mcenedella

Terrific look behind the curtain at being on the judging panel for this prestigious fiction award.

Lines up with our data at Leet Resumes on "Why You Should Include Numbers on Your Technical Resume": https://leetresumes.com/blog/why-you-should-include-numbers-...

OP here. If you're in the 1% of developers than can consistently produce quality content in blogs, videos, and other formats, this can absolutely be a superior way to demonstrate your command of your field and the subject matter.

To state the obvious, the time, care, attention and effort involved in producing superior content such as yours Umar, is a lot more than getting a free technical resume rewrite from MeetLeet :)

Heart comes from the same place, but a separate effort :) We're focusing on writing technical resumes for free, which is a different business than TLC.

Well, that's exactly right: "every developer knows that the number of lines of code can mean a multitude of things good or bad."

So the goal is to display your sophistication and level of experience by showing your performance with numbers that are appropriate to your level and skill. Something that, when you're asked about it, demonstrates your capabilities, and your ability to delve into the technical details, in a way that only someone at your level could do.

Again, thanks for the feedback. The comments on this post, as usual for Hacker News, are phenomenal and informed. I think I've come up with at least 3 additional posts just based on everyone's feedbacks and critiques!

OP here.

Oh my goodness! You are our target user! This is exactly the correct way to think about: "I always write my performance review as if I were updating my resume."

Email me please - my first name at our domain name.

OP here.

Fair feedback here. A lot of companies are not data-driven enough. But with OKRs and behavioral interviewing, the trend is towards companies and interview processes being more data driven.

I'd suggest that this makes it more important for you to track numbers. You're responsible for your own career - your current employer certainly isn't concerned about where you will be 10 years from now.

My recommendation would be, from now on, to keep an eye on the 3 - 5 metrics you can realistically help in moving in a year. Track the numbers independently if possible. It matters much more to your career than to your company, and helps you share a story about your capabilities to future bosses and employers.

Yes, that's completely true. Statements like this require a lot of context. How the recruiting workflow works today is that context is surfaced in actual interviews.

Would it be better if we could somehow accurately assess professionals on the sum totality of their experience, contributions, behaviors and traits? Yes, indeed it would. But it would also be a lower-paying world because managers would only have sufficient information to hire the people they know closely, and have personally observed over sufficient periods of time.

Our modern system that enables people unknown to a company to be hired based on a simplifying process is a feature, not a bug. Because of this system, companies can scale, hire hundreds or thousands of engineers, and create world-defining products. That success is what enables companies to pay the extraordinary compensation that the technology profession currently earns.

In a world historical context, or even a 21st century capitalism context, the compensation paid to professionals with only a few years experience is absolutely without precedent. Many technology professionals earn more per year in their first year of employment than their parents or grandparents ever earned in a year in their entire lifetimes.

So while I agree there are downsides and negative aspects to the tradeoff of the modern, anonymous, meritocratic system of hiring, the benefits, for technology professionals and the world, far outweigh the negatives.

Thanks for the comments. Perhaps I can be helpful by walking backwards from something you do perceive as valuable? For hiring conversations, what's a great one look like to you?

Why? Great technical resumes make for better outcomes for professionals. We talk more about here: https://www.meetleet.com/#faq

Silly numbers: ok, if those numbers are silly, I agree, you shouldn't use them. What numbers are relevant to your professional success? How can you demonstrate, as a technology professional working in a commercial enterprise, that you helped improve the company, team, or product during this year?

The important thing is to find numbers that you don't believe are silly, but that are meaningful and relevant to your performance and share those. The nature of the accomplishments you cite, and the type of numbers you use, reflect the type of professional you perceive yourself to be. And that signal is meaningful to hiring managers in recruiting processes.

Author here.

When hiring managers and recruiters are looking through a stack of 100s of resumes, or even 10s of resumes, all of which say "Worked with technology X", how can they choose which professionals to interview or phone screen.

Actual experience in the real world is that those who quantify their success in using technology X to achieve goals / OKRs / results for teams tend to get the interview.

OP here. Thanks for the great comment.

This made me laugh: "I sat in the same building while these things were going on."

I agree with you that starting point matters, and that context matters - such as sometimes doubling AWS costs would be better.

The nature of the advice is the science - using numbers factually works better. The nature of your feedback is the art - the types of accomplishments you choose to demonstrate reveals a lot about you as a professional.

To take our example of the doubling AWS costs to make better decisions. Well, how can you quantify those were better decisions. If it's just by the feels, that's not as effective. If you can quantify it - Helped team make decisions that led to x% improvement through database normalization - that is more persuasive than simply saying "Improved team's decision making through database normalization."

Hope that makes sense!

OP here.

Thanks for the great comment. As you think about your overall career, I guess I'd ask you to not think of this as merely a stupid game.

In the complete context, you're an accomplished technology professional who will continue to develop skills, talents, and capabilities throughout your career. How you put your talents to work in solving level-appropriate challenges and problems is important to your progression in your career.

So starting with the meaningful, real, achievements -- your ever-improving aptitude and problem-solving abilities, applied against problems of ever-increasing complexity and depth -- how do we best express that in a short, asynchronous format of about 300-500 words?

Inevitably, the compression of a human experience to this reduced, written, format will leave out meaningful nuance and important clarifications. But in the overall system, it's necessary for the participants involved to have some way of prioritizing the expense of time, money and attention on interviewing and recruiting specific individuals. The alternative is unworkable for everybody - we simply can't conduct full interviews of every applicant, it wouldn't be a good use of company's OR applicants' time.

So if, for the system to work better, we need to adopt this practice, then how can you best represent your true professional capabilities within a limited, constrained document such as a resume. My post suggests it is with numbers, and my observations of actual behavior with recruiters and hiring managers show that numbers are better.

A great technical resume can help get you the interview. In an interview, especially a behavioral interview, you'll be asked deeper question about that 50% reduction in API load time. If it turns out that it was just a few minutes to implement, the hiring manager will, rightly, question your technical judgment in putting that forth as one of the 2 or 3 or 4 most significant accomplishments in your career at that company.

So rather than viewing it as a game, I'd suggest starting with the real achievements you've had in your career, focus on those and how to best represent them in brief, written format. Tricks or shortcuts like mentioning a task that only took a few minutes won't work well, and leave you behind where you could be with more appropriate achievements.

OP here. This is a fair critique of the simple example shared in the article. Many thanks!

OP here.

Thanks for the great comment and sharing your story. In the context of your background - "Having worked on building up a lot of infrastructure stuff from the ground up," it's important that you chose numbers that are level appropriate for someone of your capabilities. if the feedback was " how accurately can "decreased load time by 75%" actually capture the scope of your work if it's a 5 minute change", then that indicates that you may have been showing numbers that weren't truly indicative of your skills and talents.

And I don't agree that picking up tasks that are low impact IRL will help. Ultimately, hiring managers aren't easy to fool, and low-impact metrics make a small impact on resume readers.

OP here.

I agree with this: "just a percentage without context makes no sense. You reduced costs by 16%? Costs of what? What's the denominator? You increased engagement? What does that mean? Subscribers? Clicks? Time spent?"

And this: "Charitably, it's to show you care about business context."

But disagree that you should not do this if writing resumes for "numerate, technical types."

A great technical resume helps get you the interview. In an interview, especially a behavioral interview, you'll be asked deeper question about that 16% cost reduction. Exactly the question you've pointed out. And your resume is more likely to get selected for the reason you pointed out - it shows that you care about business context, or, more broadly, commercial technical achievement.

With technical, numerically literate types as interviewers, they are going to want to know something about how successful you were in being technically accomplished. And the plain, observed, fact is that professionals who demonstrate, with numbers, their accomplishments, get more interviews than professionals who paste their job description, or simply assert they achieved something good without quantifying it.

And a good Paul Graham citation is always welcome and relevant! :)

OP here. This is exactly right: "I feel it's important for technical interviewers to have some experience with STAR/behavioral interviewing. This assists with screening/selecting resumes and exploring these areas in interviews."

Hope you don't mind if I steal some of your comment to use in the update of my post! :)

OP here. Hope you don't mind if I borrow this for the update of my post!

OP here. I agree with your feedback. At a small startup, engagement might be relevant. At a larger company, scale, scope and complexity, relevant to the level, are absolutely more appropriate.

OP here. Readers of your resume, and ultimately hiring managers, will make assessments of your overall capabilities based on the type of achievements you use in your resume.

If a senior engineer cited an improved loading time that could be googled in 5 minutes as one of the 4 or 5 accomplishments in her or his two years at a company, they'd be sending a bad signal about the type and scale of achievements they're capable of. Hiring managers will be looking for something more level-appropriate and that indicates a relevant level of skill.

OP here. I think this is exactly right "The exact number is irrelevant, the fact that there is a number is relevant. That means the developer not only understood the business requirements but also measured the impact afterwards."

In follow-up interviews, the interviewer may dig into those results, and in reference checks, may try to confirm your achievements, so I do not think it's accurate to say it would be OK to use BS numbers.

But the overall sense that numbers are important, and send an important signal about a developer's work habits, patterns and practices, is true.

Original author here.

This is fair. For a developer at a small status, connecting their work to an increase in user engagement might be appropriate.

At a mid- or large-size firm, your bullet points would be more relevant and a better reflection of the work done.

I hope you don't mind if I steal these bullets when I update the post! :)

Author of the post here. Great comments from everybody.

The importance of numbers on your resume comes from a few places: - Shows you care about the results of your work, rather than just performed the work - Show that you understand the connection between your work and technical or business outcomes - Demonstrates your specific capabilities in using your technological skills in delivering results

At this moment in time, the amplitude of accomplishments does not matter. For example, two resumes with the same type of accomplishments, but one has double the numbers of the first, would not mean that one resume is twice as likely to get interviews. Both would be far more likely than a resume without numbers to get interviews.

In a future world where all technical resumes have well-attested numbers, this may shift. We are nowhere near that point yet.

As for accomplishments not being fact-checked. Well, yes, that's true. And that's why a resume can generate you an interview request, but not a job offer. During an interview, particularly behavioral interviews, an employer will dig deeper and want to understand more about the why and how you achieved what you achieved.

"They found that the reptiles and mammals had two patches of activity, one on either side of the developing nasal cavity. Birds, on the hand, had a much larger single patch spanning the front of the face. The researchers reasoned that the alligator pattern could serve as a proxy for that of dinosaurs, given that they have similar snouts and premaxillary bones. The researchers then undid a bird-specific pattern of gene expression in chicken embryos using chemicals to block the genes in the middle of the face. (For ethical reasons, they did not allow the chickens to hatch.)

The result: The treated embryos developed a more dinosaurlike face. “They basically grew a bird embryo back into something that looked more like the morphology of extinct dinosaurs,” said Timothy Rowe, a paleontologist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has previously collaborated with Abzhanov."

Good effort by the OP to recruit women speakers for conferences.

“ The source code to M.U.L.E., believed lost, was found in 2020 in the possession of Julian Eggebrecht. He had pitched an enhanced 16-bit version of the game. EA accepted the idea and sent him two discs with the source code of the original.”

“Mats’s work was generally met with interest, but when he e-mailed the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying, things took an abrupt illegal U-turn. The Board told Mats it had no interest in hearing about his ideas. Fair enough. But the Board didn’t stop there. After a two-year investigation, it fined him $500 for publicly criticizing the timing of traffic lights without having a Professional Engineer license. The Board also forbid him from continuing to discuss his research.”

“(A note for older readers: More time separates us today from the debut of the first iPod than separated the first iPod from the debut of the first Macintosh computer.)“

Wow.

The Chubby Checker recorded Dig Dug song is a terrific find.

I’m not sure how much higher math you’d really need to answer the question “how many tanks has the other side produced?” if these were the serial numbers of the captured tanks:

[689, 341, 386, 741, 982, 414, 845, 241, 180, 447, 880, 21, 583, 993, 812]

it’s tough to see an argument for anything other than: a. about 1,000, or b. 1,000ish but there may be a confounding fact pattern we are unaware of....