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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

Thanks. As a student I'm aware that perfectly mastering a skill is difficult. I put the progress bars because I thought it would be pretentious to just mention a language or a framework and pretend that I master it fully.

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This thread has made me think about it again. I think the best way is to somehow give context either inline or throughout the resume, because there isn't a standard. That said, I looked around and came up with a scale for languages this morning.

Expert: Participates in the development and direction of the language or major frameworks, or extremely deep knowledge of some uncommon area of the language's semantics/runtime. Substantial experience developing sophisticated tools/products in that language. Why are you even writing a resume?

Strong: Knowledge that goes beyond what one would expect of a "standard" X programmer.

Proficient: Experience doing professional work on a project in a language without needing to come back up to speed.

Moderate: Able to do real work in a language, but limited depth, or a bit rusty.

Introductory: Still learning. Can write code in the language, but nothing significant.

Self evaluation:

I'm either strong or proficient in Java (I know things about the runtime, compiler optimizations, bytecodes, that aren't everyday knowledge for a typical enterprise Java programmer, but there's so many things I don't know).

I'm proficient at Javascript--did two years of professional work at it in my current company, but nothing special.

I'm either moderate or proficient in Python. I reach for it as a scripting language, but my web development experiments were a few years ago, and I'd be starting from scratch.

I'm moderate at shell scripting.

I'm introductory in Haskell, C, Elisp and AWK.

I wouldn't list my experiments with J, Scheme, Ruby, Rust or PHP at this point.

I confess that I don't know how a resume reader would react to that. It's just the terms that I think in.

To be fair I'm very skeptical when I look at those graphs. "80%" progress would suggest me that you're extremely fluent not only in language (as in syntax), but you also have deeper understanding of how it works under the hood (so at least familiarity with the specification + being able to use that knowledge in practice), and probably familiarity with some most popular frameworks/libraries. And I just find it hard to believe (not saying I'm right) you have that much skill in 2 languages (which would take quite some time of actually working as a dev, I think), and not much less in another 4 (~70%). That's a lot. I'd much rather see language + brief overview of skills (frameworks, is it mostly knowing of syntax or you have actually built some larger scale projects with it)

Also, how does one average their level of knowledge against things they don't know? If you asked me how good I was at C# 3 years ago, I probably would have said 75%. Three years later, I would say 65%.

I'm significantly better at C# now than I was 3 years ago, but I'm also more aware of the things I don't understand. I also recently saw a Jon Skeet talk and it ruined my level of self-worth.

Yes this is a subjective guess at best. But I try to remain close to the grades I got in engineering school.

As I've said in the other comments, I never thought that this would be an issue. I think your proposed solution might be the closest to the answer.

Thanks for your time and feedback

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