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.
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.