position so take that into account.

When I read resumes, accomplishments meant next to nothing to me. I was looking for capabilities.

Your EC2 example is probably an exception to what I'm about to say because EC2 is very well known and you can quantify the difference you made in real dollars. But, 99% of the time I have no frame of reference and therefore no way to evaluate claimed accomplishments on a resume.

Oh, you managed accounts totaling $24MM in accrued receivables annually? Sounds impressive, but what if every one of your peers were managing $30–40MM and you were well known to be a slacker? Etc.

It's much more useful to me to know what classes of problem you can solve and which tools / techniques / technologies you're proficient with toward solving them. Descriptive statistics do very little for me.

> and you were well known to be a slacker? > what classes of problem

If people are going to lie on their resume there isn't a whole lot of anything you can do to fix that at the resume evaluation level. So many resumes have 100x skills where they say they know some language because they happen to walk by a room where someone might have been looking at the wikipedia page describing someone who might have used the language once accidentally.

If you can't relate the impact / accomplishment of the candidate for your job to your company,then that just speaks to a low quality resume. It should be obvious to any reviewer why what you did is relevant to their interest.

The reason why impact matters is that in some sense it should be theoretically reproducible. "Saved 100s of engineering hours by fixing some nonsense" which if true should speak to someone who can ostensibly save time while also understand the meaning of their work.

> It's much more useful to me to know what classes of problem you can solve

There is somewhat less opportunity to bullshit on what problems you have solved than on what problems you can solve.

That's a good example for a success. I've seen resumes from Junior devs with <2 years experience, where every line item was a business goal met, and almost nothing on their technical skills they've gotten. Been a hiring manager 10+ years, and it's a trend I've seen more recently.

that formula is preached non-stop on reddit /csmajors /cscareers ect .

I do feel bad for junior developers. I'm at the point where I won't consider a job unless it came through my professional network. I did a bit of job hunting during some downtime after my last gig just to be diligent while my current was being lined up and it is utterly depressing. LinkedIn and co's "one click apply" has to be the worst thing to happen to the industry for remote workers.

Back in "my day" you'd tailor your resume to the company you applied to in an effort to highlight relevant experience, and that was a minimum- most also included a cover letter... Not fire off three dozen applications a day hoping to hear back from one after a month or three.

Got any extra room in your yurt?

I often read “decreased X by N%” as a slight lie: they don't tell how precise N% was measured and how they can know that all of N% came from their work and not other circumstances.

So my impression is that they work sloppily and oriented more towards office politics than good engineers.

Presenting such numbers to motivate management is a frequent advice on the Soft Skills Engineering podcast [0]. I agree that their (the numbers’) meaningfulness is often doubtful.

[0] https://softskills.audio/

As a hiring manager / lead for technical positions, this is fine, and often proposed by the 'resume experts'. Where I get incensed is these statements where the original design/architecture that this individual was responsible for was the problem, and they are just bringing something back to baseline where it should have started. I see this ALL THE TIME. And this is with grace towards changing requirements etc. And not just on resumes, I see this on internal corp. accomplishments, and typically the higher the level the more the savings and more the unnecessary waste was to start. For example, CFO once claimed like $20mm in savings because he decommed a financial module that they bought and NEVER used and NEVER needed - this guy crushed is bonus this year.

99% of bullet points containing numbers in a resume are made up, hamfisted BS, the other 1% cannot be attributed to a single individual so putting them in a personal resume is silly.

I don’t blame people for doing so. That’s what they have been told by recruiters to do to increase their chance of their resume not being thrown into the trash or be invisible. If there is someone to blame for this, it’s the recruiting industry.

Not you specifically, but as an industry response, that seems too pat.

The recruiters will do and react to what the hiring managers ask for. When one too many candidates slip thru who bullshit, or there is weak signal that such and such method of candidate selection seems to result in marginally stronger candidates, then everyone rushes to do that thing and it eventually becomes sludge. Leetcode interviews are a classic example.

We (individuals) get poor candidates because we (industry) encourage and reward poor recruitment practices. Time for us all to look in the mirror, honestly.

I've seen 300k salary hiring managers punching down on a recruiter making 60k who doesnt know her C# from her C++. That sort of behavior says more about the flaws of the hiring manager than the recruiter. If you never talk to the recruiter but once a year when you have budget to hire someone, never take the time to educate them on your business, well then you're going to get crappy candidates.

It’s so dumb. There is no way to verify the numbers, and yet, this stupidity weaseled its way into the LinkedIn cinematic universe of corporate bullshit. The same point but without the “X by Y%” hits the same for me— besides I know what questions to ask to judge if you are actually capable of moving the needle, which is all I care about as a conductor of interviews.

the problem is CVs are screened by non-tech HR/recruiters, who lack the capacity to screen candidates. Because it is much easier to apply online with one click, each position is spammed with millions of CVs.

in response, for HR it is much easier to filter out CV if it lacks style, not substance. Therefore they look at bullet points like "Done X by Y%".

The proper way should be to limit the intake funnel: accept only a few applications per job, so that they can be screened properly by HRs by calling them, and talking to them and properly screening (old school style), instead of tossing their resume to the bin after 15 sec quick review

I agree with the sentiment, but not the conclusion. Sure, numbers can be abused, just like anything else, but they provided specificity which you can then interrogate and call bullshit on. I won't necessarily fault someone for leaving off the numbers and just speaking qualitatively to the large scale system rewrite they did, but it's harder to evaluate whether such an effort was indeed warranted or was just a lateral move post-hoc rationalized by an engineer who didn't understand the original system and needed to rewrite it just to achieve that understanding. Again, if someone is satisfying the business with such efforts, more power to them. As a hiring manager, I don't want to get into a subjective evaluation of the relative engineering value of specific work at an external company that I have no first-hand context on, but I do want to know that candidates understand the highest level goals they are hired to contribute to. Metrics, however flawed, give a good entry point into such conversations.

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