This is the best advice here. You want to be able to say, “during the time I worked here, I did X and the company’s revenue increased by Y.” Swap in whatever metrics are particularly relevant to the job you’re applying for.
Not saying you are wrong, but when does management even know exactly which specific X caused how much increase in revenue, let alone a software developer.
It's not about saying you directly caused the specific increase in revenue, it's more about highlighting the value you can bring to a future organization – at least so you can talk about it in an interview. Remember, this game is not about determining if that increase was purely attributable to your work, it's about convincing an employer that you can add value.
For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year. Sure, there were probably other factors that helped, but when you can point at specific things and back them up with metrics, it's 100% better than just listing a bunch of skills and jobs.
Sure that's ideal but honestly I've worked on a bunch of stuff at several different companies but have yet to land in a place where I was able to collect these sorts of statistics that everyone is always going on about putting in your resume.
Numbers are ideal, and I'd think carefully on if there is a metric you can tie to a data point, but it doesn't have to be all about numbers. Example: maybe you streamlined a common app flow making it significantly easier for users to accomplish a task, or implemented accessibility best practices across your product making it usable by a wider range of people. Both of these have more pop if there is a statistic you can cite with them, but even without they speak to impact not just "worked on Python web application".
I think it's a combination of the market and assumptions.
- Some think I'm no longer technical enough because I've done managerial stuff, despite recent work being hands on.
- Some think I'm not managerial enough because I still do technical stuff.
- Some think I've somehow failed because the specific role was only ~20 months ( it was actually equity shenanigans )
- Some think I'm too senior and won't stick around ( despite the role being top of the market pay wise )
Mostly, I don't really know, because when going through the front door, they typically don't respond, and in actual fact the only leads I get are the ones that contact me.
But I think our specific culture focuses on reasons to say no, rather than reasons to say yes, and the current market only helps compound this, even if the outcome is worse.
Of course, I might just be shit, but they also likely don't know that by not speaking with me. :)
If you don't have specific data, you can still frame your work in a way that is more compelling than, "I can code in Python and I worked at XYZ company for 3 years." Whatever value you were adding, put that first, even if it's just "built new products that increased company's sales and helped expand to X new markets."
> For example: you coded and launched a new feature, and that feature brought in 20% more users over the following year.
Even if I did, it was probably someone else's idea, someone else decided it would be worth adding to the product, someone else made a UX and UI design, I wrote the code, someone else tested it, maybe there were some iterations of those. It's all team work.
Someone claiming such a increase as their personal achievement is spouting BS and would not get an invitation here.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
How did you learn about that number? Where did you pull it from?
> 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 reduced a 25 hour process down to 30 minutes. Someone else at the company took that 30 minutes and reduced it to 25 and put "15% reduction in import processing time!" on his resumé. But... he was also the one who was insistent that there was nothing to be done about the 25 hours in the first place. It was "impossible" to get it faster, supposedly.
In the past, I've put that 25 hour reference on my resume, and I had a couple recruiter folks tell me it smelled of bullshit, advising me I'm not supposed to exaggerate that much. What do I do? It's the truth, and if I explained it to someone who understood the state of the art at that time, the 'fix' would make a lot of sense (not magic, just... a deep understanding of what the tech stack is doing under the hood).
Last year I fixed a report screen that took 50 seconds to load up; brought it down to .5 seconds. But the company had already told the client it would require a big rewrite to 'fix'. And I 'fixed' it without the big rewrite. FWIW, the rewrite wasn't necessarily wrong, but also wasn't necessary. Or at least the ordering could have been reversed - give short term saving up front to keep users happy, then provide the rest of the support for that shortcut in the rewrite ('refactor').
Anecdotes like this can get you filtered out of some places that think it's BS. And... it might not hurt to avoid those places in the first place, but... you can't always know ahead of time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
