[gregjor]

A field does not evaluate skill. People do. People are subjective. Some skills permit more objective quantitative evaluation than others. Chess, in your example, looks like a skill we can objectively measure and rank, over a career of matches with scores kept. Even so we’re measuring a person’s performance in chess matches as a proxy for chess skill. A mediocre player might get lucky and catch Garry Kasparov on a day he has a migraine.

Most skills aren’t so easily evaluated, measured, ranked. Part of the problem is what we measure. For a programmer do we look at lines of code per day? Commits? Bugs found? Profit earned from the code? We might have a subjective opinion about a programmer’s skill, relative to other programmers, but that’s hard to quantify. I think most skills present this kind of problem.

I don’t think any professional or technical skill lends itself to direct objective, quantitative evaluation. Instead we usually look at results and consistency. How we rank those factors for multiple people is partly subjective.

[bingojess]

Yes obviously which is why OP is asking the question.

And you aren't right, there are many games where there are objective scores or measures of skill like other have said golf, darts, billiards. What leads to a field being more objective is the presence of scores which can be compared and serve as the goal, and the score outcome is not based on luck or opponent play.

[gregjor]

Maybe not obviously, since this question gets asked in some form or another fairly often.

I used a game as an example of something that permits objective and quantitative scoring. Professional and technical fields don’t work like that. Chess and darts and tennis do.