I hate this advice so much, even if it's true that it works.

How many people actually have any sort of knowledge of (or access to) such measurements? If you're in sales or management, great, but the bulk of the workforce, especially those who desperately need their next resume to land them a half-decent job fast, are not in such positions.

Even as a developer, I've had exactly one gig where I had access to quantifiable results. Customer X was losing $Y per week, and when I provided a solution plugging problem Z... well, that's that. Some customers and employers are rather cagey about leaking finance data. Even if they were wide open about my impact, I'd have to stick around a few extra years to see the result.

I'm engineer and I've had direct knowledge of how my work has impacted other departments. I don't even have to ask - sales or ops will just say "thanks to X project, we reduced touch time by 30%" at all hands or general meetings. I can't imagine working at a place that hides this info from either the engineers or most of the company.

Doesnt have to be about money. I reduced page load times by x%, measured it with the chrome inspector network tab and it was brought up in an interview.

You should always strive to measure the impact of your work. Always.

And if you can't measure it, you should ask your users for ballpark estimates. "Hey George, how many minutes a day does the new feature I added save you?" From there you can convert it to an estimated average financial impact fairly easily.

And at the end of some successful two year project, having moved on to a new position at a new company, am I to call George back a few years later and ask for him to leak me info about my project's impact, assuming George still works there himself?

So by that point, I've already made like three things up because there's absolutely no way for them to fact check this nonsense. Why talk to George when I can just pull something out of my ass? "Yeah, the process totally saved a half hour every week, which is about $500 because BUSINESS. Good luck verifying that, asshole."

Wait, so you think that when you say "I made the process 13% more efficient and saved the company $12.5 million dollars" that they actually call the company to verify?

>>Why talk to George when I can just pull something out of my ass?

Because lying is bad? I mean when you talk to George you are at least making a good faith effort to come up with a realistic estimate (which you would be honest in your resume by using words like "approximately" for instance). That's preferable if you have no other way to calculate the business impact of your work.

Yeah 30% is not a "hard number", I use this stuff on my resume but only because I know the people who read them are not like me.

This is a very standard format: Action, quantifiable result. Action, quantifiable result. I think one of the best edits one can make to their resume is to at least convert to that format.

"Responsible for C++ implementation of WhizBang Product's codebase" = ???

"Implemented BarFoo feature resulting in an additional $50M in revenue and 3 industry awards" = ahh, here's something this person can do for me!

And what do you do when you don't have access to that data? Lose the position to those who do or are willing to lie about it?

There are ways you can show quantitative impact that's not necessarily financial. Examples include: time saved in terms of hours, reduction of support requests, etc.

"I made up useless nonsense because that's what you want to hear and it resulted in me getting a job."

Why does it have to be useless nonsense? It's about thinking about your work differently, and learning to tell the story of your career in a quantifiable way, rather than just qualitative.

Turns out the bean counters care about beans.

I had a free resume evaluation thing done to my resume and this was what was suggested to me regarding "I did x, resulted in % effect" and I don't know how to calculate that as a task do-er person / working on a site that doesn't make money yet (but being paid by site owner to develop features).

You also mentioned the how to calculate part which may imply having access to the site owner's data (however that may be, ask them) but I think it's hard to calculate those figures/don't know how to.

You probably have to wait too to see how your changes have impacted their site, by changing a CTA button color to "blue" and then you say "In 2 weeks, we noticed 150% growth in conversions" or something.

Regarding your first question, I think you’re looking at it too much from your own perspective. Take a look from the perspective of the site owner; what problems do you solve for him/her? What other value do you add to the site?

If say you added a capability to encrypt data (not SSL but static data storage encryption) and ability for multiple users. Without any users yet how do you qauntify that?

Presumably, he did that expenditure and revenue math before he decided to start hiring for the role.