>> resume building Exactly. Every developer is always running a build-resume thread in his mind at the background, which drives choices many a times. But why

>> resume building Exactly. Every developer is always running a build-resume thread in his mind at the background, which drives choices many a times. But why does it happen? May be, there's no way for the developer to claim the value driven, and thus these skills end up being the proxy to be showcased! If a developer's resume mentioned "got a 40% reduction in total operating cost of the supply-management-pipeline by enabling automated operations and reduced errors by 20% over a year, and helped drive sales up by about 30% over two years", this would NEVER get picked up by a recruiter - who would just be skimming the resumes for specific keywords. Worse, it could be an automated tool scanning the resume. Also, in the general scheme of things, developers are kept off the real value outcomes for a reason - to prevent them from understanding their true value. Cause, it is good for business! :P All of these combine to cause developers from not understanding the quantum of value being driven by their efforts, and thus to compensate for the lack of this important info - and to compensate for the shortcomings of the industry standard "job-description" templates that bother only about skills-and-number-of-years (as opposed to value-outcomes-driven-over-unit-time) make it harder for developers to really understand (and then showcase these in their resumes). Also, an old classic on these lines - http://www.bruceblinn.com/parable.html http://www.bruceblinn.com/parable.html - The parable of two programmers. "I don't want to seem like a hack, so I'll do enterprisey things, so that nobody can call me a dumb guy" is another thing running in the background.