Your technical skills are brown.

My technical skills look like sh**.

What?

Welcome to my click-bait message of the day!

Now let me explain.

I recently watched a charming YouTube video, filled with dry humor and dad jokes (so exactly my kind of thing) about the color of sh**. Did you know that brown doesn’t exist, as a color? That’s not very interesting, at least from the perspective of RGB color science. There are only three “real” colors, right? Everything else is a composite.

Purple? Red + Blue.

Orange? Yellow + Red.

Yellow? Red + Green. (Yeah, this one is weird. It contradicts everything we learned about mixing paints in kindergarten. 🤷‍♂️)

Brown? uh…

The funny thing about brown is that it’s a color that doesn’t really exist. It literally depends on how you see things.

To prove this, the video shows you an amibiguously colored square on a black screen. If you follow the instructions properly and watch the video in a dark room, the square appears orange. Then the background fades from black to white, the colored square suddenly appears to be brown, even though the square itself didn’t change.

So it is with all of the technical skills we put on our résumés and LinkedIn profiles.

The optics of these skills depends entirely on context. Unless you’re truly the best C# developer in all the galaxy, or maybe you invented the newest frontend framework from the shower on your iPhone, your skills rarely shine on their own.

But as soon as you put them in context of business-related accomplishments, like increased sales, improved reliability, and better customer satisfaction, these otherwise sh**-like skills begin to glow… orange? Okay, I guess that’s where this analogy falls apart. Time to end for today.