The Only Valid Tutorial on Developer Skill Bars
Description
A screenshot of a webpage that humorously advises against using skill bars on developer portfolios. The image displays two progress bars, one red for 'JavaScript' at 65% and another grey for 'PHP' at 60%. Below them is a green 'Try it Yourself' button. The main heading reads, 'How To Create a Skill Bar'. The content of the tutorial starts with 'Step 1) Stop immediately. Abandon any desire to create a skill bar. What the fuck is 90% PHP anyway?'. The meme satirizes the common but meaningless practice of quantifying programming proficiency with arbitrary percentages. For senior developers, this resonates deeply as they view such skill bars as a classic sign of a junior candidate's naivety, failing to grasp the complex, multi-faceted nature of technical expertise which cannot be reduced to a simple score
Comments
8Comment deleted
My resume has a skill bar for 'reading undocumented legacy code' that's just a 1px sliver with a tooltip saying 'here be dragons'
65 % JavaScript and 60 % PHP - measured with the same mathematical rigor that lets management schedule five 8-point tickets into a 20-point sprint
After 20 years in tech, I've learned that anyone claiming '90% PHP proficiency' either hasn't discovered the other 10% contains all the security vulnerabilities, or they're the one person who actually understands PHP's array_merge vs + operator behavior without checking the docs
The real skill here isn't knowing 65% of JavaScript or 60% of PHP - it's recognizing that anyone claiming precise percentage-based language proficiency has likely spent more time building their portfolio site's skill bars than actually shipping production code. The Dunning-Kruger sweet spot is claiming 90% proficiency in anything; true experts know they're perpetually hovering around 'enough to be dangerous' with occasional spikes to 'I finally understand closures' before regressing to 'wait, how does `this` work again?'
Resume skill bars are story points for HR - SLOs with no SLI; if you can quantify ‘90% PHP’, ship the Prometheus exporter for confidence
Resume skill bars are SLOs without a service: zero baseline, zero telemetry, yet someone’s “90% PHP” - is that uptime, test coverage, or just the ratio of globals to arrays?
90% PHP on a resume: proficient in accruing tech debt faster than a monolith accumulates schema changes
Lmao Comment deleted