Skill is a very delicate topic.<p>For "quantitative", assuming we're talking about STEM, I don't think many people would strongly defend any of the established measures (job interviews? performance evaluation? corporate pay scales? academic publication metrics?). I think the consensus among tech workers (maybe not their managers) is: it's all bad.<p>Now, for "objective", I would say it's also all bad, but there is bad and much much worse. In my limited experience, the larger and more experimental the field, the worse things get. Established mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists often agree on who is "strong" and who is not, in their community (they are at times all wrong). In software engineering, it's often even less clear. In astrophysics, you need to be in the right lab to do anything (maybe it is a skill?). In animal biology, you need lots of luck with your experiments (although poor ethics can sometimes help make luck happen). I'm joking here, but here's my very rough feeling: when success depends a lot on external factors, people underestimate those factors to varying degrees, adding tons of noise and bias to the consensus.