Skill meters representation is arbitrary

[Xitang Zhao]

Documenting some feedbacks

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?

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 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.

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.