Glossary

A job reference (see also the german version) is a letter from the (former) employer that states what the employee did, and how well he did it.

There are oh so weird rules here on how to phrase stuff therein, but this is not what this question is about.

Question

I hope this can even be generally answered, but even if country/region specific, I think there is enough international know-how on this site to get useful answers for different regions.

I was wondering how detailed the tasks a programmer / developer did should be spelled out in a job reference. (After all, they can be spelled out in all detail in a CV when applying for a new job.)

So how much detail is usual for a job reference?

Example

• Developed Windows applications in C++

or

• Developed Windows Desktop Applications using C++ with MS Visual Studio 2005 and MFC, utilising Boost 1.47 and specif library xyz, focusing on subsystem abc for numerical calculations of ...

etc.

What makes more sense?