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

4 points by wtpiu 12 years ago | 1 comment

ex: "Skills: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, ember.js, mongoDB, Rails, ..."

Instead of having a plain list like the above, how do you list your skill set / differentiate your understanding & experience with them?

I've been using the above setup for awhile, but I have a couple of problems with it:

1) The list can get long, and potentially lose its value. Does ordering matter?

2) What do I include? What shouldn't I include? At what level of understanding, does a specific skill warrant inclusion?

3) I'd like to differentiate my exposure to each (ex, I'd consider my Rails a 7/10, but my JavaScript a 6/10), potentially ranking by understanding or months/years.

4) What about languages / frameworks that I have used in side projects and/or am just picking up? I'd like to include them because it shows that I'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.

feedback from devs or hr people would be amazing.

danso 12 years ago |

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): 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.

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(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)