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by nv-vn
2049 days ago
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100% agree. For a long time I got by with my resume just covering achievements at a high level without any numbers. Every time I asked for resume advice, people suggested adding more numbers to it. Having worked on building up a lot of infrastructure stuff from the ground up, I never really had a great way to describe my job with a handful of numbers because the impact was the creation of the project rather than increasing/decreasing/reducing/whatever metrics. Eventually I caved in to the trend but this led to an interesting encounter: I had one behavioral interview where the interviewer really ripped apart some of the numbers -- what does "growing user base by 50%" mean out of context if you only have 10 users, how accurately can "decreased load time by 75%" actually capture the scope of your work if it's a 5 minute change, etc.? Numbers can be great to tell a story, but it seems like often time that story is either a distraction from the day-to-day reality of a job or just a gamed metric of some kind. This trend really sucks because there's a definite pressure (at least early in one's career) to pick up tasks at work that look good on a resume but may be low-impact IRL (e.g. rather than adding a new feature that people will pay for, let's just whittle away at latency that's already fast enough for our users). |
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Thanks for the great comment and sharing your story. In the context of your background - "Having worked on building up a lot of infrastructure stuff from the ground up," it's important that you chose numbers that are level appropriate for someone of your capabilities. if the feedback was " how accurately can "decreased load time by 75%" actually capture the scope of your work if it's a 5 minute change", then that indicates that you may have been showing numbers that weren't truly indicative of your skills and talents.
And I don't agree that picking up tasks that are low impact IRL will help. Ultimately, hiring managers aren't easy to fool, and low-impact metrics make a small impact on resume readers.