Resume: How to quantify my contributions as a software engineer?

Question

I am updating my resume, and I'm wondering how to quantify my contributions to a startup where I worked for ~2.5 years.

Most resume advice suggests to quantity your achievements, ie: "Boosted customer retention by 25%", "Contributed to a 12x page speed increase". Unfortunately, I didn't measure many of my achievements. I also don't think the company allowed much time to measure our impact.

I do have some facts, for example: I started as the 9th employee, and the 5th engineer, and we had ~10 customers. By the time I left, there were ~50 employees, ~15 engineers, and ~70 customers.

I am highlighting my achievements at the top of my resume, in the summary section. Is it okay for me to say

More than doubled active user growth at startup XYZ

? Of course I didn't do this single-handedly, but I'm not sure how else to highlight my hard work in a quantitative manner.

How do software engineers typically quantify their achievements? How bad is it to offer hand-wavy calculations?

Answer 1

I quantified almost nothing in my CV. I just provided numbers when they were objectively available: date of birth, scores in school, etc. Other than that, I just wrote about the experience and the projects I worked for.

Usually, if you read carefully, the examples with "quantization" apply to jobs where numbers are "Gods" - and those are usually sales (or other related or similar activities).

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I explained here the structure of my CV, just in case you need some inspiration.

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Notes:

1. I do not imply that quantization must be avoided at all costs. If you have some relevant numbers, it is OK to show them. It is the "quantization at all costs" which I speak against.

2. As stated in a comment, some tech companies seem to be big fans of numbers. However, in my personal opinion, most tech companies don't reject you from the start just because of that.

3. Normally, if a company really wants numbers, they will specifically ask, either you directly, or through the public communication channels (e.g., on their web page).

4. If you will ever encounter a large number of potential employers asking for numbers, then start thinking to make some updates to the CV. In my almost 20 years of employment, nobody ever asked me about "self-marketing" numbers during interviews.

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A good hint from @PaulKaram in a comment

We say that most companies do not need quantization, but only the list of the required skills. The truth maybe is somewhere in between. Compare the following:

1. I am proficient in using C, C++, Python, and Ruby
2. I am proficient in using four programming / scripting languages: C, C++, Python, and Ruby

Is statement 2 more "quantified" than statement 1, just because it makes the numbers explicit? Does statement 2 provide more information? For me, statement 2 is actually more difficult to read, because I need to throw away the "junk" information.

Answer 2

Personally I think the "quantify everything" advice (which I've seen as well) is really bad advice for software engineers. We work in teams, we don't produce anything individually (unless you're the sole developer, in which case you can claim 100% of everything...).

Highlight the technologies you've worked with, the responsibilities you had at your previous roles, and how many years experience you have. Those are the criteria that will get you considered for an interview.

Answer 3

As someone who reads Software Developer Resumes routinely, quantify if you want or don't. It really doesn't matter as I ignore that part of the bullet point anyway because I know you wouldn't have put it on your resume if it's bad. Also it's likely inflated numbers anyway. The most important things for me are:

• Familiarity with multiple programming languages and tools (Shows that you are willing to learn new things and don't view yourself as a (Insert Programming Language Here) developer only
• Job Experience that shows you have the ability to take a barely/poorly documented user request and develop something that was what the user was really asking for.

Answer 4

I think numbers are incredibly important, to help give a sense of the size and scope of the work you've done.

The rest of this answer is from a blog post of mine:

We know that numbers attract attention. When scanning your resume, the reader’s eye will be drawn to the numbers naturally.

Moreover, numbers make your story more interesting and give the reader a sense of the size of your accomplishments, or the troubles you’ve solved in the past.

Consider the difference between these two bullets:

• Ran the help desk. Answered trouble tickets, responded to phone calls and tracked spare computer parts.

• Ran the help desk for 200-seat office. Staff of 3 answered average of 50 phone calls and 27 trouble tickets per day. Maintained 200-unit inventory of spare computer parts worth $10,000.

These two bullets describe exactly the same responsibilities, but the addition of specific numbers draw the attention of the reader, and add the details that give a much fuller picture of your responsibilities.

Without the numbers, the reader might also logically assume that the reality is more like this:

• Ran the "help desk" in a four-person real estate office. Answered questions a few times a week about Excel. Kept a spare PC in a closet in case something tanked.

Remember, your awesomeness is not self-evident, and part of your job in telling the story of your awesomeness is giving the numbers to support it.

Answer 5

As @virolino already pointed out, you don't have to quantify anything if you don't want or don't have something to.

I personally quantify my work so, that other people can see what exactly I did and more important which impact I made.

If you have worked about 2,5 years, you have done things, which you can quantify and list in CV. To give you a direction - try to list everything you have done in this company:

1. I implemented CRM service
2. I fixed a bug which slowed down a system
3. I designed a new version of data transfer system
4. I introduced a new ticket dashboard

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Then you have to think how all these things helped your company. You can use something like this:

1. It is easier to work with customers
2. System has better performance
3. More stable data transfer
4. More comfortable work with tickets

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And the last step is to define how much these things helped the company:

1. brought 2x more customers by better CRM
2. improved system performance by 2x times
3. improved stability/plausibility of data by 4x times
4. saved 10 man/hours per week by introducing better ticket dashboard

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Of course you didn't do all this alone, but it is obvious. The point is to provide things, on which you have worked with a team and what you and your team have achieved.

Answer 6

Whether you quantify your contributions is not as important as indicating whether your projects were successful. Did the result meet the market favorably?

Your resume would best focus on your most important contributions to the success of projects, the technologies/tools incorporated and used, and your expertise using them.

I recently did a painful series of interviews (4-5 hour drive each way, grueling interview sessions) only to learn when I wasn't hired that my resume listed one technology which I barely used in a previous role was of great interest to them. Somehow they thought that meant I was a guru of said technology. When they found out I was a mere "appliance user", they were disappointed (probably from difficulty of finding a true expert in that realm).

Answer 7

I wouldn't presume to tell you what you need to be noticed by a big HR department. But as an engineer who farms work to other engineers, while some quantitative information helps me understand the scope, pace and intensity of what you've worked on and therefore (presumably) what you'd be able to handle, I'm much more interested in why than how... and I'm more interested in how than how many. If you say you convinced your bosses to structure an API in a certain way because it would make it easier for vendors to integrate their system, that's much more impressive than if you told me how many vendors signed up.

My advice would be to cite your personal achievements, not the company's...but also, you should rightly view it as a personal achievement anytime you convinced someone to take a path they hadn't seen before, and it worked out well for everyone. The best coders - it sounds very 90s, but like Samurai, really - will think outside the box and present their Daimyo with an opportunity. The question of why you thought of that particular improvement speaks to both your intelligence and your loyalty. I believe those are still the qualities companies are seeking, and will always seek. If you present your intelligence with humility and you show curiosity and provide the reasons, they should see your value. If they don't, then either your value isn't that great, or it's their loss.

A coder who thinks for herself/himself about a problem is a diamond. Rough or not, those are the ones worth keeping. So focus on the problems you solved and don't worry about the numbers.

Answer 8

You should try to quantify the things that you think the recruiters want to know. Working as one of a team of 5 (or 15) is slightly useful, as it indicates the sort of working environment you're used to. It would be more useful if you could quantify your position relative to the others, maybe you were one of 5 senior engineers out of those 15 engineers.

You could also quantify the system you worked on, in whatever way is meaningful. If the start-up was sold, its value is significant. Otherwise the number of users, countries, transactions or the value of the widgets in the inventory give an idea of its size and importance, and thus give the recruiter the impression that you could be trusted to work on their system.

They probably aren't interested in the number of bugs fixed or lines of code written, but you could quantify a specialism by saying something like "implemented 80% of the stored procedures".

If you've got a long list of languages and technologies, it can be useful to quantify how many years you've been working with them, or how much of your time you spent in each area.

Answer 9

As a web engineer I would add metrics like

Improved Average Server Response time by 15%. Improved Google SEO to 90+ Improved DB queries on landing pages by 250ms.

Things like these. Numbers just set your CV apart.

Answer 10

When you're looking for a job, and you're putting together your CV it's a very good idea to quantify the impact of your work - if you can.

Sometimes you have no way to know what impact a project you delivered or took part in had on the company or the userbase. But recruiters and hiring managers like to see that engineers are aware of the impact of their work beyond the technical side.

Sure, most of the projects you've delivered you probably didn't deliver alone. But you don't have to take full credit, you can always make it clear you worked on it with a team of X people, and you were a junior/senior/lead developer on it. Nothing wrong with that.

If you can tell that the startup you worked for was acquired for X amount, definitely go for it.

If you can show that the project you delivered raised user retention by X%, you should definitely add that too.

Showing any achievement of this type is great. Not many engineers add this to their resume, but recruiters and hiring managers like it, so it'll give you an edge.

Btw I've picked up some cool insight as to how big tech companies filter applicants, and how to write a resume to get past that filter from this interview: https://codingsans.com/blog/software-engineer-resume