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Comment by dasmoth | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't that just encourage those who do have a range of technologies at least somewhat under their belt to tweak their skill-weights on each application to bring it closer to a presumed "perfect skill vector" for that job?

(...or is that the whole point...?)

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There is a tendency for people that are less skilled to pad their resume a bit to try and give the appearance of being more rounded and knowledgeable. This backfires for a couple reasons. The first reason is that it is fairly well-known and accepted now that people who list too much are usually trying to compensate, and are stigmatized. The second reason is that these candidates, if chosen, may be asked about the technology in an interview and will not be able to answer tech questions about the technology.

I would think that those in the know will limit the amount of technologies they list based on the job spec and their experience level. It isn't really useful to list something that you read one article about.

Also listed would be years of experience, in the first iteration. In a later one, I'd want to replace that with some way of evaluating directly a person's general skill level on a scale like this: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/gervais-macle... That would take a long time to figure out, though: how to evaluate programmers in the general case.

3 points of Machine Learning with 20+ years of experience (or 2.0 level skill) is different from 3 points from a fresh college student. The first means he's probably an expert; the second means he specialized in it while in school.

Resumes have two purposes. One is to give a list of topics one is willing to discuss in the interview. The second is to project social status (i.e. lie). So you have a mix of self-evaluations and lies on a resume. The latter don't have signal, but the former do. The reason for the 10-point allocation is that self-evaluation has a great deal of signal if a person is expected to trade off one claim against another ("i.e. I know Java but I'm really good at Python" vs. "yeah, I'm an expert in all languages").

This can never work. Resume's have only one purpose - they are marketting materials for folks looking for work. Everything else has to be considered within that frame reference.

To some extent what Michael is saying is already true, but since resumes don't have a character limit candidates aren't held to it. If you were given a finite amount of space, such as one page, what would you choose to describe? What Michael is proposing is essentially limiting what you can say. If you had an online application that said to list 3 technologies that you use, that would probably be quite different than the list of 30 you may have on your resume, and it would send a strong message about how you truly value certain skills.

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