Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CM30 | Hacker News Reader

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> Here are the things you can do to bring your resume up-to-date: * "Key achievements" does not include numbers to describe impact. For example, "pre-screen and match thousands of patients a day" could be rewritten as "pre-screen n patients per day and match them to m healthcare provider with 99.99% uptime" sounds impactful. * Self-rating of your skills is not necessary. Nowadays your description of your impact is implicit on how you learn and work. In addition, "expert" for one person may not be the same for others.

I've seen this a lot online, but as someone who struggled to add this sort of data to my CV before, where exactly are people getting these stats?

Every company I've worked for either didn't know how changes affected things like uptime or conversion rate or page views or didn't share the information with the engineering team.

Do most people just make up these stats? Guess and hope it's somewhat correct? Work for companies that just happen to tell their engineering teams everything about the impact of their work? Actually go out and measure it themselves somehow, like throgh Google Analytics?

Just feels like it may be difficult for the author to show this sort of data, since they may not have access to it at all.

Most are making up these stats. Don't say 100% improvement, though, unless you can back it up but 30% with a process improvement should be easy to justify in an interview. The point here is to make your resume "skimmable" since no one reads text anymore.

In the cases of uptime and conversion rate, might you only implement the change after looking at the desired metrics and verifying that they've improved?

re GP comment: it's more about the tone -- one should seem confident and well-acquainted with what they choose to show -- than the actual numbers. If you told me that you improved conversion rates by 2%, or 20%, I would barely know the difference, but I would see both of those very differently than just "improved conversion rates". If you don't have numbers, I would try to be specific in some other area instead (e.g. technologies used, names of big clients). Similarly, phrases like "had creative input across the full stack" might give me pause -- what does that mean? It implies a low amount of impact; why not say something more attractive, like "contributed and assisted others across the full stack"?

The modern CV art is purely about how confident and fluent you are in answering anything on it. The actual roles and projects may be anything; you just base it as a biopic adaptation based on your life.

This is difficult for those of us with moral compasses... an obsolete form of navigation I suppose.

> where exactly are people getting these stats?

You can basically make them up - just make up something plausible for your field. It's not like everybody else isn't rounding up anyway.

The product management team, or whoever was pushing for the project in the first place, should have this data, and will often be very happy to share. They might not themselves know 100%, but they should have some estimate of benefits. It's not always widely shared, but you could certainly ask.

same here, i've never had any stats or measurements about any of the features i've built.

Then how can you know if building the feature made any sense?

Engineers don't usually get to decide which features to build.

Someone needs to have data to validate a feature has value. Otherwise the company is just operating on the GIGO principle.

I’ll admit, companies like that do exist and somehow survive!

I should think the vast majority of companies operate without data on the value added by specific product features. The cases where you can assign a dollar value to a specific feature are the exceptions, not the rule.

It's not necessarily a case of GIGO, either. Take VSCode, for example. Tons of useful features. How many of them can be linked directly to increases in Microsoft's revenue?

One would hope that the VSCode devs are trying to build a good text editor according to their own taste and intuition (while also listening to outside feedback). It would be a complete waste of time to try to 'validate' every feature added.

the business users asked for it, ergo it makes sense ipso facto

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