Fancy Numbers on Resumes Are a Big Fat Lie😨

I have a new theory. The star performers who are bagging the plum software engineering jobs have “increased customer engagement by 300%”, “Saved $500k in operational costs” and “reduced build times by 90%”.

Either they have a dedicated team of statisticians working for them, or they’re making it up.

Here’s the rub. We shouldn’t be expected to pull quantifiable metrics from our job and plug them into our resume as it’s not a metric that should be used to filter software engineers.

The Nonsense of Measurable Improvement

Magic Numbers

Let me have another (unpopular) opinion. Numbers matter. Metrics make sense if you’re working on a 6σ* project where you’ll get such stats for free, but most of us are working in an Agile environment where such metrics are not collected.

I’m frequently surprised by the lack of data collection in software development and the number of decisions that are made without data to drive the choices.

When recruiters and companies become obsessed with attaching numbers to achievements they’re expecting software developers to provide metrics that the industry is not interested in collecting. I mean, name the last time you finished a sprint and thought to calculate how much time you have saved the company by refactoring spaghetti code so it is maintainable? Without company norms for doing so, you’d be forced into simply making up the numbers and that can’t be good for at least 51.3% of developers.

The Software Engineering Reality

We all know what we’re doing each day. We debug. We refactor. We review the code. We sit through aimless long emails. We have a PR nitpicked to death by someone obsessed with alphabetical imports.

When we go for a job, nobody seems interested that we delivered unclear requirements, slapped in that “urgent” request (that never got deployed) and still delivered despite the CI being broken.

The impact of getting our work done (and well) simply isn’t measured. OKRs and KPIs don’t capture our work (mine don’t exist too), and often they are nothing to shout about in the world of competitive applications and filtering resumes. 

The Damage

This obsession with numbers (that frequently don’t exist) is a quirk of corporate culture, and it’s also harmful.

I’m going to say it. 73.3% of software developers just make up statistics and numbers and people go along with them. They’re not verifiable 98.23% of the time, so a subset of candidates just make them up.

So dishonest candidates have resumes that pass through the filters because they make stuff up, but more reliable honest software engineers fall at the first hurdle as they don’t have quantifiable experience on their resumes.

I’m also 110% certain that many reading these metrics aren’t numerate enough to realize that the figures don’t make sense.

People are gaming the system. Instead of mentoring juniors, contributing to team morale, or writing maintainable code, they’re chasing metrics. This is how you end up with beautifully documented, utterly useless features.

Conclusion

The truth is that the worth of developers is often intangible. It’s the stability a developer brings to a project. The mentoring of a junior team member and the code review stopped a production bug that really matters.

We should be measuring relationships, trust and the consistent delivery of quality work. Sure, you couldn’t give a $ dollar value to those things, but since making up numbers is costing the industry $4,927,2932.92 a year, we should use these false metrics as a red flag for prospective candidates.

If being a great developer isn’t enough for your employer, it might just be time to find one that values the person and not the metrics. If such a thing exists.