Obviously this is nothing to brag about, and I’m here just to share some random thoughts.
LinkedIn Skill Assessments are quite straight-forward. You have up to 90 seconds to answer a question about a skill, and you’ll be evaluated after answering 15 questions. Time out on a question is the same as getting a wrong answer.
In general, you are expected to pass if you have related hands-on experience. However, it is important to know that whether you pass or not depends on other people who take the same test. Top 30% will pass and others will fail, which means no matter how easy the assessments are, they are not totally effortless. Honestly I don’t think it provides much value though, and I did some today just for fun.
Programming
Android
I’m falling a bit behind in terms of Android, as my most recent experience was exploring Google’s MVVM framework in 2017-2018, and Kotlin is not included in this assessment. However, I do have 4 years Android experience, and I can pick up the recent technology like Jetpack Compose pretty quick if needed.
C Language
I haven’t been using pure C for a long time, but since Objective-C is a superset of C, it’s still part of me. However, I think it’s hard to apply a lot of software development principles with what C offers nowadays. It will be interesting if I would work on an embedded system and architect design patterns use pure C.
OOP
Textbook OOP assessment is a bit outdated by today’s standard, but it still has to be there as the foundation of the more modem approaches. I highly promote composition over inheritance in real life projects, which is also more common in front-end Swift codes, but the traditional OOP is still seen a lot in some cross-platform frameworks like Realm, or back-end frameworks.
Objective-C
I spent around 10 years in Objective-C on and off. I have to admit that I haven’t used much “recent” features like nullability (not that recent, of course), but they are not assessed anyway. It would be interesting to use objc to construct modem applications and frameworks (it was reported Apple is doing a lot even today), but I don’t expect to see this happens in most apps.
PHP
The PHP assessment contains both the language itself and some web stuff. I used PHP mainly for back-end APIs, but the web parts are kind of common sense and are easy to guess.
Swift
Swift is my “main” language now, and I passed this several months ago. It’s worth to mention that starting from Swift 5, a lot of new language features and frameworks are introduced, and if you are just working on delivering features during your work, you are likely to miss a lot. Spending time to catch up each dot release is as important as finishing your daily job.
For example, Apple is prompting boxed type all the way from Swift 5 to Swift 6. Understanding the difference between some and any and getting prepared will benefit your project in the long run.
Tools
Recommended by LinkedIn
Bash
I use shell everyday (ZSH instead of Bash of course), so while I’m not an IT admin, I still know a lot about things like setting up a server etc. GPT technology helps a lot to solve specific problems nowadays, but it’s still good to have some overall high level concepts about shell environment.
Git
Again, I use git everyday, can’t claim I’m an expert, but it’s still good to get the skill assessed. To be frank, for things like Shell, Git, or VIM, we developers probably only use less than 10% of the whole scope. But as long as we have the right concept, this should be enough to cover our daily uses.
Technology
Linux
Linux assessment is about the system admin part like LVM. Not a lot of implementation details of Linux itself, you can pass this one as a normal Linux user.
REST APIs
Textbook REST API questions don’t provide much value, and you should be able to pass it no matter you are on the front-end or the back-end. But as front-end developers, we all know that the back-end guys sometimes just do whatever they want and we have to comply. I tried to not do it when I was design back-end architecture, and it’s not really that hard to follow the best practice. But I understand that there are usually a lot of tech debts in real life so it’s not as easy as I said.
Soft skills
Agile methodologies
I believe most people have more or less agile experiences nowadays. I believe agile shouldn’t be something that the scrum masters talk about; it makes it’s possible for everyone to participate project management at some degree. And by understand more textbook agile concepts and approaches, it helps you tweak it for your own team based on the very nature of your business.
Cybersecurity
I only have a little bit hands-on experience as a hacker, but I still found that most tech leads are just reciting some textbooks when they talk about cybersecurity. For example, you can obfuscate your code with commercial solutions all you like, but in the end of the day, things like API access keys of your app will be there in the sniffer, with the help of tools like Frida. I’m not saying it’s worthless to obfuscate your code, but at least you need to understand what it’s for, and hope much value it provides in real life.
Having this being said, it’s still good to know the textbook answers in regards of cybersecurity, and expand it with field experience as needed.
IT operations
It’s like the Linux assessment, but more on the Windows side. I haven’t heavily used or developed on Windows for 15 years, but a lot of things are pretty much common sense, and a lot of developers should have enough knowledge to work on IT operations anyway.
Conclusion
These assessments won’t do much, but I may end up doing more of them if I still can’t find a #job… This article may be updated anytime.
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