"Average" skills in a resume
Posted: Mon, 5 December 2005 | permalink | No comments
Just reading another painfully funny The Daily WTF[1] entry. Instead of a code snippet, this was a resume snippet instead. Apart from listing skills in such heavyweight corporate tools as Emule, Kazza, Paint, WordPad, Acrobat Reader, and Winzip, the candidate also listed "Average" knowledge in a very, very wide variety of skills.
The important question is, over what collection of the population is this average taken? Considering the usual demonstration of these "Average" skills, I think that the average is taken over the entire mammalian population, including all of those dolphins who (thankfully) have never even heard of "Micro Soft Visuals: Basics", and that dog at puppy training this morning that spent most of the time licking it's own genitals.
Self assessments are always bollocks. Nobody's seriously going to rate themselves "half-assed" at every programming language they know. I've seen one interesting way to describe your language proficiency, though -- group languages into "used in the last 6 months", "1 year", "3 years", and "dim, dark distant past". It gives a reasonable idea of what languages you might be useful in, either through current knowledge, a past knowledge that can be polished, or perhaps knowing a language similar to the one that the company needs skills in that you can be cross-trained into.
1. A site dedicated to archiving, for posterity, the worst of the code that controls the world. Scary and hilarious all at once.
Post a comment
All comments are held for moderation; markdown formatting accepted.