Comment by michaelrpeskin

Yes! I came here to say this.

It's like saying my skills in "English" are equivalent to Maya Angelou's skills in "English"

Skills are things can do regardless of the technology/language. My skills are in computational math. I could write you a good algorithm in JavaScript with maybe a day or two of ramp-up/review of the nuances of the language. I could not (quickly) write a (good) web application in the same language.

I can deploy complex distributed computational code using EC2, I cannot even begin to understand the IAM. Do I have "Skills" in AWS?

It's such a pain when I'm reviewing resumes. I don't care about the language, I care about what you can do, and that's so hard with the checkbox system we've devolved into.

Much of my career has been based around low-level C and bit-twiddling optimizations for micro optimizations of math for speed and floating point accuracy. My current job is at a Java shop. When interviewing for that work, I hadn't touched Java since CS101 in college. I was lucky that I was interviewing at a small company that didn't have recruiters, but had me talk directly to the team and they could understand that the skill was "Math" not "Java". I still can't understand how Gradle or the rest of the Java build system we uses works, so it's good we have someone with "Skills" in DevOps to do that.

I hope the industry recognizes this soon - I think you're right, it's probably the biggest impediment to finding good candidates.