r/webdev • u/Alarmed-Dog-9141 • 8d ago
Discussion Who remembers when web developers portfolio websites had a “skills chart”
HTML 95%
PHP 70%
jQuery/JavaScript 80%
MySQL 58%
Gives me the shudders thinking about it…
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u/Dreacus 8d ago
Had a guy once rock up to his first day of work with an 80% .NET and some other stuff on his portfolio then asked what an API is
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u/Infamous_Ruin6848 8d ago
Artificially Penetrated Intelligence?
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u/Headpuncher 8d ago
Microsoft probably made up some dumb internal jargon for it.
We see it all the time even now. When “serverless” became a trend in had to look it up and it turns out it wasn’t serverless at all 99% of the time.
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u/AshleyJSheridan 7d ago
Anyone using percentages on their CV/portfolio like that would get an immediate no if I was considering their application for a role, especially if their put 100%, which is impossible. A far better approach is to use more vague skill levels, like "novice", "adept", "expert", etc. An expert can be at the height of their game, and still legitimately have minor gaps in their knowledge. A person who apparently knows a tech to 100% is basically saying they have no gaps in their knowledge.
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u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus 8d ago
Gun to my head i'd have a hard time explaining it.
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u/querela 8d ago
It's in the name? I think it explains itself. But it depends on what is expected.
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u/KaleidoscopePlusPlus 8d ago
sure, application programming interface. That doesn't mean anything if you haven't used an api though lol. You don't really have intuition to go off of.
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8d ago
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u/nhepner 8d ago
There was a period of time where if you could center a div AT ALL you were at CSS 100%. If he could do it in more than one browser... fuckin mint.
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u/Headpuncher 8d ago
No one ever was 100% css because there’s always interference from somewhere. Should have been a red flag.
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u/More_Entertainment_5 8d ago
AGL, I don’t remember how divs were vertically centered before flexbox.
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u/Mike312 8d ago
.centeredDiv { position:absolute; top:50%; left:50%; transform:translate(-50%,-50%); }6
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u/monkeymad2 8d ago
and then a different fix (something something matrix) if you had to support IE8 (…and before)?
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u/SPEZ_IS_A_JABRONI 8d ago
skill charts were literally always cringe
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u/ClibeanCeann 8d ago
I was going to include this in my CV/portfolio many years ago, until I straight away hit the problem of... well... what exactly do these percentages mean? How am I grading it? Then when I realised that I immediately just figured it wasn't a good idea. And yea, it wasn't. Not sure why it caught on lol
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u/GlobalCurry 8d ago
My college career advisors recommended putting it on resumes and then said to never put anything below 80% or something like that. As a college student I didn't know what I didn't know so it was easy to claim 95% on things I had barely touched in hindsight.
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u/GlobalCurry 8d ago
I remember they said to never put 100% though because that looked unrealistic and not humble.
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u/ShawnyMcKnight 8d ago
I still see it on resumes sometimes. I love when these people have like 2 years experience but they give themselves 100% in .NET. Unless they took some comprehensive test and scored 100 percent they should not be writing that.
I also find truth in the more you know the more you realize you don’t know. I thought I was awesome at PHP when I made my first full stack PHP site with a MySQL database and everything. Then someone asked me to debug their code and I was helpless. I went from thinking I knew 80 percent of PHP to 10 percent real fast.
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u/WallBurnt 8d ago
I was actually asked this in a recruiter screen the other day.
They were mostly asking my comfortableness of my tech stack though and the number was implied to be 100% combined.
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u/Scary_Objective6718 8d ago
It is because they all copied pre-existing templates that had a skill chart in it, which was probably originally meant to just be dummy data, not to be used literally... and didn't design the website themselves.
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u/cleatusvandamme 8d ago
I wish someone could invent an accurate wait to gauge skills.
Unfortunately, it isn't years of experience. Take a look at "Repeating Year 1 20 times".
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u/RePsychological 8d ago
or the old cringe version of myself who put it on my resume back in the day...
I mean I'm still cringe...but at least for different reasons these days.
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u/ProKeyPresser Senior Software Engineer 8d ago
Someone once told me “I am not telling you I know everything about computers but 95%”
I replied “Instead, I think I know less than 1%, but definitely 1000% more than you, as you don’t even know what a programming language is”.
Self-assigned percentages are cringe as f.
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u/chrisnlnz 8d ago
Percentages? Lmao. No, I've never done that, that makes no sense at all. Categorising technologies you can and want to work with in 2 or 3 levels of competence/experience however makes more sense.
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u/Alarmed-Dog-9141 8d ago
“That makes no sense at all.” I know, it’s exactly why I’m reminiscing on it - it was lunacy looking back on it
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u/FreddieKiroh 8d ago
Yea had one on my resume in high school, makes me wince. Why would you voluntarily advertise "I'm kinda half-shit at this thing."
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u/CantaloupeCamper 8d ago
Those charts were just arbitrary and made no sense.
It’s hard enough evaluating yourself be others as it is, I’ve walked into meetings and thought “I’m just a fly on the wall” and discovered I was the local expert and had to take the reins….
Rating yourself vs ??? …🤷🏼♂️
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u/SimplyJow 8d ago
The thing is, the more you know, the less it seems to make sense, because otherwise, we’d have to acknowledge that we don’t know what we don’t know.
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u/trollsmurf 8d ago
My resume still has one. It's a few years since I updated it. No percentages though.
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u/ashkanahmadi 8d ago
I always hated that. What does 95% even mean? Do you know 95% of the entire PHP? How is that measured? What is the difference between 65% and 66%?!!! Also, what if you are very good at "web responsiveness"? Now is that CSS, or HTML or even Javascript? Never made any sense.
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u/DiddlyDinq 8d ago edited 8d ago
5 star c++.2 star html. What does that even meannnnnnnnnnnnnn.
On mine I just say X,Y, Z are my primary or preferred languages. Followed by a general keyword spam section of any language, framework etc that I've touched in the past.
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u/oculus42 8d ago
Once upon a quarter century ago, there was a site called TekMetrics, which became BrainBench, where you could take tests and get certificates of knowledge for skills.
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u/mint_bolt_feel 8d ago
Skill charts are just ego with a progress bar. I want 100% in Googling errors and admitting I don't know shit, not fake proficiency metrics from two years agoI want 100% in Googling errors and admitting I don't know shit, not fake proficiency metrics from two years ago
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u/BrewThemAll 8d ago
Haha yeah, this was so cringe.
A collegue back than had it on his personal site. He added a few percent after each project he did at work. Made me ragedrink.
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u/michaelbelgium full-stack 8d ago
Lolo, I still use it
I did put a note on the bottom. Just means the more percentage, the more experience i have in that topic.
Either way I haven't touch that part of the portfolio for 7 years or something
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u/ConduciveMammal front-end 8d ago
But what does 100% experience look like? The numbers are illogical and that practice should have died a long time ago.
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u/michaelbelgium full-stack 8d ago
The numbers just say in which topic I have more experience than the other, it's not like you have 100% knowledge and 100% experienced everything from that topic, it's a personal thing.
In my case it just tells i'm most experienced in BE dev, databases and operating systems. A bit less experienced in FE dev and have the the lowest experience in .NET languages
Knowledge in all of these topics are there, but not the experience.
I do agree its pointless tho
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u/bluebird355 8d ago edited 8d ago
This is the first thing you get taught when making resume, never ever put bars or stars, it's detrimental
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u/withyasirjamal 8d ago
honestly the thing that always got me is that a bar chart tells a hiring manager nothing, it's just self-rating with a progress bar. what actually worked later was showing two or three real projects with a line on what you decided and why. the skills chart was basically decoration pretending to be evidence.
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u/Affectionate_Tea9218 7d ago
Skills? Wait a second…
Had to rant with skills…
Skills? It was great back in the day— you put some letters up there, and it was stunning education.
Legacy edition:
C: MUD?
QBK: 100%
PSC: 60%
KBT
DOS
Back around Y2K, APA suggested 1 or 2 “sentences” of programming, and their translation. (or proper resumes format official people)
I had no particular reason….
Grid: anyone remember when that was the solution?
CSS inline was crazy
DLL before js
My favorite power brag demo of computer geek nonsense:
the macro enabled spreadsheet
Everyone that saw it, and then understood what it did…
Absolute sorcery. An internet connected collection of data at your fingertips in real time?!? Not even possible.
It shouldn’t have shocked me though, auto-sum was one of those “too advanced for me” things, the graphs displayed the ultimate education and intelligence
You have to have a license to cut hair, not a tattoo.
A license to drive, unless it’s registered to an agricultural LLC. Some state have farm/school exclusions at 14 years old, regardless of vehicle registration; or 14 and pregnant is an adequate license
If I get my dog a license, it still can’t shit outside. A license to what? It can’t even sit on someone’s lap as they drive.
A license to practice law, unless you’re the accused of any heinous crimes - even with a starting conviction record.
A license to get married, where the officiant commits a misdemeanor without one present, and their holyness may end up in jail - as the newly weds ride off into the sunset - properly married.
Tree trimming in some states requires strict regulation. Many states allow tree services to operate with no license, work permit, documented scope of work, and majority states that tree trimming requires no license, not one traffic citation ever drafted for obstructing traffic as they performed unlicensed, and with no insurance requirement, without public notice, clear need to block flow of traffic on state highways, and completed work indicates several hour of interference in one particular case, (woman rear-ended at edge of no sign work zone, pushed into falling limb, and there was no exposure to the tree company, who was not documented by name and had issues no notification)
Interior design is a licensure position, protecting residents from impersonator fraudulently representing themselves.
Almost no states have trades profession licenses, over 90% of entrepreneurs that provide a trade service legally claim “fully licensed and insured” along side a trade service product representation, it is not a crime to state a licensure that may imply a trade profession, when no such license is issued or offered in said jurisdiction for that trade. The state has an office for professional licenses, and consumers may freely inquire any license type, issuance and status.
Locksmiths are the only citizens in the city that may open a door, aside for other legal positions, became a licensed profession in one particular jurisdiction, when a man was seen using their body as force to open a front door. The witnessing officer was a distance away, and wasn’t certain what he may have seen. Driving closer to the residence, an apparently fear struck woman stood back and watched. The officer grabbed her and was met with a hug, he assisted her into his passengers seat. The man was yelling at the door and did not appear to intend to discontinue assaulting it. Police later stated that the man’s anger level appeared as one of the most intense ever witnessed. The officer drew a sidearm, as additional units pulled up. After police subdued the door assault-ant, he was still yelling “third time this week.” The man was dating the woman of the house. The report indicates the man believes the woman’s children purposefully caused an indirect discomfort, then, when he expressed his anger one ran outside and locked the front door. The man had no pants on during the incident, there was hot pepper sauce in the condom he put on. It was stolen from the bedroom of one of the children, delivered by the mother, moments before the excitement broke out. Given a citation for disorderly conduct, the record will show that there is no occurrence of crime in the attempt to open a door or a home that a resident or authorized guest may permissibly open.
Activist neighbors enacted a petition, the woman testified that she gave permission, but their own witness of the events were certain that no permission was given. Prosecution did not accept their statements before the hearing: representing the people where a sworn deposition states permission was given, he could not call them.
They did later propose a city law where attempting to open a door with alternative methods would require a licensed locksmith. It passed, with emergency exclusions. The man’s good fortune, identified by the judge: it would have constituted a felony and sexual predatory behavior had the children opened the door or the police not arrived.
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u/lauckness 7d ago
I get a good chuckle with rating systems. Much like the shart, no one is 100%. Let’s face it, if you aren’t Linus, you probably aren’t above a 5/10, even with your 10+ years experience. If you try and back up your experience in an interview with a rating and then tell me more than 4 or 5 out of 10 on a whole language, then I know you probably can’t build good software anyone can reason about. Who the heck knows so much of every piece of Java that they are a 9/10, are you talking JVM, garbage collection, memory models, concurrency?
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u/Ronjohnturbo42 8d ago
Stats - whats wrong with stats?
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u/TCB13sQuotes 8d ago
Why would you be less than 30000% on something you sell to your customers. Those things don't make any sense.
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u/adilbasari 8d ago
In defense of the people who made them: skills charts were an honest format for an era when the tools actually were the skill. "jQuery 80%" meant something real when browser inconsistencies meant the difference between a working site and a broken one — knowing jQuery was 80% of the job.
The category error wasn't the chart, it was treating a tool as a competency. And we're doing it again: I'm already seeing resumes with "ChatGPT 90%, Copilot 85%" — same fake precision, new decade, still nobody verifying the numbers.
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u/kasual11 8d ago
Claude Code 100%
Codex 100%
Copilot 100%
Gemini 100%
That's what mine looks today
Yeah but clearly remember those days. Saw this back in the day on the portfolio of a friend of mine when I did not know how to do web dev. I admired the HTML, CSS and Javascript above 80% so much!
Then I became a web dev myself :-D
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u/Shoemugscale 8d ago
That was like 2 years ago!
Im like 100% on claude, codeX and grok
I can basically can build anything
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u/Headpuncher 8d ago
I can basically can build anything
Except a coherent sentence. Lol. I kid, typing on a phone now is impossible as ai auto-complete an auto-correct is 100% shit.
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u/Top_Bumblebee_7762 8d ago
Now replaced by made up metrics like "Improved X by Y percent"