The skill bars or skill meters are completely useless because one person's 10/10 is another person's 2/10. Moreover, the more junior the engineer, the higher they score themselves in their discipline.
I am an older engineer and I would rank myself 6-7/10 in most aspects of my work, even if I have architected and built some trend-setting systems in my corner of tech. I have never seen a junior score themselves so low on average.
My experience is also that companies that care about these things (where hires are mainly filtered by HR and not SWEs) tend to build very mediocre teams. I am probably old enough to eschew the whole resume padding or prettifying thing all together. My last resume was written in Notepad, and it worked just fine for its purpose.
It also sickens me when I see a posting stating something like, "Must be an expert in these 6 disparate technologies". Like, I already hesitate to call myself an expert in my bread-and-butter, day-to-day tech stack. Now I have to over-analyze, "Do they mean expert? Is that flexible? Or am I really just that unqualified? Did the hiring manager just spend four seconds putting this together and will take whatever?"
I like this post. When you get past 10 years experience, you will have gone through phases of technology. Who is going to put "expert" for PHP 2023? Few. How about "expert" for Excel/VBA in 2023? Fewer. (Perl from mid-2000s!) Yet, 10-15 years ago these were important languages and ecosystems; today, much less.
I just saw a new hire at my company introduce themselves by email as a "senior developer" with two years experience. After reading that email, I cringed all the way under my desk...
It's a huge problem in this industry, especially for junior level people. Imposter Syndrome is real, so there's no need to throw gasoline on that particular fire. And usually they really don't need expert level experience in six different technologies or platforms, they need someone who is competent at two or possibly three of them and learning the rest on the job.
I do something like that, but use pandoc to get whatever format they ask for. It's not always nice looking, but it's seldom me who is initiating the contact (ie they already have an interest in me, and they need a resume "for the process").
Similar, I wrote mine[0] with Typst (alternative to LaTeX) and YAML. It's source is still plain text but I get a nice PDF with the beautiful typesetting reminiscent of LaTeX and an easier scripting language.
edit: The generated PDF from the template mostly works with OP's resume-parser[1]. There's just fields lacking like Certifications, Awards, and Skills which are parsed under the Projects Category.
Yeah, the problem with self-ranking is that humbleness is actively harmful. 4/5 for everything is the only safe bet -- not the best, but one notch below. You would probably have people like Howard Hinnant or Dave Abrahams come to a similar question about C++ and rank themselves as a 3/5, thinking: "There must be so many edge cases that I don't know about!". Robot HR or dumb middle managers: "Ah, they are weak. Next!"
I emphatically disagree. Unless a team is throwing out resumes that look "too good", in which case that team is purposefully picking mediocre developers, being confident does not mean you'll only be hired by places with exaggerators.
I am an older engineer and I would rank myself 6-7/10 in most aspects of my work, even if I have architected and built some trend-setting systems in my corner of tech. I have never seen a junior score themselves so low on average.
My experience is also that companies that care about these things (where hires are mainly filtered by HR and not SWEs) tend to build very mediocre teams. I am probably old enough to eschew the whole resume padding or prettifying thing all together. My last resume was written in Notepad, and it worked just fine for its purpose.