What most people seem to do with these scales is pick the language that they are most comfortable with and say that they are an 8 or 9 in that and then arrange everything else on the scale relative to that.
The problem with this is that your overall numbers are likely to go down over time.
If you are a college freshman who spent a weekend learning JS then you can now probably do most of everything you can do in your main language (say Java). That means that you put down "5" for JS.
Once you've got a few years under your belt, your knowledge in any new language has a much higher standard to meet.
I filled in a questionnaire for a job once that has vague questions such as "Rate your skills in TCP/IP , Novice/Intermediate/Advanced".
I had no idea what the scale was here, did advanced mean being able to write a TCP/IP stack from scratch, identify bottlenecks in huge networks or what?
I was trying to decide whether to tick novice or intermediate however it turned out that "advanced" actually meant being able to run traceroute from command prompt and set A records in DNS.
I remember the advice a friend of mine gave me, he said "Just put 10 for everything, you'll get an interview"
I just put that I had worked with TCP/IP on a resume once, and they asked me what fields were in a TCP header. I was able to reconstruct all but one from first principles, since I didn't actually remember them all.
If I'd put "10" in TCP/IP for that company, I would have been slammed in the interview. As it was I passed. Apparently no one ever remembers the CRC byte in the TCP header. :)
People who have to worry about checksum offloading for high performance know this :) ... This is a feature of high end network cards.
(although, in fairness, I'd only require that level of knowledge at the tip of tongue if someone was going to be a network stack developer or high level sysadmin/network admin -- for a regular web developer, just knowing that there are tcp headers and flags which can be set, and which might get mangled by devices between client and server, is enough.
It's CRC at the level below TCP (well, 2 layers below: ethernet)
The problem with this is that your overall numbers are likely to go down over time.
If you are a college freshman who spent a weekend learning JS then you can now probably do most of everything you can do in your main language (say Java). That means that you put down "5" for JS.
Once you've got a few years under your belt, your knowledge in any new language has a much higher standard to meet.
I filled in a questionnaire for a job once that has vague questions such as "Rate your skills in TCP/IP , Novice/Intermediate/Advanced".
I had no idea what the scale was here, did advanced mean being able to write a TCP/IP stack from scratch, identify bottlenecks in huge networks or what?
I was trying to decide whether to tick novice or intermediate however it turned out that "advanced" actually meant being able to run traceroute from command prompt and set A records in DNS.
I remember the advice a friend of mine gave me, he said "Just put 10 for everything, you'll get an interview"