Given how bad our brains are at determining the size / area of slices like that, I'm not sure visually comparing candidates like that would necessarily result in you picking the best one - and that's assuming that each of the required skills is measurable on a linear scale, which is rarely true.
The biggest difference: The second derivative of quadratic growth (the change in the rate of change) is constant. While any derivative of exponential growth stays exponential.
For quadratic growth, think naive sorting like bubble sort. For exponential growth, think bogosort.
Technically: If you use Big-O notation, then indeed O(x^2) \subset O(a^x). But also O(x) \subset O(x^2) \subset O(a^x).
