[MOARDONGZPLZ]

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

[atomicnumber3]

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.

[cfiggers]

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.

[marcyb5st]

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 :)

[taude]

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.

[teiferer]

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.

[paffdragon]

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.

[pertymcpert]

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.

[zdragnar]

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?

[silvestrov]

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.

[methods21]

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.

[layer8]

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/