How we communicate signals seniority

https://yuezhao.substack.com/p/the-altitude-of-the-communication

by yuezhao • 2 years ago

41 39 2 years ago

yuezhao.substack.com

justinl332• 2 years ago

100%. I've seen junior PMs fast track their careers by literally just always framing their work in terms of business outcomes. One of my reports went from entry-level to senior in 2 years by always tying her projects back to user growth or revenue impact, even if it was just bug fixes or UI tweaks. definitely a skill worth nailing early in your career.

tux3• 2 years ago

That does not seem like what I want the company I work at to optimise for.

Being the best at turning bug fixes or UI tweaks into a flashy story. This signals myopic focus on apearances over real world outcomes.

Aloha• 2 years ago

In the end, without successful business outcomes, there would be no money to pay the paychecks we all need.

Its great if you're a technical person who has a clear vision for your product, if its not a product anyone else needs however, its not gonna do much good for you.

justinl332• 2 years ago

I hear you. Imo it's still a tradeoff/balancing act between business outcomes and your own career

silentsea90• 2 years ago

+1 on this, I've been pushing my team to measure impact more. Else we remain a team of high value that remains unrealized and therefore underfunded, which hurts us all.

exe342• 2 years ago

how do they measure the business outcome of their tweaks, is that a/b testing?

semi-extrinsic• 2 years ago

I only skimmed down to the "Sign up for a 7-day free trial" Substack thing, and I already had to work hard at not throwing up in my mouth. Blessed be the random number generators that I don't work at a place like this.

ThrowawayR2• 2 years ago

It's also worth adding that the self-promotion laden submissions for this domain have only been posted from two accounts "yzcoach" and "yuezhao" (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=yuezhao.substack.com) and that those accounts have almost no other postings, i.e. this user is probably intentionally violating the HN guidelines against self-promotion and advertising. Rather inappropriate behavior for a former executive or anyone worth hiring as a coach in my opinion.

icepat• 2 years ago

Based purely on the responses, who would you hire? Who would you consider for a manager role? Do you even believe this is the same person?
The altitude of your communication signals your seniority and experience.

It's not mentioned anywhere which is the superior (to the author) response. This article is so vague that, at the end, I still could not tell which one the author preferred.

gus_massa• 2 years ago

The seccond one.

new product from 100 to 10,000 users

It means, "I made money for my prevoius employer, I'l make money for you $$$$."

But my version is too vage, so the hiring boss don't belive it. With some numbers it's more realistic.

caerwy• 2 years ago

The software industry has become swamped with suits optimizing their status and prestige.

burnte2• 2 years ago

Very true, but that's why it's important for GOOD leaders to know how to sell themselves, so we can push the monkeys in suits out of the way. Learning how to talk about myself in a way that really communicates with business people is the single greatest aspect of my career success. Yeah, I'm smart and highly capable, but that's useless if I can't get in the door.

forgotusername6• 2 years ago

Whenever I see numbers like that on a CV I am immediately skeptical. There's almost no possibility that the numbers you are listing were a direct result of your contribution. Also, you were probably part of a team, so it was probably a group effort. The other thing is, unless it really was all your idea, who cares how well the feature did?

hn_throwaway_99• 2 years ago

Was going to come here to post the same thing, so glad to see this at the top. From the article:

    > I led a project to refactor the core code base and make performance improvements which accelerated development speed by 30% and decreased app size by 50%, leading to 10% in app installs.
    >
    > (please note all numbers are illustrative)

In my experience, it's more like "please note all numbers are bullshit". I agree with you, in that whenever I see numbers like this I would say 5 out of 10 people are totally making them up, 4 out of 10 are taking credit for a large team effort, and maybe 1 in 10 has a real right to say he was responsible for that metric change. So the problem is that even if you're that 1 out of 10 person, the interviewer may be coming at this with the attitude of "90% of people are bullshitting".

I feel like the article is "half right". Yes, I want to know how you drove business outcomes, but I really really care what you actually did. I've been in too many interviews where people could talk a good game but then when I tried to drill down into specific actions the interviewee took, I felt like that consultant from Office Space: "What would you say ya did there??"

RaftPeople• 2 years ago

Same here, I was going to post the same thing.

I want to know lots of specifics about how you approached the work because that is the only way I can read between the lines and gain a lot of information about your experience and general style.

I have no interested in the stats because they don't help me understand how your capabilities+style will actually translate to the role.

atomicnumber3• 2 years ago

This creates an opposite problem that will be picked up by readers of your CV - if everything is a "we", then they wonder how much you actually contributed vs just sat there watching a more senior engineer.

Discussing impact also communicates that you're impact-oriented, which often indicates maturity and seniority to many readers.

"who cares how well the feature did"

This indicates lack of seniority to many CV readers, especially startups. "Who cares"? Literally every single person who was at your startup before it failed because people were too focused on tech and not enough on the product, the business, or the users. How many startups have such a thing written on their tombstone?

To quote the article's giant pull quote at the bottom:

"The more you describe the “How”, the more Junior I think you are."

burnte2• 2 years ago

He said this is for leadership position, so obviously he didn't do it all themselves. The leader is telling you they're capable of leading a team that can achieve things like that. Finding people who can lead well and reliably is a lot harder than finding people who can just do a job.

CM302• 2 years ago

This is kinda what I always wondered about these "show the numerical impact of your work" stats.

How exactly do you know that? Unless you're a manager or something, how do you know that the company got say, 30% more users and 20% more repeat views after they changed the sign up process?

For an awful lot of companies, the tech department flat out doesn't know what the stats are like for their site/app, or care enough to track the direct impact of their work.

Is that a good thing? Absolutely not, but it seems like a depressingly common one nonetheless.

euvin2• 2 years ago

One time, I sent in a question to a panel of anonymous recruiters asking if they could tell that a quantitative number in someone's resume bullet points was bullshit, and if they even cared.

The only responses I got out of that were "generally we can tell if you're embellishing, and the hiring manager can probably tell, so don't lie!" without much further deliberation.

I was hoping that the anonymity would grant them the ability to say the quiet part out loud, but I guess I shouldn't have expected much.

ikr678• 2 years ago

I think everyone knows the $$ numbers are made up but when you have millions of cvs to sort through, the $$ are more shiny and compelling to hr/managers who are making $$ based decisions.

steren• 2 years ago

My BS-o-meter went off the roof reading this article

anotherhue• 2 years ago

The only real decision a SW person needs to decide is whether to communicate their skill in SW or their skill in business.

Rustified a monolith with 99% SLA, SW.

Owned revenue stream that brought in 40MM with 20% YoY growth on 80% margin -> Business.

You can do either, but you probably don't have time to do both.

kqr• 2 years ago

These numbers tell me the person who wrote them have a sloppy understanding of causality, at best.

I mean, I appreciate reading the concrete numbers because it gives a more detailed trampoline into interesting discussions, but don't for a second imply you, as an individual, had very much agency over the outcome at all. That would border on clinically meaningful hubris.

(I guess this opinion makes me low in seniority?)

lolinder• 2 years ago

Based purely on the responses, who would you hire? Who would you consider for a manager role? Do you even believe this is the same person?

Frankly, neither.

The first is intentionally written to be as dull and disinterested as possible, and so comes off poorly (presumably because it was designed to).

The second is a meaningless out-of-context number and corporate speak soup that doesn't really tell me anything about the prospective hire.

Obviously, this was written by and for executives in product orgs... and maybe it makes more sense there. But I'd balk at hiring anyone who talks like this into an engineering org, even at the executive level.

exmadscientist• 2 years ago

Yes, exactly... the person I want to hire:

1. First tells me their role/career/place on a team ("I'm a widget frobnicator")

2. Tells me what skills they have ("I specialize in frobnicating mistuned widgets")

3. Tells me what that does for their employers/clients ("We got that big widget over at MegaCorp fixed up")

4. Then puts numbers to it all ("That made millions of users' experience faster and freed up ten thousand servers")

Fill me with buzzwords or BS me with statistics alone, and I'm not interested. Yin and yang go together.

henning• 2 years ago

OK, so you admire consummate bullshitters who take credit for the combined efforts of dozens of people where they only played a part towards a larger effort. What do you want, a fucking cookie?

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh• 2 years ago

Counterpoint:

"When art critics get together, they talk about form and structure and meaning. When painters get together, they talk about where to get the best turpentine." (Picasso, supposedly [1])

To be generous to OP, I think their point is about how to communicate in an elevator pitch, or a resume bullet point, or the first few minutes of an intro call. And in those contexts, OP is pretty reasonably correct.

What it comes down to is details.

The person citing numbers about growth, hiring, or whatever is proving they know the details of the work. And that's a great start.

The next step for the interviewer comes in following up to find out whether they actually know the details of how the work was done, why it was done that way, what was good or bad about how the work was done, and why it's good or bad.

A good follow-up question would be something like: "Great, please walk me through the story of how you took ${METRIC} from A to B, what you think went well, and what you think went poorly." That should yield a solid 10-15 minute (or more) discussion where the executive candidate can prove they have the ability to handle both minute details and grand strategy at the same time, as well as the discretion to know when they're supposed to be doing which one.

Failure to do this on the part of the interviewer is how a company ends up with so many sub-par executives. And a failure on the part of the executive to push themselves in this way, in the first place, is how our industry has ended up with so many sub-par executives.

[1] https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/10/20/turpentine/

refulgentis• 2 years ago

Love this comment. Saw over and over again at Google that a lot of people can learn the latest correct thing to say, get a job, and coast on a trillion dollar behemoths standard growth mechanics. (case in point: me)

There's always that tension, but IMHO I watched it tip over into something ugly over 7 years from 2016 - 2023

fungiblecog• 2 years ago

To me it just signals what a bullshitter you are. Most people cannot claim these "outcomes" because it takes a whole team. How do i know you made any contribution to those outcomes?

manquer• 2 years ago

I agree, the only people I would take this pitch from would be ex-founders or at least a CXO or the head of the business unit .

immibis• 2 years ago

You aren't the target audience. To the target audience (professional bullshitters) it signals you're part of the in-group.

morgante• 2 years ago

This is exactly the kind of cringe-inducing content that I'd expect from a "PM career coach."

You can communicate understanding of the business without falling into BS slop.

Truly senior people have made such significant and real contributions that (a) their resume is mostly an afterthought and (b) the story

bofadeez• 2 years ago

It's foolish to judge someone from a single statement. Give them something to do and see how it works out.

edwinjm• 2 years ago

For IT people:

"At a big IT company, I migrated the CRM to a new system and the revenue went up with 6%".

Right.

exe342• 2 years ago

I also increased the average temperature across the country by 15 degrees over a period of six months.

euvin2• 2 years ago

These tactics of slapping numbers and quantifiable metrics on resume bullet points really do remind me of the formulaic clickbait tactics on social media. Once everyone starts to do it, it leaves the same film of tacky bullshit everywhere. It's beyond actual merit and accuracy at this point.

OutOfHere• 2 years ago

No, but this is how you fool non-technical people. You will not impress any technical person by skipping the "how".

It is funny since one can make outrageous claims on one's resume about impact without needing to prove anything. This doesn't work the same for the "how".

polotics• 2 years ago

Choice quote from this:

"""While it may be “useful” to do that refactor or redesign, or work on an annoying bug"""

Shortest but not sweetest time-capsule to an already-dead moment in our collective past, IMHO

How we communicate signals seniority

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