I was with the author until I got to the actual advice. "Worked with technology X" seems a lot more relevant and useful than "achieved x% improvement" or "reduced cost by 30%". The latter doesn't just signals that the owner of the resume read a questionable article online and decided to follow its advice.
When hiring managers and recruiters are looking through a stack of 100s of resumes, or even 10s of resumes, all of which say "Worked with technology X", how can they choose which professionals to interview or phone screen.
Actual experience in the real world is that those who quantify their success in using technology X to achieve goals / OKRs / results for teams tend to get the interview.
The problem with the "achieved x % this-or-that" statements is that they require a lot of context to understand and are very difficult to verify. Don't tell me that when you're screening hundreds of resumes you can successfully understand what those achievements actually represent or what kind of skills and effort they required in the context of their company, team and problem domain. Let alone compare candidates based on a bullet list of their claimed achievement, each of them using a different metric and worded in a different way.
Yes, that's completely true. Statements like this require a lot of context. How the recruiting workflow works today is that context is surfaced in actual interviews.
Would it be better if we could somehow accurately assess professionals on the sum totality of their experience, contributions, behaviors and traits? Yes, indeed it would. But it would also be a lower-paying world because managers would only have sufficient information to hire the people they know closely, and have personally observed over sufficient periods of time.
Our modern system that enables people unknown to a company to be hired based on a simplifying process is a feature, not a bug. Because of this system, companies can scale, hire hundreds or thousands of engineers, and create world-defining products. That success is what enables companies to pay the extraordinary compensation that the technology profession currently earns.
In a world historical context, or even a 21st century capitalism context, the compensation paid to professionals with only a few years experience is absolutely without precedent. Many technology professionals earn more per year in their first year of employment than their parents or grandparents ever earned in a year in their entire lifetimes.
So while I agree there are downsides and negative aspects to the tradeoff of the modern, anonymous, meritocratic system of hiring, the benefits, for technology professionals and the world, far outweigh the negatives.
Yeah I think this article has good advice for something closer to a perfect world, where a company gets a good signal for the employee but frames this as making it the prospective employee's responsibility to give that signal.
But in this existing world, a non-standard resume just makes it harder for anyone to screen quickly.
