from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are resume achievements made up or real

by 2bor-2n on 7/24/21, 9:15 AM with 2 comments

It is advisable to mention your achievements in the resume to sell yourself better. I am wondering developers who list achievements like "improved website performance 2x" or "my frontend architecture lead to 3x productivity and fewer bugs", do developers really calculate these metrics or do they just made them up?

And has anyone had any experience where they were questioned by the interviewer about these matrices?

  • by bradknowles on 7/25/21, 5:46 AM

    Anyone can write anything they want. The question is whether an interviewer actually asks them about what they have written.

    I’ve made sure that all specific claims I’ve made on my résumé are ones that I can explain, but of course I no longer have access to those systems so I can’t prove my conclusions. Either they believe me or they don’t.

    I don’t recall being asked any specific questions about the particular claims I’ve made, but I do know that at least some of those claims have led to general questions about what I did in those jobs, and gave me an opportunity to expand on the nature of the work.

    But I do assume that they might ask about anything I put on there, or questions related to things I put on there. Or if they feel there are gaps in the information I provided, they might ask questions about that. So, I’m very careful about what I put on my résumé and what I choose to leave off.

  • by yuppie_scum on 7/24/21, 12:40 PM

    Yes, performance metrics can be quantitatively measured with application performance monitoring/metrics (APM) solutions like datadog, new relic, grafana Prometheus, etc