

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

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.
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danso
I'm assuming you're talking about a PDF-style resume, right? If you're talking
about building a web-based resume, then the list should point to concrete
things that you've built, and where possible, links to Github -- even to
actual files. I'm not saying this as an expert in recruiting, just saying that
_show, don 't tell_ 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.

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't touched in a
year...here's what I wrote under the subhead of "Programming"

> _Programming: Proficient in Ruby on Rails, PHP, Javascript, ActionScript
> (Flash), and relational databases (MySQL)_

Uh, OK, that's obviously not _great_ , but I was applying for a general-
purpose type of job in which the resume-reader was _not_ a tech person.

However, the "show-don't-tell" parts of the resume were written like this...I
don'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't have much to
say other than "I used jQuery"...

\--

 _SOPA Opera
([http://projects.propublica.org/sopa](http://projects.propublica.org/sopa)):
This was a Ruby on Rails 3.x site I built to serve as an clearinghouse of
information on the proposed "Stop Online Piracy Act" legislation, with landing
pages for every state and every Congressmember._

 _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 ' Congress API and designed the site architecture so that I
could singlehandedly administer it using Google Spreadsheets, while using
MySQL as the database._

 _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 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 ' positions on SOPA from the hundreds of
constituents who emailed and called me._

\---

(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)

