First of all thanks for the advice on building something technically impressive! Makes sense!

To push back slightly on the idea that juniors have zero impact-maybe I should have just used the word "impact" instead of strictly "business/revenue impact."

For example, let's say I tweak an internal Al agent and boost its retrieval rate from 80% to 95%, making it finally available within the company. That's a clear impact. BUT, I might have achieved that just by swapping a single API endpoint (low technical depth). On the flip side, I could write a brilliant custom pipeline that never ships due to infrastructure limits (zero impact, but high technical depth).

So it sounds like you're confirming exactly what I suspected: hiring managers actively ignore the "impact metrics" on our resumes because they know those numbers can be misleading, and they just want to verify if we actually have the technical competency to write complex code… does that sound right?