One bullet, rewritten

Here is a bullet from a real CV, lightly changed.

Worked on the checkout flow. Improved performance.

Both true. Both worth nothing, and the person who wrote it does not know why.

The problem is not that it is vague, although it is. The problem is that it describes an assignment rather than a decision, and assignments do not tell me what level you operate at. Someone gave you the checkout flow. You worked on it. That is what an employee does. It is not what a senior engineer does.

The rewrite has four parts, always the same four.

The constraint you were under. What you chose. What you chose against. What changed as a result.

Applied here: checkout was dropping about one in four hundred orders on poor connections. I traced it to a race in the cart layer, and chose a version check over a lock so the rollback path stayed a single release. Support tickets on that flow went to zero.

Same work. Same engineer. One of those gets read as senior.

Notice what the four parts do.

The constraint proves you understood the problem rather than the ticket. The choice proves there was a decision. What you chose against is the part almost nobody includes, and it is the strongest signal in the sentence, because it demonstrates you considered alternatives rather than implementing the first thing that occurred to you. And the result makes it verifiable.

The exercise. Take your three strongest bullets. Rewrite each one this way.

If you cannot fill in what you chose against, you have found a bullet where you executed rather than decided. That is completely fine, and it should not be one of your three strongest. Find one where you did decide, even if the work was smaller. A small decision you owned beats a large task you were handed, every time, on a CV and in a room.

Three bullets. One hour. It is the highest-value hour available to you this month.

Your CV read the way I read hundreds of them from the hiring side: salari.dev/services.

# The Brief, archive issues 11 to 15

Engineering judgment. Undated.