Sorry devs, Twitter Bootstrap isn't a "skill"

As an applicant, you'd be stupid not to target your resume with buzzwords based on trends you see in job descriptions. You are trying to get past the recruiter, who is literally going to crosscheck buzzwords on your application with those in the description.

To call applicants kiddies for playing that game the way it's supposed to be played... well, it's just seems naive.

Why is Twitter Bootstrap not a skill, but JBoss, Hibernate, Django, heck even Node.js, etc. a skill (perhaps I'm putting words in the author's mouth, but I doubt he'd have the same opinion of a resumé with those skills listed)?

According to this guy, you're only allowed to list the languages you use as skills, not the tools you use within those languages.

Bootstrap is a very useful tool in some situations. As a developer with little to no graphic design ability (but a reasonable understanding of basic UI design), Bootstrap enables me to skip a massive chunk of work on projects that don't benefit from the attention of a designer (e.g. internal portals, administrative tools).

Is it a skill? No, it's a tool. Being able to use it involves some skill with HTML, CSS, and possibly Javascript.

Does it belong on a resume? Why not? At worst it may not be relevant to everything you might apply for; at best it shows a familiarity with available utilities that, required for a given project or not, might come in handy or at least show you're open to and have worked with current alternatives to the everything-from-scratch approach that's sometimes but not always necessary or helpful when developing for the web.

[edit] After going looking for an author citation, I see this is on the official blog of a digital agency, written by one of the partners, who refers to himself as a "titan of industry."

That's just embarrassing. The ego is stifling, and the tone screams "nightmarish to work for." [/edit]

Except that "Twitter Bootstrap" isn't a buzzword at all; it's a collection of CSS, Javascripts, and HTML coding conventions that make it possible to quickly build websites.

We put things in our job listing like, "familiarity with Backbone required". Is Backbone a buzzword? Is someone who uses Backbone less of a developer? Should I just automatically assume that anyone with developer after their name knows Backbone? Will this list of dumb, rhetorical questions ever end?

The author of this post gets it completely wrong:

"Claiming Bootstrap as evidence that you 'know' development is like claiming that changing your oil means you 'know' automotive engineering."

Knowing Bootstrap does count as knowing development, whether Paul likes it or not. There's quite a bit to Bootstrap, and even if it only takes someone a couple of days to come up to speed with it, maybe I don't want to pay for those couple of days. Maybe I don't have a couple of days.

Knowlege is a continuum. Once you gain a little, it's easy to look at everyone beneath you with a sense of contempt, but what's the point? What do you gain? Better yet, what are you giving back to the world? If we accept the author's message in whole, what action can we take to better ourselves? Sorry, but I can't see any dramatic improvement if we all stop asking about Twitter Bootstrap tomorrow.

Atacrawl nailed it when he called this a, "snotty drive-bys masquerading as insightful criticism".

I've all but forgotten the intricacies of the DOM due to jQuery. There's probably plenty of developers who have begun their careers in the past 5 years who probably don't know JavaScript as anything other than where they put their document.ready block. Ditto for frameworks like ActiveRecord and the ability to write SQL, etc. Is the lack of underlying knowledge the fault of the framework?