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Comment by hiAndrewQuinn | Hacker News Reader

What counts as a keyword here? If you're hiring for a frontend developer and you see e.g. "Redux" do you just can it?

Knowing or having experience with Redux isn’t going to cause me to pick you over someone else who doesn’t list it for a job where I’m paying you hundreds of thousands of dollars. I look at other skills.

I would not can it in isolation, but if I see a comma-separated list like: “proficient in redux, react, html, JavaScript, sql, kubernetes, word and excel”… then yes, you don’t make the cut.

Or if you list your Microsoft qualifications or your MIT continuing education courses. These are all negative signals.

What would be an example of a positive signal?

Unfortunately many recruiters do look at that. I'm always a bit disappointed when someone wants me to rate my Java experience, or complains that my CV doesn't mention REST experience.

Metrics: I increased retention 2x; I reduced latency from X ms to Y ms; increased slo to 99.999… those are all meaningless. It was in fashion to put such numbers in cvs maybe 5-10 years ago. Not anymore

They were always lies because they’re imprecise. “I” didn’t do any of those things, you did other things together with other people leveraging company infrastructure to accomplish those things. Tell me about the SKILLS you excel in tha make those things happen.

Why would you not want to know a general idea of what specific technology someone is familiar with ? Someone could be an "infrastructure engineer" and be more proficient in specific tools vs others - don't you want to match that to the job your hiring for ?

In my case it's not a lie: I reduced the time for a complex import process from 1 hour to 3 minutes, a 20 fold improvement. I included it in my CV, but now I wonder if I should take it out.

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