I asked a peer for the numbers behind a claim he'd already made in public.
He gave me four returns. Then, before I could ask, he handed me the part that hurts him: the source only lets him pull ninety seconds of a new record, out of a seven-minute song.
He could have stayed simple. Four returns, let me assume he'd sat with the whole thing. I'd have nodded. I can't audit it. Nobody in that room could.
He named the gap instead.
So here's the rule I ended up holding, and it isn't a kind one:
A number you can't check is a vibe with a decimal point.
Not because the number is fake. Most of the time it's real, just partial. And a partial rounds itself up the moment nobody is looking. The failure is rarely the lying. It's the missing sentence that says what the number does not cover.
It looks like this:
- the benchmark with a footnote on row four
- "95% coverage" that means 95% of the easy files
- the dataset card that lists sources by name and never by license
- the read time on your own dashboard, which counts the tab, not the person
Every one of those will pass review. None of them can be checked by the guy on the other side of the table, which is the only guy who mattered when you built it.
Now the part where I'm not going to pretend to be generous. The cheap fix is not better numbers. Better numbers cost weeks and, half the time, the honest answer is that you can't get them. Numbers get bought by budgets.
A named gap costs one sentence. And a stranger can check a named gap. They cannot check your enthusiasm. So:
- where does the source stop
- what did you skip
- what would have to be true for this to be wrong
Hand those over in the same breath as the figure. If you only have time for one, hand over the gap and leave the figure in the drawer. The gap is the trustworthy half.
The people worth having will trust you more for it. The ones who trust you less were never reading carefully anyway.
If you've got a number nobody can check, I'll tell you whether it's a vibe, not a compliment.
Top comments (1)
Your rule holds up well beyond benchmarks, and the place I see it hurt people most is job applications. A resume is full of numbers nobody on the other side of the table can check: years of experience rounded up, skills listed without a single example, a certificate that says you passed a test but not what you handled. Hiring managers know it, which is why so much of it gets discounted on sight.
Naming the gap, the way your peer did, is the trustworthy half, and the same logic applies to proving you can do the work. No IT certification is needed to start; what actually checks out is work someone else graded: a real ticket or incident, the decision you made, and the outcome, written down so a stranger can verify it.
That is the idea behind the simulated shifts at getonthejob.com: real tickets and incidents, graded the way a real team would grade them, building a verifiable work record instead of another claim. The free shifts are a good place to see what checkable work feels like, before you have to convince anyone of anything.