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Two quotes from the article stand out. First, from the X screenshot: "something about the process of writing makes your ideas 10x better". Second from near th

Two quotes from the article stand out. First, from the X screenshot: "something about the process of writing makes your ideas 10x better". Second from near the beginning: "The most important person to convince is the author." Design documents are so essential that even after mumble years in the industry, I am amazed when people, including putative "Product Managers" push back on the idea. As Leslie Lamport noted, "Writing is nature's way of telling us how sloppy our thinking is." For those wanting to learn how to improve the quality of their technical writing, see Write Like an Amazonian: https://medium.com/@apappascs/write-like-an-amazonian-14-tips-for-clear-and-persuasive-communication-e2a11afc7362 https://medium.com/@apappascs/write-like-an-amazonian-14-tip...

apwell23 1y ago
> Replace adjectives with data I think this idea got so pervasive all throughout tech that all the resumes that i now get are filled with so many numbers that i don't even know what to make of them.
- kingkongjaffa 1y ago
  99% of bullet points containing numbers in a resume are made up, hamfisted BS, the other 1% cannot be attributed to a single individual so putting them in a personal resume is silly.
  - Lich 1y ago
    I don’t blame people for doing so. That’s what they have been told by recruiters to do to increase their chance of their resume not being thrown into the trash or be invisible. If there is someone to blame for this, it’s the recruiting industry.
    - kjellsbells 1y ago
      Not you specifically, but as an industry response, that seems too pat. The recruiters will do and react to what the hiring managers ask for. When one too many candidates slip thru who bullshit, or there is weak signal that such and such method of candidate selection seems to result in marginally stronger candidates, then everyone rushes to do that thing and it eventually becomes sludge. Leetcode interviews are a classic example. We (individuals) get poor candidates because we (industry) encourage and reward poor recruitment practices. Time for us all to look in the mirror, honestly. I've seen 300k salary hiring managers punching down on a recruiter making 60k who doesnt know her C# from her C++. That sort of behavior says more about the flaws of the hiring manager than the recruiter. If you never talk to the recruiter but once a year when you have budget to hire someone, never take the time to educate them on your business, well then you're going to get crappy candidates.
  - corytheboyd 1y ago
    It’s so dumb. There is no way to verify the numbers, and yet, this stupidity weaseled its way into the LinkedIn cinematic universe of corporate bullshit. The same point but without the “X by Y%” hits the same for me— besides I know what questions to ask to judge if you are actually capable of moving the needle, which is all I care about as a conductor of interviews.
    - slt2021 1y ago
      the problem is CVs are screened by non-tech HR/recruiters, who lack the capacity to screen candidates. Because it is much easier to apply online with one click, each position is spammed with millions of CVs. in response, for HR it is much easier to filter out CV if it lacks style, not substance. Therefore they look at bullet points like "Done X by Y%". The proper way should be to limit the intake funnel: accept only a few applications per job, so that they can be screened properly by HRs by calling them, and talking to them and properly screening (old school style), instead of tossing their resume to the bin after 15 sec quick review
  - dasil003 1y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but not the conclusion. Sure, numbers can be abused, just like anything else, but they provided specificity which you can then interrogate and call bullshit on. I won't necessarily fault someone for leaving off the numbers and just speaking qualitatively to the large scale system rewrite they did, but it's harder to evaluate whether such an effort was indeed warranted or was just a lateral move post-hoc rationalized by an engineer who didn't understand the original system and needed to rewrite it just to achieve that understanding. Again, if someone is satisfying the business with such efforts, more power to them. As a hiring manager, I don't want to get into a subjective evaluation of the relative engineering value of specific work at an external company that I have no first-hand context on, but I do want to know that candidates understand the highest level goals they are hired to contribute to. Metrics, however flawed, give a good entry point into such conversations.
- MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
  If I get one more resume from a “seasoned professional” who has “decreased X by N%” I am going to close hiring, quit tech, and go be a hermit. N.B. I received such a resume while typing this comment and am absconding to Outer Mongolia as I type
  - atomicnumber3 1y ago
    What do you want to see, then? Colorful prose? I and a few others really did save my company 10 million dollars one year. It was in EC2 spend for a hadoop cluster. I can tell you how we did it and who did what. Yes it was actual dollars we would have otherwise paid to AWS, it is not funny money calculated by looking at sticker rates and ignoring our discounts (which were large). I'm proud of this and it was one of my largest impacts at the company. What would you have me put on my resume? "Decreased EC2 spend by a whole bunch!"? "Reduced EC2 spend"? I don't get where this hatred of numbers on resumes is coming from. Is much of it probably bullshit? Yeah, just like most resumes. But I expect you to sort through it the same way you do the rest of the resume. Ask them about it. I can tell you the whole story of mine. I'd expect others can do the same. And if they stammer and crack, now you know how exaggerated it was.
    - pertymcpert 1y ago
      You can complain all you want on here but it's not going to change the fact that most readers including myself just glaze over them. Because as you say most are just bullshit. So keep doing it if you don't actually care. If you do, maybe try to think of a different way to communicate it that sets you apart.
      - thunderfork 1y ago
        [dead]
      - SatvikBeri 1y ago
        I generally like it when resumes do this, and so do most people I know. I'd be interested to see surveys, I don't think it's anywhere close to universal. That said, I'm typically focused on very measurable domains (e.g. making code faster.)

apwell23 1y ago

> Replace adjectives with data I think this idea got so pervasive all throughout tech that all the resumes that i now get are filled with so many numbers that i don't even know what to make of them.

kingkongjaffa 1y ago
99% of bullet points containing numbers in a resume are made up, hamfisted BS, the other 1% cannot be attributed to a single individual so putting them in a personal resume is silly.
- Lich 1y ago
  I don’t blame people for doing so. That’s what they have been told by recruiters to do to increase their chance of their resume not being thrown into the trash or be invisible. If there is someone to blame for this, it’s the recruiting industry.
  - kjellsbells 1y ago
    Not you specifically, but as an industry response, that seems too pat. The recruiters will do and react to what the hiring managers ask for. When one too many candidates slip thru who bullshit, or there is weak signal that such and such method of candidate selection seems to result in marginally stronger candidates, then everyone rushes to do that thing and it eventually becomes sludge. Leetcode interviews are a classic example. We (individuals) get poor candidates because we (industry) encourage and reward poor recruitment practices. Time for us all to look in the mirror, honestly. I've seen 300k salary hiring managers punching down on a recruiter making 60k who doesnt know her C# from her C++. That sort of behavior says more about the flaws of the hiring manager than the recruiter. If you never talk to the recruiter but once a year when you have budget to hire someone, never take the time to educate them on your business, well then you're going to get crappy candidates.
- corytheboyd 1y ago
  It’s so dumb. There is no way to verify the numbers, and yet, this stupidity weaseled its way into the LinkedIn cinematic universe of corporate bullshit. The same point but without the “X by Y%” hits the same for me— besides I know what questions to ask to judge if you are actually capable of moving the needle, which is all I care about as a conductor of interviews.
  - slt2021 1y ago
    the problem is CVs are screened by non-tech HR/recruiters, who lack the capacity to screen candidates. Because it is much easier to apply online with one click, each position is spammed with millions of CVs. in response, for HR it is much easier to filter out CV if it lacks style, not substance. Therefore they look at bullet points like "Done X by Y%". The proper way should be to limit the intake funnel: accept only a few applications per job, so that they can be screened properly by HRs by calling them, and talking to them and properly screening (old school style), instead of tossing their resume to the bin after 15 sec quick review
- dasil003 1y ago
  I agree with the sentiment, but not the conclusion. Sure, numbers can be abused, just like anything else, but they provided specificity which you can then interrogate and call bullshit on. I won't necessarily fault someone for leaving off the numbers and just speaking qualitatively to the large scale system rewrite they did, but it's harder to evaluate whether such an effort was indeed warranted or was just a lateral move post-hoc rationalized by an engineer who didn't understand the original system and needed to rewrite it just to achieve that understanding. Again, if someone is satisfying the business with such efforts, more power to them. As a hiring manager, I don't want to get into a subjective evaluation of the relative engineering value of specific work at an external company that I have no first-hand context on, but I do want to know that candidates understand the highest level goals they are hired to contribute to. Metrics, however flawed, give a good entry point into such conversations.
MOARDONGZPLZ 1y ago
If I get one more resume from a “seasoned professional” who has “decreased X by N%” I am going to close hiring, quit tech, and go be a hermit. N.B. I received such a resume while typing this comment and am absconding to Outer Mongolia as I type
- atomicnumber3 1y ago
  What do you want to see, then? Colorful prose? I and a few others really did save my company 10 million dollars one year. It was in EC2 spend for a hadoop cluster. I can tell you how we did it and who did what. Yes it was actual dollars we would have otherwise paid to AWS, it is not funny money calculated by looking at sticker rates and ignoring our discounts (which were large). I'm proud of this and it was one of my largest impacts at the company. What would you have me put on my resume? "Decreased EC2 spend by a whole bunch!"? "Reduced EC2 spend"? I don't get where this hatred of numbers on resumes is coming from. Is much of it probably bullshit? Yeah, just like most resumes. But I expect you to sort through it the same way you do the rest of the resume. Ask them about it. I can tell you the whole story of mine. I'd expect others can do the same. And if they stammer and crack, now you know how exaggerated it was.
  - pertymcpert 1y ago
    You can complain all you want on here but it's not going to change the fact that most readers including myself just glaze over them. Because as you say most are just bullshit. So keep doing it if you don't actually care. If you do, maybe try to think of a different way to communicate it that sets you apart.
    - thunderfork 1y ago
      [dead]
    - SatvikBeri 1y ago
      I generally like it when resumes do this, and so do most people I know. I'd be interested to see surveys, I don't think it's anywhere close to universal. That said, I'm typically focused on very measurable domains (e.g. making code faster.)