*me reviewing a resume*

"Optimized backend APIs and increased speed by 40%"

*resume straight to dustbin*

why tf do people write like this

What’s the problem with that?

Yeah, it's exactly the stuff I put in there. It's kinda default for a BE engineer.

I wanted to comment the morning on this post but couldn't get it to open. 😕

@whimsical devrant is a real pain in the butt lately :/

@Lensflare > "What’s the problem with that?"

Lacks context. 40% of what? I can increase the performance of my service by 99% by not accessing the database. Should I put that on my resume and expect employers to light up my phone with 6-figure offers? I'm sure some do.

We had a team that lived for coming up with contrived 'speed improvements' for services. They would spend months re-writing a service and send out graphs showing 20%...10%....40% ..etc improvement numbers. Without context, those are some impressive numbers.

With context, those numbers were measured in milliseconds and less. Like a service that took 2ms, now takes 1ms, they claimed a 50% performance improvement and completely justified the 6 months it took them to re-write the service.

Hmm, I think it could lack detail about the improvement made but that's all. Some api can be more difficult to improve than other assuming we are talking about a rest or some kind of web api.

Ugh that sounds like my CV...

@PaperTrail I think context is something that you’d probably give in an interview.
But I get your point and I agree.

because they're told to write it like that and that that's what you wanna hear

@Lensflare exactly, my resume is pure to get an invitation and do the selling irl.

Can you give us an example?

@PaperTrail It doesn't really need the context. It's in a fucking CV.

If the person is any good, they will be able to elaborate. If not, you'll know it in the first sentence, but not from the CV alone.

@kamen > "It doesn't really need the context. It's in a bleeping CV"

If a CV comes across my desk bragging they improved performance of some X service, it better have context or in the trash it goes.

CVs better scream "I'm here to work, serve people, and not bullcrap you around. " or in the trash it goes.

Since our HR dept changed hiring strategies (staying away from the 'academic' CVs), the team we have now are freaking rock stars.

Google level? No, better. They write code and go home. None of this "Look at me! I'm working 12 hour days! Look at MEEE!!" stuff that comes from devs who spend months shaving 3ms from a query that nobody is waiting for and expect awards and accolades.

@meysam

exactly what @PaperTrail said. This is why I hate it.

I have that in mine. But going into details on it would be... iffy. At most I could say I've optimized the way our dashboard gets its metrics which dramatically lowered loading times (40-90 seconds down to .5) but I can't exactly write in my resume "Yeah my last company had such poor technical knowledge they were making over 22 thousand sql queries every time someone loaded the dashboard"