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Comment by linusha | Hacker News Reader

A general question: What do you all think about this Skill representation as points out of 5 (or 7 or 10 for that matter)? These arbitrary scales always hit me as kind of...useless? There is no frame of reference what a specific amount of points mean. Of course, with this kind of skill-self-description there will always be difficulties, i.e., one does not always know what one does not know etc. But it seems to me that e.g., a duration of full-time or equivalent experience with a technology would provide a better way of measuring experience than these arbitrary scales?

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The skill bars or skill meters are completely useless because one person's 10/10 is another person's 2/10. Moreover, the more junior the engineer, the higher they score themselves in their discipline.

I am an older engineer and I would rank myself 6-7/10 in most aspects of my work, even if I have architected and built some trend-setting systems in my corner of tech. I have never seen a junior score themselves so low on average.

My experience is also that companies that care about these things (where hires are mainly filtered by HR and not SWEs) tend to build very mediocre teams. I am probably old enough to eschew the whole resume padding or prettifying thing all together. My last resume was written in Notepad, and it worked just fine for its purpose.

I wrote my last cv in markdown and named it my_name.cv

Disappointedly, lots of "resume uploaders" refused to accept my file, even as .txt.

Had to retreat back to pdf. Hard times we live in.

I do something like that, but use pandoc to get whatever format they ask for. It's not always nice looking, but it's seldom me who is initiating the contact (ie they already have an interest in me, and they need a resume "for the process").

I wrote mine in markdown and convert it to pdf (well, first html then pdf). It's worked well

   markdown resume.md > resume.tmp.html
   cat template/header.html resume.tmp.html template/footer.html > resume.html
   cp resume.html resume.tmp.html
   sed -i -e 's/"normal"/"pdf"/g' resume.tmp.html
   xvfb-run -a -s "-screen 0 640x480x16" wkhtmltopdf resume.tmp.html resume.pdf
   rm resume.tmp.html*

Similar, I wrote mine[0] with Typst (alternative to LaTeX) and YAML. It's source is still plain text but I get a nice PDF with the beautiful typesetting reminiscent of LaTeX and an easier scripting language.

edit: The generated PDF from the template mostly works with OP's resume-parser[1]. There's just fields lacking like Certifications, Awards, and Skills which are parsed under the Projects Category.

[0]: https://github.com/jskherman/cv.typ

[1]: https://www.open-resume.com/resume-parser

It also sickens me when I see a posting stating something like, "Must be an expert in these 6 disparate technologies". Like, I already hesitate to call myself an expert in my bread-and-butter, day-to-day tech stack. Now I have to over-analyze, "Do they mean expert? Is that flexible? Or am I really just that unqualified? Did the hiring manager just spend four seconds putting this together and will take whatever?"

It's a huge problem in this industry, especially for junior level people. Imposter Syndrome is real, so there's no need to throw gasoline on that particular fire. And usually they really don't need expert level experience in six different technologies or platforms, they need someone who is competent at two or possibly three of them and learning the rest on the job.

I like this post. When you get past 10 years experience, you will have gone through phases of technology. Who is going to put "expert" for PHP 2023? Few. How about "expert" for Excel/VBA in 2023? Fewer. (Perl from mid-2000s!) Yet, 10-15 years ago these were important languages and ecosystems; today, much less.

I just saw a new hire at my company introduce themselves by email as a "senior developer" with two years experience. After reading that email, I cringed all the way under my desk...

The optimal approach is to rate yourself high in everything because you can. It is clearly in your best interest to do so.

Not for everyone. Resume-padding gets you into teams with resume-padding members.

I emphatically disagree. Unless a team is throwing out resumes that look "too good", in which case that team is purposefully picking mediocre developers, being confident does not mean you'll only be hired by places with exaggerators.

Yeah, the problem with self-ranking is that humbleness is actively harmful. 4/5 for everything is the only safe bet -- not the best, but one notch below. You would probably have people like Howard Hinnant or Dave Abrahams come to a similar question about C++ and rank themselves as a 3/5, thinking: "There must be so many edge cases that I don't know about!". Robot HR or dumb middle managers: "Ah, they are weak. Next!"

I used to say this (when asked about my Perl skills):

"In terms of the whole world? I'm probably a 5-6 out of 10. In terms of people in finance, I'm probably a 8 out of 10."

And I put it this way to show: - I'm not a Perl guru - I also know, roughly, the spectrum of Perl skills in my industry - I'm therefore closer to the upper end for my role + industry match

In my experience, recruiters and hiring managers have barely any capability to read and comprehend a text, so I write my resume for them, with many buzzwords as possible hoping to make it to the stage to discuss the position with someone who has an opposable thumb and then discuss actual requirements for the position and how what I know can help, so yeah those matrix are useless, but there is a gate of id10ts at the entrance to any company and so we need to put them on the resume

I think it's useful for a junior engineer to display I have experience in x, y, and z, and this is how I rate my personal proficiency in each.

I wouldn't take a 9/10 to mean I am in the top 10% world wide in this skill, rather it is where I consider myself most proficient.

For more senior roles I might see it as a slight red flag to be honest.

Stack rank your skills. It’s valuable to know which you know better than others. Ranking against peers is pure folly.

Exactly. That's what i'm doing. I also rank the tech that i really do not like to work with lowest ;)

Agree with others' points that this skill meter is subjective, arbitrary and might not add much value. I created it initially more as a option to make the resume design to look more creative and appealing in design. I did called it out that it is an optional section, but yeah, agree that this section seems to require more thoughts. I create an issue to keep track of this: https://github.com/xitanggg/open-resume/issues/11

IMO it makes more sense to simply mention the most important skills inside the position description bullet points.

They are arbitrary in a way but remember that the people scanning over the resumes are not technical people, for them its important that a skill is there and thats about it. Finding a job is more about social skills than technical ones.

But why spent valuable estate on the CV by providing a made-up scale, when just putting the skill would be enough to satisfy your argument?

Because resumes aren't evaluated on maximum information density (and sometimes sparser resumes even do better).

I don't care for skill self-ratings as a concept either but these are placed in what would need to be negative space anyways. If you're committing to a skills list, removing the rating dots and stuffing more skills in their place probably wouldn't have a positive effect.

I decided that I'd track my time on any project that I work on, and put those projects into categories that I want to be represented in my CV. Whenever I generate a resume, I'll aggregate the time spent on those projects, by category. So I'll get a neat little thing that says "6 months hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails", or something similar.

Depends on details.

If somebody has experience in different areas (not just "Java and c++" but e. G. Project management and technical development), it may be useful to understand their relative ranking or focus or priority or direction.

All data is data.

If you put something on your resume I assume that you’ll be able to defend it when pressed.

At the end of the day that’s all that matters. If it is a skill you have just list it, don’t fluff it up.

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