Maybe I’m just swimming against the tide, but I work at a “big N” company and I am more impressed by “saved X dollars”, “made process Y faster” or “built feature Z” than I am with a specific set of technologies.

I’ve interviewed a lot of incredibly bright people that didn’t know any technologies more modern than C++.

+1. It feels like most people making comments such as the OP are people actually not working in BigN companies and just making assumptions.

I've done a lot of interviews at BigCo and definitely not looking much at the technology.

Part of the problem is that many software developers work in organisations where that kind of information - dollars saved or made, time saved, steps reduced - isn't shared. In a siloed org, the development team writes code to satisfy bug reports or feature requests, which come from a business analyst or product owner, who is the sole conduit to "the business". Why these things are needed, their relative priorities, or their ultimate impact, are not regarded as important concerns for the development team.

tldr: software developers often can't measure the impact of their code, so they fall back on describing the technologies they use, which drives a counter-productive desire to employ "sexy" technologies.

> Part of the problem is that many software developers work in organisations where that kind of information - dollars saved or made, time saved, steps reduced - isn't shared.

It's not even that they are not shared. It's that the importance of projects is often measured in dollars spent, complexity, amount of people working on them. Which means that often the inefficient teams and solutions are considered more important- their managers and tech leads have more people under them and they are more visible to the rest of the business.

That's surely because C++ is the language To Rule Them All!

I jest partly, because every time I write something in C# or PHP (even with the half-baked "strong" typing they are introducing), I constantly curse and think how easy it'd be in C++

I do a lot of interviewing at a big company. It's easy to detect when people are cramming technologies on their resume, and it's a moderate negative signal. They aren't thinking of the customer, or of the problem; they're thinking about the tech. That gets in the way of good design and is a red flag, in my book. I'm not at all alone in this, so I'm not sure it's as clear as you make it out to be.

Same here, but I can tell you from experience with group interviews that while we're definitely not alone, we're probably in the minority.

There is a term for this: resumé driven development. I experienced it too first hand and it is maddening. Every problem becomes a microsevice kubernetes problem.

The competent software teams and companies don't hire by keyword though, they look at actual output and results delivered.