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Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

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Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#171

Post by saiya-jin »

apenney wrote: post #142
meritt wrote: post #67

Intelligence. Tenacity. Ambition. Judgement. Bonus points for recognizing the bullshit parade that is the current startup world. e.g.: NodeJS has value, but it's mostly the same wheel we've had for 20+ years. Or that MongoDB's changelog has consisted of standard SQL features for the past five years and that pgsql would have been just fine (had people read some boyce-codd anyhow).

How do you judge those qualities? I too interview for a similar set of skills (intelligence, curiosity, a desire to constantly improve things, someone who's just willing to put in the hard slog as well as work on the fun projects) but it's incredibly hard! I've definitely had people that interviewed well that just wanted JIRA tickets fed to them immediately upon starting. It's very hard to figure out if someone will…

take it with a pinch of salt... people that excel in all 4 criteria are at most 1% of workforce, and you need to bring some serious money and interesting challenges to attract them over from other seriously paying places with great challenges and atmosphere and whatnot.

I mean, what ambitious person would like to worse in less that best job available on the market, for best possible money?

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#172

Post by saiya-jin »

raverbashing wrote: post #102
shubhamjain wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess most companies need to pretend that they are a cool tech company with a "challenging line of work". The sheer shortage of programmers manifests a developer-centric market where using the cutting-edge technology matters, even if the business considerations make less of a sense. Take for example, Walmart Labs move to Node.JS + React [1]. The rationale is quite obvious here. It's a step to distance from the corp…

Maybe because developers were sick of being forced to use "corporate technologies" sold at golf courses (like crap from IBM or Oracle) So when I see a job posting advertising those I know the people in charge have no clue in what they're doing and treat developers as janitors. Or as pg said: "The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that want…

> ... "corporate technologies" sold at golf courses

don't forget the tennis courts

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#173

Post by evex »

hood_syntax wrote: post #147
sjcrank wrote: post #118

When recruiting for web development (heavy JavaScript SPA work), I look for 3 technical skills: 1. Core JavaScript. You should be able to read modern idiomatic JS code pulled from an open source project and explain what it is doing and how you would modify it to add features. 2. Core CSS. You should be able to review Bootstrap source and explain how it works. You should be able to create static HTML/CSS to match UI m…

This may not be the place for this, but do you have any recommendations for learning front end development in that way? I've done some front end for my current job, but frankly I'm an amateur and I want to be able to market myself as full stack. Do I just glue a tab with Mozilla docs to my browser and make sites in my spare time? I'm asking you in particular because I value core competencies and what you're looking f…

I would say follow these https://github.com/vic317yeh/One-Click-to-Be-Pro#javascript, enough to get you ramped up as a front-end engineer

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#174

Post by lj3 »

user5994461 wrote: post #168
UK-AL wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he wants great people. That's the point.

I think he wants cheap people. Everything he is looking for is hinting at cheap.

Not necessarily. He says he operates in NY, so he can't pay too cheap. Even the most loyal employee will jump ship if the competing offer is 2x what he's currently making, especially with NY cost of living.

What he wants is stability. You'd be surprised how many very smart people put a premium on that sort of thing, especially when they get older.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#175

Post by IsaacL »

troygoode wrote: post #3

We're an Enterprise B2B SaaS company headquartered in San Francisco. Our stack is node.js/React/Postgres so knowing any/all of those is a bonus, but we don't specifically target those skills – we instead look for a diverse, intelligent set of engineers who have a strong technical background or a newer technical background but heavy experience in a non-programming field (mathematics, economics, architecture, teaching,…

Funny to see you here! By the way, what happened to shintolin.com?

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#176

Post by lj3 »

xor1 wrote: post #152
damosneeze wrote: post #44

I work at Real World React. We specialize in training engineers on front-end web development, specifically React, Redux, RxJS, and related technologies. We've trained engineers from Twilio, OpenTable, NerdWallet, Tesla, Esurance, and many more. We are based in SF. Since we also do private consulting and project-based work in addition to our workshops, we have recently got to talking with our clients about helping the…

Do you have any recommendations for picking up strong Javascript foundations? Asking as an iOS dev who has barely worked with it.

https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

A series of 6 small books that cover the JS fundamentals in detail.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#177

Post by dhimes »

user5994461 wrote: post #164
dhimes wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like generally "competence" is being defined as being in the 95% percentile in tech.

The 80% percentile of applicants is defined as people who can write a program to print numbers from 1 to 10. Not sure about the 95%. Maybe that's people who can do it without bugs nor expressing that this is a very dumb question unworthy of them xD

LOL yeah that would be a problem.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#178

Post by user5994461 »

lj3 wrote: post #174
user5994461 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he wants cheap people. Everything he is looking for is hinting at cheap.

Not necessarily. He says he operates in NY, so he can't pay too cheap. Even the most loyal employee will jump ship if the competing offer is 2x what he's currently making, especially with NY cost of living. What he wants is stability. You'd be surprised how many very smart people put a premium on that sort of thing, especially when they get older.

They won't get 2x offers if they don't have a pedigree and can't handle hard tech interviews. (Which is what he's filtering for).

An employee with limited options = A more stable employee

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#179

Post by eropple »

z3t4 wrote: post #131
eropple wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing "revolutionary" about CommonJS. It's a packaging system that offers simple encapsulation (but so does Java/Kotlin/Scala or C#). There's something different about it, in that it allows concurrent use of different versions--but, frankly, to me that's a demerit, not a positive, 'cause I'd rather keep my dependencies squared away.

NodeJS allows lexical (function) scoping of modules. I do not know any other language that allows this. Function scoping allows better decoupling when functions do not depend on the outer scope. And modules in NodeJS are truly modular as they contain all their dependencies, even libraries.

The former: I'd like to know how this is better than, say, assembly-level scoping in a PCL in C#. It's different, but I wouldn't call it better, and I wouldn't say that it enables better decoupling--just decoupling at a different level.

The latter: as mentioned in my previous post, this is, to me, a misfeature. Transitive dependencies being encapsulated in a dependency increases the likelihood that those dependencies don't get fixed when bugs inevitably arise in those transitive dependencies. Do not want.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#180

Post by collyw »

raverbashing wrote: post #102
shubhamjain wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess most companies need to pretend that they are a cool tech company with a "challenging line of work". The sheer shortage of programmers manifests a developer-centric market where using the cutting-edge technology matters, even if the business considerations make less of a sense. Take for example, Walmart Labs move to Node.JS + React [1]. The rationale is quite obvious here. It's a step to distance from the corp…

Maybe because developers were sick of being forced to use "corporate technologies" sold at golf courses (like crap from IBM or Oracle) So when I see a job posting advertising those I know the people in charge have no clue in what they're doing and treat developers as janitors. Or as pg said: "The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that want…

I am busy wrestling with Salesforce right now (the height of crapness in my opinion), but it hasn't stopped me seeing relational databases as more useful than Mongo in the majority of use cases.
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