Spiky Skills
The safest resume is the worst one. It’s full of soft words and smooth edges. It looks like everyone else’s. It slides across the desk, leaving no scratch.
People try to be “well-rounded” because it feels professional. But round surfaces don’t hook onto anything. Opportunities pass by, and you don’t catch. What you want is a shape that sticks. Spiky.
A spike is a “conspicuous pocket of excellence.” Not “experienced with,” but “known for.” It has evidence attached to it. A demo, a number, a repo, a talk, a feature that shipped and moved a metric. If you removed your name from the page, someone who knows the field should still be able to tell which item is yours.
The usual advice says to be T-shaped: breadth plus one deep vertical. That’s better than round. But one spike is fragile. You don’t control the context where your career will inflect. You don’t know which problem, team, or timing will matter. So you want several spikes—independent, sharp peaks that multiply one another. A small hedgehog of ability.
The best part is how spikes interact. Not all combinations are equal. Ordinary combinations add; weird ones multiply. Design plus statistics turns into growth design that actually works. Backend plus UX turns into product intuition grounded in architecture. Compliance plus code turns into fintech that ships without lawyers panicking. If you’re optimizing, look for orthogonal edges that don’t overlap. You want cross-terms.
There’s a hiring side to this. Picture a busy manager scanning dozens of resumes. Years, titles, keywords blend together. What stands out is a peak. Something specific enough to provoke a “Huh.” Huh is the sound of a spike catching.“Published an open-source software used by 3k teams.” Most people understate the specificity of their own work. They sand off the point. Don’t.
You build spikes by doing projects that resist faking. Certifications don’t usually count. Artifacts do. Shipping does. Spikes are the residue of hard problems that left a mark.
There’s a difference between variety and spikes. Variety is sampling many things shallowly. It looks active but doesn’t pierce. A spike is deep enough that others defer to you on that topic. You know the sharp edges because you cut yourself getting there. A good rule: if your “skill” can’t be tied to a specific result with a number, a link, or a name that someone else recognizes, it’s probably not a spike yet.
A common fear is being “too spiky” to “fit.” Some companies want sanded shapes that fit cleanly into job descriptions. That’s fine. Those places optimize for predictability. The right environments trade smoothness for force. Early-stage teams, new products, turnarounds: they want people who can produce non-linear outcomes. Spikes are non-linear. They make you the person everyone routes the weird stuff to. That’s where the interesting eras of a career come from.
It’s tempting to pad the roundness anyway, to game the filters. You can pass through a lot of gates with the right acronyms. But you’ll get filtered into work that values acronyms. If you want to change your trajectory, bias toward proof over keywords. Portfolios cut through more filters than resumes. A few public posts beat a dozen bullet points. A demo that runs beats any “proficient in.”
What spikes should you pick? Start with one the market already rewards and one you can’t stop caring about. Then add an orthogonal one that makes the first two collide. Don’t chase novelty for its own sake; chase usefulness where most people won’t bother to go deep. Boring domains have room for very sharp points.
How to tell if a spike is ready? People you respect ask you for help on that topic. You get pulled, not pushed. You can explain it in plain language and also handle the hairy edge cases. You can do it under pressure. And when you write it down, it makes someone say “Huh.”
You don’t know which spike will be the one that catches, so build several. Then go stand where the opportunities pass, and let the shape of your work do the grabbing.