2 min lesson
Quantify or it reads as junior
Name the parts in "Quantify or it reads as junior" and give the practical job of each one.
Step 1 of 2
Quantify or it reads as junior
Senior IC stories have numbers; junior stories have adjectives. “Improved onboarding” is a non-answer. The fix is to attach a metric to every story before you walk in, even if it's an honest estimate you can defend.
- “Made offboarding faster”
- “Access revoked across 20+ SaaS apps within 5 minutes of the HRIS termination event, down from same-day manual.”
- “Reduced manual work”
- “Eliminated ~6 hours/week of provisioning clicks across the IT team.”
- “Improved security”
- “Cut standing admin grants by 70% with just-in-time access, with no new tickets.”
- “Helped with the acquisition”
- “Migrated 140 users and 160 devices to our tenant in 9 days with zero lockouts.”
Defensible estimates beat vague adjectives every time.
When you tell the automation story, name the failure mode you designed against. “The script was idempotent and ran in dry-run first, because a deprovisioning job that double-fires or partially completes is a security and lockout risk.” That one sentence separates an engineer from someone who once wrote a Bash script.
“The win wasn't the script. The win was that offboarding stopped being a thing a human remembers to do. The HRIS is the source of truth, the termination event fires the workflow and access is gone before the person has left the building. I kept a human approval only on the irreversible step - wiping the device - because that's the one I wanted a second pair of eyes on.”
Don't let every story be a solo heroics tale. On a flat team, the ability to disagree with Security or Eng and still land a shared decision is a graded skill. If you can't name a time you were wrong or changed course after a partner pushed back, you're missing the story that carries most of the collaboration signal.