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Ask HN: What's the best way to describe your development skill set on a resume?

4 pointsby wtpiuover 11 years ago
ex: &quot;Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ember.js, mongoDB, Rails, ...&quot;<p>Instead of having a plain list like the above, how do you list your skill set &#x2F; differentiate your understanding &amp; experience with them?<p>I&#x27;ve been using the above setup for awhile, but I have a couple of problems with it:<p>1) The list can get long, and potentially lose its value. Does ordering matter?<p>2) What do I include? What shouldn&#x27;t I include? At what level of understanding, does a specific skill warrant inclusion?<p>3) I&#x27;d like to differentiate my exposure to each (ex, I&#x27;d consider my Rails a 7&#x2F;10, but my JavaScript a 6&#x2F;10), potentially ranking by understanding or months&#x2F;years.<p>4) What about languages &#x2F; frameworks that I have used in side projects and&#x2F;or am just picking up? I&#x27;d like to include them because it shows that I&#x27;m interested in picking up new stuff, but their inclusion with what I would consider my core skill set might backfire if it is assumed those skills are all equally developed.<p>feedback from devs or hr people would be amazing.

1 comment

dansoover 11 years ago
I&#x27;m assuming you&#x27;re talking about a PDF-style resume, right? If you&#x27;re talking about building a web-based resume, then the list should point to concrete things that you&#x27;ve built, and where possible, links to Github -- even to actual files. I&#x27;m not saying this as an expert in recruiting, just saying that <i>show, don&#x27;t tell</i> applies to resumes as it does to any other form of salesmenship...and web devs have a very special advantage in this area and should exploit it to the full.<p>But PDF resumes are often necessary for corporate jobs that have a defined process...either a literal one-pager PDF, or something that is basically arranged like one (i.e. you fill out an online form with text fields)...Looking at my Word.doc resume, which I haven&#x27;t touched in a year...here&#x27;s what I wrote under the subhead of &quot;Programming&quot;<p>&gt; <i>Programming: Proficient in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Javascript, ActionScript (Flash), and relational databases (MySQL)</i><p>Uh, OK, that&#x27;s obviously not <i>great</i>, but I was applying for a general-purpose type of job in which the resume-reader was <i>not</i> a tech person.<p>However, the &quot;show-don&#x27;t-tell&quot; parts of the resume were written like this...I don&#x27;t talk about years of experience, or even how much time I spent on a project...I like to focus on what was actually deployed (and what reaction I got, if any)...in the example below, it should be obvious that my back-end work was more involved than the front-end part, because I don&#x27;t have much to say other than &quot;I used jQuery&quot;...<p>--<p><i>SOPA Opera (<a href="http://projects.propublica.org/sopa" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;projects.propublica.org&#x2F;sopa</a>): This was a Ruby on Rails 3.x site I built to serve as an clearinghouse of information on the proposed &quot;Stop Online Piracy Act&quot; legislation, with landing pages for every state and every Congressmember.</i><p><i>I wrote Ruby scripts to gather and process legislative data from numerous sources, including Congress.gov, campaign finance data from OpenSecrets, and the New York Times&#x27; Congress API and designed the site architecture so that I could singlehandedly administer it using Google Spreadsheets, while using MySQL as the database.</i><p><i>I also did virtually all of the front-end coding and design, including the use of jQuery plugins to allow users to interactively sort and filter the data.</i><p><i>I initially launched the site as a side project, deploying it as a flat-file site on Amazon S3, where through word-of-mouth alone, it received about 150,000 page views (and emails from Congressional staff) in its first week. When we re-launched it from ProPublica, it received as many as a million pageviews in a single day. The Google Spreadsheets-backed CMS allowed me to easily update legislators&#x27; positions on SOPA from the hundreds of constituents who emailed and called me.</i><p>---<p>(This was on the supplementary section of the resume...so for a situation in which you have to compress onto one page, obviously, bullet-point the most important and most concrete sentences)