24 ms·

What a great technical resume can do for you

243 points by mcenedella 6y ago

iliekcomputers 6y ago
Do people take stuff out of their perf reviews and put them into the resume sometimes? I imagine most perf reviews are fairly focused on numbers as well, curious if there's an overlap of content that could go on a resume as well, my intuition says most probably there is.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  If you feel it'll help you standout and gwt an interview then it's worth trying.
- GrumpyYoungMan 6y ago
  Yup, this absolutely works! I always write my performance review as if I were updating my resume. If I don't like what I see, that's feedback to myself and motivation to change my plans for the next review period. This particularly works in companies big enough that internal transfers are possible; the text of the performance review should be specifically written with the idea that the next hiring manager will read it in mind.
  - mcenedella 6y ago
    OP here. Oh my goodness! You are our target user! This is exactly the correct way to think about: "I always write my performance review as if I were updating my resume." Email me please - my first name at our domain name.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
> Instead, a technical resume’s primary purpose is to generate interview requests for you. It’s where you make the case to “please pick me out of the pile. Yes. A resume's primary purpose is to win favor for an interview. But! Not all suitors and opportunities are equal. That is, the goal isn't simply interviews, but interviews with the right organizations, with the right culture, that have the best potential for an LTR.
kevinpet 6y ago
Some of this is "yes, I wish people understood that" to me, like: "It’s to make it as clear as possible which types of problems you’ve solved in the past, and how well you solved them." This is all I care about. I want to see the complexity of what you've handled. "As a result, their bullet points are full of sentences that begin “Responsible for” or “Worked on” or “Assigned to.”" These phrases have always struck me as meaning "I sat in the same building while these things were going on." But when the author suggests using numbers, those strike me as bs. I assume that success in moving numbers depends on what the starting point is. I'm sure I could walk into the typical high growth startup and find tons of places where I could get a 10x performance improvement, because they've been focused on other things. Is reducing AWS cost by 17% (from a low baseline) better than doubling AWS cost and allowing the team to make better decisions because the data is normalized and easily searchable?
- mcenedella 6y ago
  OP here. Thanks for the great comment. This made me laugh: "I sat in the same building while these things were going on." I agree with you that starting point matters, and that context matters - such as sometimes doubling AWS costs would be better. The nature of the advice is the science - using numbers factually works better. The nature of your feedback is the art - the types of accomplishments you choose to demonstrate reveals a lot about you as a professional. To take our example of the doubling AWS costs to make better decisions. Well, how can you quantify those were better decisions. If it's just by the feels, that's not as effective. If you can quantify it - Helped team make decisions that led to x% improvement through database normalization - that is more persuasive than simply saying "Improved team's decision making through database normalization." Hope that makes sense!
ku-man 6y ago
How come this very low quality blog post is on HN? It say nothing of interest. Not to mention that its only purpose is to sell the author's resume writing services.
ingvul 6y ago
> Refactored our front/end experience using React. vs > Increased user engagement 27% by refactoring our front-end experience in React. Do tech interviewers actually prefer the second description over the first one? To be honest, I find the second one out of context (and a bit robotic/pedantic). Reasons: - sure, 27% may look like a decent increase, but what was the metric you guys used? How many users you have? One cannot put all of this info in a resume of course (because it's a resume!) so please don't just drop a 27% there as if it means a lot - I can imagine that the goal of the team/company was to "increase the user engagement", even perhaps "increase the user engagement by X%" and the product team thought "alright, let's refactor our front-end in React; no idea if it will bring an increase of X% or X/2%, but let's do it". But it's impossible to say that React (or any other tech) will bring you an increase of engagement in %X exactly. You just don't know that number, the number comes after; you may have some hypothesis but that's all. So, what you are actually telling me is this: "hey, we wanted to increase our user engagement by some percentage and so we refactored our front-end in React. Later on, our analytics tool told us that the user engagement increased by 27%." Again, you weren't aiming for that number, it just happened. - you are not going to get hired for that 27%. Imagine there's another candidate that says "Increased user engagement 89% by refactoring our front-end experience in React". What now? Is him better than you? Again, context is king, but you cannot put that much context in a resume.
- martinald 6y ago
  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.
  - ingvul 6y ago
    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.
momirlan 6y ago
Rubbish. I was in IT 30 years, and it was all about surviving BS projects which inevitably were declared a "success" if they achieved 5% of the promised functionality. Numbers, performance ? What a joke. Yet I made a good income in senior jobs, leading "succesful" projects. Managers who hold the purse have no idea of technical measures anyway, or care.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  I was having a friendly conversation with my boss. I tried to joke about how windows batch basically gaslit me for half an hour, because I didn't know batch variables are substituted at evaluation time, not runtime, so it basically makes it impossible to reassign a variable unless it's in a batch script file with EnableDelayedExpansion turned on. I don't think I fully communicated the joke but I learned a lot just by trying to.
- ozim 6y ago
  I agree with that summary "rubbish". I have a different angle on why it is rubbish. If someone is not getting any replies even if he sends out 10's or 100's solicitations, I believe there is no tweak he can do to his resume that will help him. Because then he probably does not have needed experience or skills, so it is more about finding right level that you can apply for, than tweaking CV. You are not going to get better salary because of your CV, after you have a reply, resume goes out of the window.
MattGaiser 6y ago
How many companies actually measure things in enough detail for most people to do this in a useful manner? I have numbers on my resume, but they are just whatever numerical metrics I could get. They are there for the sake of numbers on the resume. Nobody is tracking how much slightly faster an API might have become or how many fewer bugs were produced a sprint unless it is an extremely data driven company.
- mcenedella 6y ago
  OP here. Fair feedback here. A lot of companies are not data-driven enough. But with OKRs and behavioral interviewing, the trend is towards companies and interview processes being more data driven. I'd suggest that this makes it more important for you to track numbers. You're responsible for your own career - your current employer certainly isn't concerned about where you will be 10 years from now. My recommendation would be, from now on, to keep an eye on the 3 - 5 metrics you can realistically help in moving in a year. Track the numbers independently if possible. It matters much more to your career than to your company, and helps you share a story about your capabilities to future bosses and employers.
marwan-nwh 6y ago
Seriously, I am thinking about leaving Tech because of broken hiring processes.
peferron 6y ago
HN loves to be gruff and contrarian about these topics. So I'm going to say this for any readers that are or will be looking for jobs: Yes, the article is mostly right. Yes, you should quantify your achievements as much as possible. And yes, the popular pattern "Accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z" is effective. The example in the article is not the best because there's too much of a leap between "moving to React" and "increasing user engagement by 27%". As a reader I'm left wondering why moving to React had such an impact. In this situation it's worth spending some of your precious word count to explain things better.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  One of the problems is that "measured by Y" often does not exist, so if it is included, it is misleading, lacking context, or just whatever number could be found. A colleague of mine probably doubled the speed of an API by deleting a feature on that page. The only reason we know is that it is noticeable how much faster it is in manual testing. Took him a few minutes to remove the function and run the tests. "Cut API load time by 50% with optimization of Hibernate queries" is true, but also ridiculous. On my own resume, I have played with the words to arrive at the largest number possible for the scale of what I did. As we didn't numerically measure anything, so it was massaging of a number into a number that was large. Recruiters seem to react well to it, but it is absurd that they do. I don't disagree that this works. I use it on my own resume. I don't think that is the problem HN has. It is just expressing annoyance that we have to play another stupid game to get hired.
  - CharlesW 6y ago
    > "Cut API load time by 50% with optimization of Hibernate queries" is true, but also ridiculous. In my experience it's absolutely not ridiculous (improvements should be measured by impact, not LOC) but it could still be improved by conveying the benefit to the company or API consumers.
    - edoceo 6y ago
      I read that Hibernate line as "removed Hibernate for direct DB connection"
st1x7 6y ago
I was with the author until I got to the actual advice. "Worked with technology X" seems a lot more relevant and useful than "achieved x% improvement" or "reduced cost by 30%". The latter doesn't just signals that the owner of the resume read a questionable article online and decided to follow its advice.
- vmception 6y ago
  Yeah I think this article has good advice for something closer to a perfect world, where a company gets a good signal for the employee but frames this as making it the prospective employee's responsibility to give that signal. But in this existing world, a non-standard resume just makes it harder for anyone to screen quickly.
- mcenedella 6y ago
  Author here. When hiring managers and recruiters are looking through a stack of 100s of resumes, or even 10s of resumes, all of which say "Worked with technology X", how can they choose which professionals to interview or phone screen. Actual experience in the real world is that those who quantify their success in using technology X to achieve goals / OKRs / results for teams tend to get the interview.
  - st1x7 6y ago
    The problem with the "achieved x % this-or-that" statements is that they require a lot of context to understand and are very difficult to verify. Don't tell me that when you're screening hundreds of resumes you can successfully understand what those achievements actually represent or what kind of skills and effort they required in the context of their company, team and problem domain. Let alone compare candidates based on a bullet list of their claimed achievement, each of them using a different metric and worded in a different way.
    - mcenedella 6y ago
      Yes, that's completely true. Statements like this require a lot of context. How the recruiting workflow works today is that context is surfaced in actual interviews. Would it be better if we could somehow accurately assess professionals on the sum totality of their experience, contributions, behaviors and traits? Yes, indeed it would. But it would also be a lower-paying world because managers would only have sufficient information to hire the people they know closely, and have personally observed over sufficient periods of time. Our modern system that enables people unknown to a company to be hired based on a simplifying process is a feature, not a bug. Because of this system, companies can scale, hire hundreds or thousands of engineers, and create world-defining products. That success is what enables companies to pay the extraordinary compensation that the technology profession currently earns. In a world historical context, or even a 21st century capitalism context, the compensation paid to professionals with only a few years experience is absolutely without precedent. Many technology professionals earn more per year in their first year of employment than their parents or grandparents ever earned in a year in their entire lifetimes. So while I agree there are downsides and negative aspects to the tradeoff of the modern, anonymous, meritocratic system of hiring, the benefits, for technology professionals and the world, far outweigh the negatives.
umaar 6y ago
I've put lots of little coding solutions, links to my videos and articles on my website [1], and have sent this to potential employers in the past for web dev jobs. It definitely helped accelerate things, and on 3 occasions I didn't have to do their take home test since my GitHub was enough. I don't have an up to date CV and my LinkedIn is empty. I've also heard of potential colleagues giving positive sentiment to the hiring manager/boss: "oh that guy, I'm subscribed to his mailing list, he's good". I've received a good number of offers, and one thing I've started to wonder: are interviewers thinking I'm a great dev because all these little side projects supposedly make me a better web developer? Or are they hoping I'll increase exposure to their brand since I already do talks and write articles? I hope it's not the former, all the time I spend writing, doing talks etc. it's taking time away (with the exception of software-based side projects) from me learning about the art of software engineering. [1] https://umaar.com https://umaar.com
- mcenedella 6y ago
  OP here. If you're in the 1% of developers than can consistently produce quality content in blogs, videos, and other formats, this can absolutely be a superior way to demonstrate your command of your field and the subject matter. To state the obvious, the time, care, attention and effort involved in producing superior content such as yours Umar, is a lot more than getting a free technical resume rewrite from MeetLeet :)
- monster_group 6y ago
  Genuinely curious - do you still have to go through bullshit whiteboard coding exercises in the interviews?
khalilravanna 6y ago
Any insight from FAANG et al companies with respect to resumes? I would guess they’re just glanced at for years of experience to bucket candidates against a type of interview schedule that then determines level/comp and that’s about it. Any managers can weigh in?
stevage 6y ago
How does a dev claim credit for increasing engagement by refactoring? So many of these metrics will be the result of a team. Switching to AWS may save money. But who gets the credit? The engineer? The manager? The architect?
- Arainach 6y ago
  Who gets the credit? Who knows. Who claims the credit on their resume and/or performance review? All of them.
vorhemus 6y ago
> Many technical resumes miss the results and the numbers How are those number of any help if I can just arbitrarily select those that are in my favor and ignore the rest? > Increased user engagement 27% by refactoring our front-end experience in React. Was it really your refactoring that caused those 27% or something else? Did your refactoring had any negative side effects that you are not talking about? How do I know it was really 27 and not just 2%? Numbers are useless without context and contexts are often company-specific or purely a matter of opinion.
devy 6y ago
Is MeetLeet[1] a spinoff of TheLadders[2][3]? TheLadders have been having the resume makeover service[4] [1] https://www.meetleet.com/#team https://www.meetleet.com/#team [2] https://www.theladders.com/about-us https://www.theladders.com/about-us [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLadders.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLadders.com [4] https://www.theladders.com/resume-reviewer https://www.theladders.com/resume-reviewer Disclaimer: I used to work with Marc 17 years ago when TheLadders was at pre-A round. Good times.
- mcenedella 6y ago
  Heart comes from the same place, but a separate effort :) We're focusing on writing technical resumes for free, which is a different business than TLC.
  - devy 6y ago
    Hello Marc!
bawolff 6y ago
Do hiring managers even look at resumes (beyond maybe how many years experience person has)? Like i know they're important to get past HR screen, but i didn't think hiring managers actually read them because they are so easy to BS they are bssically useless as a signal.
jiveturkey 6y ago
nonsense. resumes are no longer reviewed that closely.
zupa-hu 6y ago
Weird, I don’t want many interviews. I want as few as possible, ideally 1 and get hired on great terms. This sounds like one of those “how to pass your exams with least effort” advices. How about you get abnormally good at what you do?
wonder_er 6y ago
Great article, and I totally agree. I feel like some of the disagreement that others imply in their comments comes from a misunderstanding of what is telegraphed when someone writes their resume in this way. The actual metrics need context to be reliable, of course, but what is being telegraphed by someone that includes outcomes-related metrics on their resume? Contrast an answer to the above question by what is (and more importantly, is not) telegraphed by an "alternative" resume, more passive, more "used #{technology} to build #{feature}" Bikeshedding on the exact metrics, the truthiness of the statement, is missing the forest for the trees.
EricRiese 6y ago
Arbitrary random numbers are pointless. 37% of people know that.
Thaxll 6y ago
Don't put too much effort into your resume, it's the key to pass the first gate nothing more.
kristopolous 6y ago
It's more about setting yourself up for success in a place you'll be happy at. Ask yourself, do you want to work with a bunch of people who present themselves like "X"? If the answer is "no" then don't do it. For instance, maybe you have a graduate degree from a prestigious university but for whatever reason you don't want to work at a place where that's a filter, so you leave it off. Maybe you've been doing technology X for a couple years and you're both good at it and really sick of it. So you leave that off too. Really, this is about the kind of culture you want to be part of, the kind of people your want to work with and where you think you'll be happy. You'll get fewer offers but you won't be working a job you hate that makes you miserable for the next year or two. Isn't that the more important thing? Make sure you're sending your personal right signals
- AirMax98 6y ago
  On point — I was getting some resume feedback earlier this week and was given some advice on how my resume should be written and formatted to pass an initial ATS scan. This is all well and good, generally, but I have no formal education background in CS/SWE, which I imagine would immediately disqualify me from any workplace that filters applications in an automated way. If anything, I’d imagine that trying to have the same micro-optimized resume that follows basic online advice may actually be detrimental here. It’s tough as looking for a job is not super fun, so it’s tempting to try and find some magic bullet solution. I came to the conclusion that I’d rather try and present myself as honestly and effectively as I can and not take 99% of what I see regarding resumes to heart, and try and direct any interested people to my portfolio/work as soon as I can.
mkl95 6y ago
I keep my resumes crisp and to the point. The first section briefly explains how I evolved from a Python 2.7 desktop application developer to a full stack web developer using Python 3 on the backend over the years. The rest is just my employment history, a few lines describing my academic achievements and a few links to personal projects related to my work experience (I change these depending on what my potential employer is looking for). I write this on a HTML sheet using Bootstrap for the layout and some basic styles, and I convert it to a PDF with pdfkit. Recruiters love it so far.

243 points by mcenedella 6y ago

Do people take stuff out of their perf reviews and put them into the resume sometimes? I imagine most perf reviews are fairly focused on numbers as well, curious if there's an overlap of content that could go on a resume as well, my intuition says most probably there is.

chiefalchemist 6y ago
If you feel it'll help you standout and gwt an interview then it's worth trying.
GrumpyYoungMan 6y ago
Yup, this absolutely works! I always write my performance review as if I were updating my resume. If I don't like what I see, that's feedback to myself and motivation to change my plans for the next review period. This particularly works in companies big enough that internal transfers are possible; the text of the performance review should be specifically written with the idea that the next hiring manager will read it in mind.
- mcenedella 6y ago
  OP here. Oh my goodness! You are our target user! This is exactly the correct way to think about: "I always write my performance review as if I were updating my resume." Email me please - my first name at our domain name.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

> Instead, a technical resume’s primary purpose is to generate interview requests for you. It’s where you make the case to “please pick me out of the pile. Yes. A resume's primary purpose is to win favor for an interview. But! Not all suitors and opportunities are equal. That is, the goal isn't simply interviews, but interviews with the right organizations, with the right culture, that have the best potential for an LTR.

kevinpet 6y ago

Some of this is "yes, I wish people understood that" to me, like: "It’s to make it as clear as possible which types of problems you’ve solved in the past, and how well you solved them." This is all I care about. I want to see the complexity of what you've handled. "As a result, their bullet points are full of sentences that begin “Responsible for” or “Worked on” or “Assigned to.”" These phrases have always struck me as meaning "I sat in the same building while these things were going on." But when the author suggests using numbers, those strike me as bs. I assume that success in moving numbers depends on what the starting point is. I'm sure I could walk into the typical high growth startup and find tons of places where I could get a 10x performance improvement, because they've been focused on other things. Is reducing AWS cost by 17% (from a low baseline) better than doubling AWS cost and allowing the team to make better decisions because the data is normalized and easily searchable?

mcenedella 6y ago
OP here. Thanks for the great comment. This made me laugh: "I sat in the same building while these things were going on." I agree with you that starting point matters, and that context matters - such as sometimes doubling AWS costs would be better. The nature of the advice is the science - using numbers factually works better. The nature of your feedback is the art - the types of accomplishments you choose to demonstrate reveals a lot about you as a professional. To take our example of the doubling AWS costs to make better decisions. Well, how can you quantify those were better decisions. If it's just by the feels, that's not as effective. If you can quantify it - Helped team make decisions that led to x% improvement through database normalization - that is more persuasive than simply saying "Improved team's decision making through database normalization." Hope that makes sense!

ku-man 6y ago

How come this very low quality blog post is on HN? It say nothing of interest. Not to mention that its only purpose is to sell the author's resume writing services.

ingvul 6y ago

> Refactored our front/end experience using React. vs > Increased user engagement 27% by refactoring our front-end experience in React. Do tech interviewers actually prefer the second description over the first one? To be honest, I find the second one out of context (and a bit robotic/pedantic). Reasons: - sure, 27% may look like a decent increase, but what was the metric you guys used? How many users you have? One cannot put all of this info in a resume of course (because it's a resume!) so please don't just drop a 27% there as if it means a lot - I can imagine that the goal of the team/company was to "increase the user engagement", even perhaps "increase the user engagement by X%" and the product team thought "alright, let's refactor our front-end in React; no idea if it will bring an increase of X% or X/2%, but let's do it". But it's impossible to say that React (or any other tech) will bring you an increase of engagement in %X exactly. You just don't know that number, the number comes after; you may have some hypothesis but that's all. So, what you are actually telling me is this: "hey, we wanted to increase our user engagement by some percentage and so we refactored our front-end in React. Later on, our analytics tool told us that the user engagement increased by 27%." Again, you weren't aiming for that number, it just happened. - you are not going to get hired for that 27%. Imagine there's another candidate that says "Increased user engagement 89% by refactoring our front-end experience in React". What now? Is him better than you? Again, context is king, but you cannot put that much context in a resume.

martinald 6y ago
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.
- ingvul 6y ago
  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.

momirlan 6y ago

Rubbish. I was in IT 30 years, and it was all about surviving BS projects which inevitably were declared a "success" if they achieved 5% of the promised functionality. Numbers, performance ? What a joke. Yet I made a good income in senior jobs, leading "succesful" projects. Managers who hold the purse have no idea of technical measures anyway, or care.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
I was having a friendly conversation with my boss. I tried to joke about how windows batch basically gaslit me for half an hour, because I didn't know batch variables are substituted at evaluation time, not runtime, so it basically makes it impossible to reassign a variable unless it's in a batch script file with EnableDelayedExpansion turned on. I don't think I fully communicated the joke but I learned a lot just by trying to.
ozim 6y ago
I agree with that summary "rubbish". I have a different angle on why it is rubbish. If someone is not getting any replies even if he sends out 10's or 100's solicitations, I believe there is no tweak he can do to his resume that will help him. Because then he probably does not have needed experience or skills, so it is more about finding right level that you can apply for, than tweaking CV. You are not going to get better salary because of your CV, after you have a reply, resume goes out of the window.

MattGaiser 6y ago

How many companies actually measure things in enough detail for most people to do this in a useful manner? I have numbers on my resume, but they are just whatever numerical metrics I could get. They are there for the sake of numbers on the resume. Nobody is tracking how much slightly faster an API might have become or how many fewer bugs were produced a sprint unless it is an extremely data driven company.

mcenedella 6y ago
OP here. Fair feedback here. A lot of companies are not data-driven enough. But with OKRs and behavioral interviewing, the trend is towards companies and interview processes being more data driven. I'd suggest that this makes it more important for you to track numbers. You're responsible for your own career - your current employer certainly isn't concerned about where you will be 10 years from now. My recommendation would be, from now on, to keep an eye on the 3 - 5 metrics you can realistically help in moving in a year. Track the numbers independently if possible. It matters much more to your career than to your company, and helps you share a story about your capabilities to future bosses and employers.

marwan-nwh 6y ago

Seriously, I am thinking about leaving Tech because of broken hiring processes.

peferron 6y ago

HN loves to be gruff and contrarian about these topics. So I'm going to say this for any readers that are or will be looking for jobs: Yes, the article is mostly right. Yes, you should quantify your achievements as much as possible. And yes, the popular pattern "Accomplished X, as measured by Y, by doing Z" is effective. The example in the article is not the best because there's too much of a leap between "moving to React" and "increasing user engagement by 27%". As a reader I'm left wondering why moving to React had such an impact. In this situation it's worth spending some of your precious word count to explain things better.

MattGaiser 6y ago
One of the problems is that "measured by Y" often does not exist, so if it is included, it is misleading, lacking context, or just whatever number could be found. A colleague of mine probably doubled the speed of an API by deleting a feature on that page. The only reason we know is that it is noticeable how much faster it is in manual testing. Took him a few minutes to remove the function and run the tests. "Cut API load time by 50% with optimization of Hibernate queries" is true, but also ridiculous. On my own resume, I have played with the words to arrive at the largest number possible for the scale of what I did. As we didn't numerically measure anything, so it was massaging of a number into a number that was large. Recruiters seem to react well to it, but it is absurd that they do. I don't disagree that this works. I use it on my own resume. I don't think that is the problem HN has. It is just expressing annoyance that we have to play another stupid game to get hired.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > "Cut API load time by 50% with optimization of Hibernate queries" is true, but also ridiculous. In my experience it's absolutely not ridiculous (improvements should be measured by impact, not LOC) but it could still be improved by conveying the benefit to the company or API consumers.
  - edoceo 6y ago
    I read that Hibernate line as "removed Hibernate for direct DB connection"

st1x7 6y ago

I was with the author until I got to the actual advice. "Worked with technology X" seems a lot more relevant and useful than "achieved x% improvement" or "reduced cost by 30%". The latter doesn't just signals that the owner of the resume read a questionable article online and decided to follow its advice.

vmception 6y ago
Yeah I think this article has good advice for something closer to a perfect world, where a company gets a good signal for the employee but frames this as making it the prospective employee's responsibility to give that signal. But in this existing world, a non-standard resume just makes it harder for anyone to screen quickly.
mcenedella 6y ago
Author here. When hiring managers and recruiters are looking through a stack of 100s of resumes, or even 10s of resumes, all of which say "Worked with technology X", how can they choose which professionals to interview or phone screen. Actual experience in the real world is that those who quantify their success in using technology X to achieve goals / OKRs / results for teams tend to get the interview.
- st1x7 6y ago
  The problem with the "achieved x % this-or-that" statements is that they require a lot of context to understand and are very difficult to verify. Don't tell me that when you're screening hundreds of resumes you can successfully understand what those achievements actually represent or what kind of skills and effort they required in the context of their company, team and problem domain. Let alone compare candidates based on a bullet list of their claimed achievement, each of them using a different metric and worded in a different way.
  - mcenedella 6y ago
    Yes, that's completely true. Statements like this require a lot of context. How the recruiting workflow works today is that context is surfaced in actual interviews. Would it be better if we could somehow accurately assess professionals on the sum totality of their experience, contributions, behaviors and traits? Yes, indeed it would. But it would also be a lower-paying world because managers would only have sufficient information to hire the people they know closely, and have personally observed over sufficient periods of time. Our modern system that enables people unknown to a company to be hired based on a simplifying process is a feature, not a bug. Because of this system, companies can scale, hire hundreds or thousands of engineers, and create world-defining products. That success is what enables companies to pay the extraordinary compensation that the technology profession currently earns. In a world historical context, or even a 21st century capitalism context, the compensation paid to professionals with only a few years experience is absolutely without precedent. Many technology professionals earn more per year in their first year of employment than their parents or grandparents ever earned in a year in their entire lifetimes. So while I agree there are downsides and negative aspects to the tradeoff of the modern, anonymous, meritocratic system of hiring, the benefits, for technology professionals and the world, far outweigh the negatives.

umaar 6y ago

I've put lots of little coding solutions, links to my videos and articles on my website [1], and have sent this to potential employers in the past for web dev jobs. It definitely helped accelerate things, and on 3 occasions I didn't have to do their take home test since my GitHub was enough. I don't have an up to date CV and my LinkedIn is empty. I've also heard of potential colleagues giving positive sentiment to the hiring manager/boss: "oh that guy, I'm subscribed to his mailing list, he's good". I've received a good number of offers, and one thing I've started to wonder: are interviewers thinking I'm a great dev because all these little side projects supposedly make me a better web developer? Or are they hoping I'll increase exposure to their brand since I already do talks and write articles? I hope it's not the former, all the time I spend writing, doing talks etc. it's taking time away (with the exception of software-based side projects) from me learning about the art of software engineering. [1] https://umaar.com https://umaar.com

mcenedella 6y ago
OP here. If you're in the 1% of developers than can consistently produce quality content in blogs, videos, and other formats, this can absolutely be a superior way to demonstrate your command of your field and the subject matter. To state the obvious, the time, care, attention and effort involved in producing superior content such as yours Umar, is a lot more than getting a free technical resume rewrite from MeetLeet :)
monster_group 6y ago
Genuinely curious - do you still have to go through bullshit whiteboard coding exercises in the interviews?

khalilravanna 6y ago

Any insight from FAANG et al companies with respect to resumes? I would guess they’re just glanced at for years of experience to bucket candidates against a type of interview schedule that then determines level/comp and that’s about it. Any managers can weigh in?

stevage 6y ago

How does a dev claim credit for increasing engagement by refactoring? So many of these metrics will be the result of a team. Switching to AWS may save money. But who gets the credit? The engineer? The manager? The architect?

Arainach 6y ago
Who gets the credit? Who knows. Who claims the credit on their resume and/or performance review? All of them.

vorhemus 6y ago

> Many technical resumes miss the results and the numbers How are those number of any help if I can just arbitrarily select those that are in my favor and ignore the rest? > Increased user engagement 27% by refactoring our front-end experience in React. Was it really your refactoring that caused those 27% or something else? Did your refactoring had any negative side effects that you are not talking about? How do I know it was really 27 and not just 2%? Numbers are useless without context and contexts are often company-specific or purely a matter of opinion.

devy 6y ago

Is MeetLeet[1] a spinoff of TheLadders[2][3]? TheLadders have been having the resume makeover service[4] [1] https://www.meetleet.com/#team https://www.meetleet.com/#team [2] https://www.theladders.com/about-us https://www.theladders.com/about-us [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLadders.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheLadders.com [4] https://www.theladders.com/resume-reviewer https://www.theladders.com/resume-reviewer Disclaimer: I used to work with Marc 17 years ago when TheLadders was at pre-A round. Good times.

mcenedella 6y ago
Heart comes from the same place, but a separate effort :) We're focusing on writing technical resumes for free, which is a different business than TLC.
- devy 6y ago
  Hello Marc!

bawolff 6y ago

Do hiring managers even look at resumes (beyond maybe how many years experience person has)? Like i know they're important to get past HR screen, but i didn't think hiring managers actually read them because they are so easy to BS they are bssically useless as a signal.

jiveturkey 6y ago

nonsense. resumes are no longer reviewed that closely.

zupa-hu 6y ago

Weird, I don’t want many interviews. I want as few as possible, ideally 1 and get hired on great terms. This sounds like one of those “how to pass your exams with least effort” advices. How about you get abnormally good at what you do?

wonder_er 6y ago

Great article, and I totally agree. I feel like some of the disagreement that others imply in their comments comes from a misunderstanding of what is telegraphed when someone writes their resume in this way. The actual metrics need context to be reliable, of course, but what is being telegraphed by someone that includes outcomes-related metrics on their resume? Contrast an answer to the above question by what is (and more importantly, is not) telegraphed by an "alternative" resume, more passive, more "used #{technology} to build #{feature}" Bikeshedding on the exact metrics, the truthiness of the statement, is missing the forest for the trees.

EricRiese 6y ago

Arbitrary random numbers are pointless. 37% of people know that.

Thaxll 6y ago

Don't put too much effort into your resume, it's the key to pass the first gate nothing more.

kristopolous 6y ago

It's more about setting yourself up for success in a place you'll be happy at. Ask yourself, do you want to work with a bunch of people who present themselves like "X"? If the answer is "no" then don't do it. For instance, maybe you have a graduate degree from a prestigious university but for whatever reason you don't want to work at a place where that's a filter, so you leave it off. Maybe you've been doing technology X for a couple years and you're both good at it and really sick of it. So you leave that off too. Really, this is about the kind of culture you want to be part of, the kind of people your want to work with and where you think you'll be happy. You'll get fewer offers but you won't be working a job you hate that makes you miserable for the next year or two. Isn't that the more important thing? Make sure you're sending your personal right signals

AirMax98 6y ago
On point — I was getting some resume feedback earlier this week and was given some advice on how my resume should be written and formatted to pass an initial ATS scan. This is all well and good, generally, but I have no formal education background in CS/SWE, which I imagine would immediately disqualify me from any workplace that filters applications in an automated way. If anything, I’d imagine that trying to have the same micro-optimized resume that follows basic online advice may actually be detrimental here. It’s tough as looking for a job is not super fun, so it’s tempting to try and find some magic bullet solution. I came to the conclusion that I’d rather try and present myself as honestly and effectively as I can and not take 99% of what I see regarding resumes to heart, and try and direct any interested people to my portfolio/work as soon as I can.

mkl95 6y ago

I keep my resumes crisp and to the point. The first section briefly explains how I evolved from a Python 2.7 desktop application developer to a full stack web developer using Python 3 on the backend over the years. The rest is just my employment history, a few lines describing my academic achievements and a few links to personal projects related to my work experience (I change these depending on what my potential employer is looking for). I write this on a HTML sheet using Bootstrap for the layout and some basic styles, and I convert it to a PDF with pdfkit. Recruiters love it so far.