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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 C

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.

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.