On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Michael Snoyman
Algorithmic Problem Solving
I think this needs to go, because I'm really having a hard time imagining any programmer who doesn't do this.
High Assurance Software Development
This sounds vague to me and/or the same as other skills (cf. Formal Verification). Again, I'm not sure how many people would describe their software as "low assurance".
Robotics and Automation
Would be tempted to drop "Automation" from here.
Web development (HTML, CSS and Javascript)
I wonder if these parentheses are necessary, or if they hint at the fact that this isn't really one skill. I have a suspicion that being competent at website and stylesheet *design* (i.e. knowledge of good design principles and application to HTML/CSS) is an entirely different sort of thing from *implementation* in terms of JavaScript technologies like AJAX and JSON and who-knows-what. Overall, I think it would be nice to have a consistent idea about how concrete or abstract we allow skills to be, and as someone else mentioned what the target audience is for them. We have skills that relate to specific libraries and then skills that are nebulous and abstract. Maybe we could ask a narrower question, or have two fields: "what can you use", and "what interests you".