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Comment by oldsklgdfth | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the skills section on his webpage: http://www.cirosantilli.com/skills/

This seems like the most honest self-assessment I have seen of one's skills.

I literally wrote a book on Meteor.js and still have to check the manual for stuff all the time. The fact that engineering interviews are essentially roast sessions / pop quizzes is insane.

I interviewed with Snapchat a few years ago and was asked to write a Sudoku solver. Some context: I had never played Sudoku in my life, lol. I came up with a naive (unoptimized, unrefined) solution and didn't get past their third round.

That was copied from failed Google interview BTW :-)

To me the main problem is that I'm always afraid to put a 5, who can not check manuals? ;-)

I'm also more and more of the opinion that (impact of projects) is more important than (current skills).

I find this interesting because grade inflation is real. There are so many straight A students that it loses it's value as a measure. But if you can do something without looking it up I would agree that is proficient.

A good team member is a larger force multiplier than a single rockstar.

I have found inverting this kind of question helps.

Rate your interest in the following:

Item A Item B

People tend to express high interest where they want to grow, or have need.

> To me the main problem is that I'm always afraid to put a 5, who can not check manuals? ;-)

Quite often I find that the greater skills lies in knowing when and how to check manuals rather than expecting to be a knowledge machine.

> I'm always afraid to put a 5

I realized one day why I behave in ways like this. It's from working in a clear-cut environment that I treat normal communication literally. Someone once commented that I 'never lie' which I understood was much more true than false but ultimately still false.

Wow, that is how I've wanted to answer the "on a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your XYZ skills".

I really wish more people had some benchmark for the numbers they throw out there.

Similarly, if I see more than one or two 9-10 on self-assessed skills, I feel that's an invitation to "sock it to me" on knowledge questions when interviewing someone. When people are 4-6 I'm a lot more reasonable.

> When I tell to managers that I’m good at documenting, they always say: great, we need better documentation! But then, one of the following may happen:

I relate so much it hurts. The industry at large seems unable to see the lost opportunity of significant investment in technical documentation.

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