4 ms·

I read resumes and that "bs" gets one negative point. Another negative point and resume goes to trash bin.

keiferski 3y ago
Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  We're engineers, not MBAs. That's a good thing, and it should stay that way.
  - farlsman 3y ago
    then you are just the labour force and disposable.
- lowercased 3y ago
  It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit. "Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team". There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, because... they were dumb moves. Do you put that on there? Or do you just put what you did, minus the impact?
  - codingdave 3y ago
    I haven't worked on a successful product since 2017. But I have absolutely supported leadership who wanted to give an idea an honest chance by delivering the product they asked for. Their failure to find a market does not mean that my technical delivery was sub-par. So my work still offers value. So I say exactly what I did - "Delivered a new SaaS app.", "Modernized a legacy system to a new tech stack", etc. I did deliver what was expected of my role, and I can claim that regardless of the market success. Now, would it sound better if those products succeeded? Of course! But there is still something that can be said for my work.
    - lowercased 3y ago
      The OP was saying "don't just say what you did - say what the impact was!" (in so many words). Well... the impact was that this thing I delivered went way over budget, and the division shut down because we ran out of money. Or... what if the impact is "user subscriptions decreased, cancellations increased, revenue declined"? I was pointing out that "impact" isn't always positive - adding it to a resume might not be all that useful. This happened to me. Was told to convert a lot of stuff to an XML database, which... no one had any experience with. But the owner wanted to be in the XML space. They sold a deal which was based on the XML database tech, but it was so bad, and so slow, and didn't actually take customer needs in to account, that we burned over $1m over 6 months, and half the company was laid off. So, yes, I can put "XML database conversion" on a resume, but there's no positive outcomes to add to it. This is what the OP was being told to do - add positive outcomes. They don't always exist, and yes, it's outside your control.
      - avmich 3y ago
        It's also often outside of your knowledge. You just too often don't have anything close to useful statistics which you can refer to. Say, replacing one message queue solution with another, because the first was considered - you may not know or agree with all the details - too slow or too unreliable. How does it help if you don't have enough knowledge about how often the previous one failed? The new one has better performance, but you don't have enough traffic to feel the difference - then what? All you see on the justification side is several logs where the error is present and maybe some obscure post on the Internet complaining about similar issues, and then you have a decision from above. And such situation could be quite typical.
        em-bee 3y ago
        this. in one job as developers we never got to see any data from production side. we were just told what features to implement or what bugs to fix, without any feedback on their impact.
  - Volundr 3y ago
    Welcome to marketing :-). But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about? There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead demonstrating your skills with something where you delivered value. It's also worth noting that even where X flopped, you still hopefully contributed something positive. In your own example, you delivered X some (months?) early. That alone saves $. I was once part of a Salesforce (god help me) implementation where we were moving all our analytics into this new Salesforce platform with the idea that it would be the central hub for all employees. When all was said and done, it flopped. It tried to do too much at once, be everything to everyone, and was useless for most. 80% of employees only logged in once. It was exactly as you describe, where from the beginning, I warned we were on the wrong path. It doesn't usually land on my resume because, I mean, it's fucking Salesforce, but if it does, or if it comes up in an interview, I can talk about how I replaced our contractor's ETL with a custom one that ingested the data in 10% of the time making it possible for us to actually keep our data up-to-date, or how I was able to refactor the data model to take proper advantage of compression and save us around $30k/month in storage costs (Salesforce cloud storage is stupid expensive). Sure, the whole thing was a major screw-up that literally cost the company millions, yet I can still talk about how I made that situation a little better.
    - lowercased 3y ago
      The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures. Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.
      - Volundr 3y ago
        Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance." It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say something about you. Looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, why would I want to talk to the guy who "built data analytics tools with SQL Server", vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers". I've got 100 resumes with SQL Server experience. The first one had a job; maybe they were good at it, perhaps they weren't, I don't know. I have literally nothing to go on. The second at least accomplished something (or is a liar; yes, I'm aware of this possibility). If you don't give me a reason to speak to you, specifically, you are just hoping you win the lottery and happen to be one of the ones I call in. > but the OP was told to add the outcomes Outcomes don't have to be the final outcome of the whole project. The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.
- elzbardico 3y ago
  Because the relationship between individual things in what a developer do and financial results is not so easily measured. There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to claim credit alone.
  - sage76 3y ago
    If you don't know, hiring managers won't know the number either. Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume. To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.
    - elzbardico 3y ago
      Yeah. I see your point, and you're right. But is fucking hard to me force myself to actually do this. My parents were that old style working class folks that had this belief in a inherently fair world (no matter how much that same world fucked them over and over till their deaths). Rationally I know how things work. But emotionally I am still the same as my parents and this is a fucking wall I am so far unable to cross. Maybe I should consider therapy. Which would be kind of funny: Making therapy to become more of a sociopath and survive and thrive in a sociopathic society.
- fuzzythinker 3y ago
  How do you prove that X and only X cause the company's revenue or some other metrics increased by Y? And let's say you can just for sake of it, how does that metric gives you any idea how good an engineer is? When I read a resume, anything that is beyond his skills (soft & tech) and experience is just sugar coating. A little is acceptable, too much and it gives me a bad feel for the candidate.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    As I said above, an interview isn’t about trying to determine if you were solely responsible for the outcome at your previous job. Obviously any intelligent person knows that it’s a complex situation, and that it may not translate directly to the new company. The point is to convey that you’re capable of providing some value to the company, should you be hired. It’s like being on a championship football team: sure, you weren’t solely responsible for winning. But being apart of winning team is certainly a lot more impressive than just listing your dribbling and passing skills. I think you are taking this entirely too literally and missing the forest for the trees. The simple point being made is that communicating your value is easier when you go beyond the basic Skills and Experience CV that every average candidate slavishly sticks to. It doesn’t need to be an exact calculation, it just needs to convey that you’ve achieved something.

Explaining how you’ve impacted the bottom line isn’t BS, it’s how business works. Failing to understand this is a common mistake made by technical people, unfortunately.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
We're engineers, not MBAs. That's a good thing, and it should stay that way.
- farlsman 3y ago
  then you are just the labour force and disposable.
lowercased 3y ago
It's also difficult to put 'truth' on there when... you did something that you knew was stupid, and there was no positive or measurable benefit. "Argued with CTO about importance of X. Did X, against my recommendation. Delivered X early, tested, documented, fast, secure. X flopped, and company laid off 20% of staff, including my team". There may not have actually been positive benefits to everything that you did, because... they were dumb moves. Do you put that on there? Or do you just put what you did, minus the impact?
- codingdave 3y ago
  I haven't worked on a successful product since 2017. But I have absolutely supported leadership who wanted to give an idea an honest chance by delivering the product they asked for. Their failure to find a market does not mean that my technical delivery was sub-par. So my work still offers value. So I say exactly what I did - "Delivered a new SaaS app.", "Modernized a legacy system to a new tech stack", etc. I did deliver what was expected of my role, and I can claim that regardless of the market success. Now, would it sound better if those products succeeded? Of course! But there is still something that can be said for my work.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    The OP was saying "don't just say what you did - say what the impact was!" (in so many words). Well... the impact was that this thing I delivered went way over budget, and the division shut down because we ran out of money. Or... what if the impact is "user subscriptions decreased, cancellations increased, revenue declined"? I was pointing out that "impact" isn't always positive - adding it to a resume might not be all that useful. This happened to me. Was told to convert a lot of stuff to an XML database, which... no one had any experience with. But the owner wanted to be in the XML space. They sold a deal which was based on the XML database tech, but it was so bad, and so slow, and didn't actually take customer needs in to account, that we burned over $1m over 6 months, and half the company was laid off. So, yes, I can put "XML database conversion" on a resume, but there's no positive outcomes to add to it. This is what the OP was being told to do - add positive outcomes. They don't always exist, and yes, it's outside your control.
    - avmich 3y ago
      It's also often outside of your knowledge. You just too often don't have anything close to useful statistics which you can refer to. Say, replacing one message queue solution with another, because the first was considered - you may not know or agree with all the details - too slow or too unreliable. How does it help if you don't have enough knowledge about how often the previous one failed? The new one has better performance, but you don't have enough traffic to feel the difference - then what? All you see on the justification side is several logs where the error is present and maybe some obscure post on the Internet complaining about similar issues, and then you have a decision from above. And such situation could be quite typical.
      - em-bee 3y ago
        this. in one job as developers we never got to see any data from production side. we were just told what features to implement or what bugs to fix, without any feedback on their impact.
- Volundr 3y ago
  Welcome to marketing :-). But in all seriousness, in the scenario you describe above, I'd question if X belongs on your resume at all. If you did it, and it was worthless, is it something to brag about? There are no doubt exceptions to this, where something is really technically interesting, but honestly, 99% of the time, what you did is just not that novel; you are better off leaving it off your resume and instead demonstrating your skills with something where you delivered value. It's also worth noting that even where X flopped, you still hopefully contributed something positive. In your own example, you delivered X some (months?) early. That alone saves $. I was once part of a Salesforce (god help me) implementation where we were moving all our analytics into this new Salesforce platform with the idea that it would be the central hub for all employees. When all was said and done, it flopped. It tried to do too much at once, be everything to everyone, and was useless for most. 80% of employees only logged in once. It was exactly as you describe, where from the beginning, I warned we were on the wrong path. It doesn't usually land on my resume because, I mean, it's fucking Salesforce, but if it does, or if it comes up in an interview, I can talk about how I replaced our contractor's ETL with a custom one that ingested the data in 10% of the time making it possible for us to actually keep our data up-to-date, or how I was able to refactor the data model to take proper advantage of compression and save us around $30k/month in storage costs (Salesforce cloud storage is stupid expensive). Sure, the whole thing was a major screw-up that literally cost the company millions, yet I can still talk about how I made that situation a little better.
  - lowercased 3y ago
    The OP may not be constitutionally capable of finding little nuggets of positivity from the midst of huge failures. Already responded to someone else, but the OP was told to add the outcomes, not just what they did. Sometimes there are no positive outcomes to list, and listing negative ones just drags everyone down. Putting "implemented $FOO" may be all you can reasonably put in writing.
    - Volundr 3y ago
      Sure, I have one 6 month job where all I can reasonably list is "implemented audit logging across all our projects to ensure HIPAA compliance." It was the most demoralizing job I've ever had, and I'm grateful that I WAS laid off (easy to say now that I have a new job). Making every line on your resume a banger may be impossible. But if you've got job after job of "implemented SAAS app in Django", it starts to say something about you. Looking at it from a hiring manager's perspective, why would I want to talk to the guy who "built data analytics tools with SQL Server", vs the guy who "reduced the processing time on our main data warehouse from 24 to 2 hours, allowing us to provide real-time analytics to our customers". I've got 100 resumes with SQL Server experience. The first one had a job; maybe they were good at it, perhaps they weren't, I don't know. I have literally nothing to go on. The second at least accomplished something (or is a liar; yes, I'm aware of this possibility). If you don't give me a reason to speak to you, specifically, you are just hoping you win the lottery and happen to be one of the ones I call in. > but the OP was told to add the outcomes Outcomes don't have to be the final outcome of the whole project. The outcome of the Salesforce failure above was millions of wasted dollars. The outcome of my refactoring our data model was a cost savings of $350k/year.
elzbardico 3y ago
Because the relationship between individual things in what a developer do and financial results is not so easily measured. There are for example a couple of projects where I worked, that should I failed to do my part, the company could be fined, and even maybe arrested. Thing is, I don't fucking have idea of what those fines could be, and of course it was a multiple team effort and it would be hilarious for me to claim credit alone.
- sage76 3y ago
  If you don't know, hiring managers won't know the number either. Just make some plausible sounding number up and add it to your resume. To be clear, I hate this sort of shit, but the game is the game.
  - elzbardico 3y ago
    Yeah. I see your point, and you're right. But is fucking hard to me force myself to actually do this. My parents were that old style working class folks that had this belief in a inherently fair world (no matter how much that same world fucked them over and over till their deaths). Rationally I know how things work. But emotionally I am still the same as my parents and this is a fucking wall I am so far unable to cross. Maybe I should consider therapy. Which would be kind of funny: Making therapy to become more of a sociopath and survive and thrive in a sociopathic society.
fuzzythinker 3y ago
How do you prove that X and only X cause the company's revenue or some other metrics increased by Y? And let's say you can just for sake of it, how does that metric gives you any idea how good an engineer is? When I read a resume, anything that is beyond his skills (soft & tech) and experience is just sugar coating. A little is acceptable, too much and it gives me a bad feel for the candidate.
- keiferski 3y ago
  As I said above, an interview isn’t about trying to determine if you were solely responsible for the outcome at your previous job. Obviously any intelligent person knows that it’s a complex situation, and that it may not translate directly to the new company. The point is to convey that you’re capable of providing some value to the company, should you be hired. It’s like being on a championship football team: sure, you weren’t solely responsible for winning. But being apart of winning team is certainly a lot more impressive than just listing your dribbling and passing skills. I think you are taking this entirely too literally and missing the forest for the trees. The simple point being made is that communicating your value is easier when you go beyond the basic Skills and Experience CV that every average candidate slavishly sticks to. It doesn’t need to be an exact calculation, it just needs to convey that you’ve achieved something.