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Comment by martinald | Hacker News Reader

It shows that you are thinking about 'the greater goal' of improving commercial/revenue performance for the company over "just" technical stuff. This is incredibly rare, I would say less than 5% of technical/developer resumes I read have anything remotely relating to this. Usually very tech heavy, which is great, but a few bullets about this shows you understand and care about more than just the tech side.

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as a developer you generally can't directly pin numbers to your contributions. A very long time, I helped a company get into a new segment of market. I have no number to give, it's just that the CEO, told me so. I'm not even sure it was smart to go there, I was just asked to transform the product to go there, and I did, but I'm not a salesman.

But you don't need numbers for that. A simple "increased user engagement by refactoring our front-end in React" is more than enough; it tells me that the goal was to "increase user engagement" (that's the greater goal, nice!) and that you know (hopefully) your way around React (tech stuff, nice!). The number strikes me as bs.

Companies are driven by numbers and manager bonuses are driven by the numbers their team produces. A developer who shows they can produce those numbers is valuable. The number may be BS or unscientific or whatever but it is there and usually that is enough for management. Anyone can say "increased user engagement" but a number says you measured it somehow which gives it worth and that is why management wants numbers.

> The number may be BS or unscientific

> but a number says you measured it somehow

Okay so it may be BS, but at least it's measured somehow, where somehow may include pulling it entirely out of your ass.

But indeed this is key:

> Companies are driven by numbers and manager bonuses are driven by the numbers their team produces

Those numbers may be bullshit as well, but there's already a cult around them and you demonstrate belonging to the tribe by flinging around numbers just like they do.

I agree this is something to look for, but doing that with numbers alone makes you look like you had extremely narrow responsibilities, and probably shouldn’t be interacting with stakeholders anyway because you can’t use words like a normal person.

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