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Comment by notTooFarGone | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read something like "Increased revenues by 93% by balancing user and business priorities against available resources" in CVs I immediately disregard it.

Maybe I've read it too much but doing the actual analysis of "what have I done and how was the impact" is a lot more than simply taking revenue beforehand and revenue afterwards and calling it a success. Also if I solve a bug that was discovered by QA, specified by PM that was hogging a lot of resources, did I really increase revenue? This trend in CVs is really annoying me as most of the time it's complete BS and only there because people watched a YT video on how to build your resume.

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Sometimes thats the only real number you have though? Maybe you can just ask candidates more about that?

I'm on a team that rebuild a sales/onboarding funnel. I was told it resulted in 5 million in additional revenue generated this year. I'll use that number on my resume at some point. But mostly because I don't have a more useful number to use.

If you ask me I can share all about how and why we build it which is probably what you actually care about, right? 5 mill might be a lot at a small company or almost nothing at a large company so $ and % are pretty much irrelevant. It's the process of building that you would actually care about, no?

I agree that is particularly vague however resumes are expected to be one pagers, in contrast to CVs, so those statements are really meant as teasers for further discussion after passing through the first HR gate (which wants these sorts of statements.)

What is the problem here?

The fact that the impact is generic, and you can not be sure about that the candidate's actions were the true cause?

In this case would a more specific claim with a more solid reasoning help?

Or are you dismissing all claims of potential positive impacts?

At a guess, they think claiming that an individual increased revenue by 93% using a simple balancing method is not very plausible, and as it is most likely just and outright lie can thus be discarded as hot air (which is actually pretty charitable).

One objection is of course that 93% is very achievable if the numbers involved are very small, but in that case the statement might just be code for "selling the office sofa" which is often seen as less impressive.

In this case, the number was accurate. The company was in a tailspin with people actively trying to abandon it.

We had to re-earn their business.

What meaning are you putting into the word "accurate" here? Are you sure you don't mean "precise"?

How would you differentiate in this case?

No one really doubts that the revenue increased. The question is whether the claim that it was by aligning the blah-de-blahs with the foobars is an accurate one and, related, what the individual contribution/leadership was. (Could another peer make the exact same claim with similar credibility?)

That’s fair.

In this situation I was actively evaluating support issues, customer reported problems and new feature requests to triage what was worked and when. I’m comfortable suggesting that if somebody else was making those decisions at the time, the entire company would have folded. It’s hard to expand further on that without going into a lot more detail though.

Neither really makes sense from a statistical perspective: your number is effectively the true value, and there is no repeatable measurement process you’re evaluating.

Your use of the non-statistical meaning of “accurate” as “free from error” is spot on.

No, the number is given in a causal statement, it is not simply the reporting of a measurement as you claim. So the distinction between "accurate" and "precise" is definitely relevant.

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