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by mdc2161 4147 days ago
Great underlying data, but sad to see it visualized as radar charts.

- Each category majorly affects the reading of the category next to it, which isn't helpful in non-sequential categorizations

- The difference between two adjacent categories creates a unique angle and shape that is purely extraneous information

- The relative sizes are hard to read as the underlying quantities aren't proportional to the displayed areas

Although not the prettiest possibility, a grouped column chart (maybe groups for front-end, back-end, maintenance, culture, etc.) is a simple example that avoids many of these issues and has very good readability at a glance.

3 comments

Good point, but I could imagine certain shapes becoming very recognisable after a while. Ensuring the ordering is such that a 5-1-5-1-5...pattern is unlikely, since these spiky shapes will all look the same. And yes the angles don't carry any extra information, but they are a helpful guide to the eye. I can see where you're coming from, but thinking about these plots a bit more carefully I think you are too dismissive.
This is a fair point and something we are actively pursuing. Right now the radar plot represents a trade off between an effective interactive form of visual input that is also compelling and provides an easy mechanism for visual comparison (with the shapes overlapped).

Appreciate the feedback.

Yeah, if you can come up with a way to give the viewer a "sense" of the person at a glance it would go a long way. Maybe add colors? Or maybe consider that some metrics are pretty related and could be represented separately. Frontend / backend could be represented as a continuum by itself. UI/UX are sort of tied with front-end, so coming up with a way to link those together might be nice. Perhaps you could use the data you have to see what tends to be linked together and come up with 2-3 representations that communicate what you're going for quickly.
An interesting idea - thanks!

As for the trends check out these links to see histograms showing related aspects according to different job titles:

https://www.workshape.io/infographic/frontendengineer https://www.workshape.io/infographic/backendengineer https://www.workshape.io/infographic/fullstackengineer

really cool data in those distributions, definitely spent way too much time flipping back and forth from one tab to another. Maybe unsurprisingly, javascript is every groups' most reported skill and full-stack engineers tend to be more senior. It'll be exciting to watch as your data set grows
We will continue to share our data set and insights. When we have more resources we will undoubtedly spend more time on analytics and infographics so that we can share back with the community on our findings.

Thanks for the comment.

Agreed; spider graphs really aren't helpful past about 5 variables.