Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cyberax | Hacker News Reader

> Do say: "I optimized a high-throughput distributed system to prioritize user retention metrics, reducing latency by 150ms through a custom caching layer."

Ugh. Pain. I'm hiring, and I've been filtering out resumes that are heavy on these kinds of metrics.

Because I literally get thousands of entries with these kinds of wording. Often with excessively precise numbers, like "by 23.5%".

My problem is that it's hard to tell the amount of real work it took to do that. It might have been as stupid as creating an additional index in the database, or it might have involved a deep refactoring across multiple systems with a zero-downtime gradual rollout.

I would prefer something like: "I worked as the hands-on leading developer to do a large-scale refactor on the highly loaded front-end network routing system, resulting in user-visible latency decrease on the Youtube front page".

For me the key words are: "hands-on" (and not just writing a product brief and getting resources for it), "large-scale refactor" (so likely not just creating an additional database index), "highly loaded".

There's no such thing as a "hands-on leading developer" on a "large-scale refactor" at Google, it'd be like saying you were the hands-on leading mechanic on building the 787 dreamliner.

I mean something like "spent a significant time as an individual contributor".

FWIW, I agree that less ink on a resume is usually a higher signal, and I also find that indicators for “ownership”, social trust, autonomy, and proxies thereof are more valuable than number go up narratives.

But sometimes people feel like they must play this game to get past the pre-interview loop screen; I’ve interviewed plenty of people with number go up narratives who’ve done exceptionally well. It’s challenging to make hard and fast rules!

Yeah, I get that.

But I'm not joking about thousands of resumes. I have 2210 resumes in the "reviewed" folder now. And they are _very_ heavy on the "number goes up" signal. I think there might be some spam service that sends them out.

I interviewed several candidates, and they are completely bad. Like, totally. Not being able to write simple recursive graph traversal ("you have a list of jobs with dependencies on each other, walk through them in a topological order"). Some can't even write simple "while" loops.

    > social trust

This is an interesting term. (1) Can you define it for me? (2) Can you provide some examples that appear on CVs that project it?

As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.

So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.

That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.

Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.

(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)

You look for impact, not how much it took time. There are people that work a lot, but have no real outcomes. Also this particular type of resume is popular because google has promoted this style

Impact can vary wildly between companies and circumstances given the same inputs however, so indexing on that can be misleading in interviews.

I've moved big revenue metrics with relatively simple projects. Anyone else could have done the same thing. And I was building on work that lots of product people and other engineers performed. That "impact" doesn't tell you anything about what I can bring to a new company with different systems and products.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com