Today’s Top Tech Skills

It’s a surprisingly good filter.

EDIT: To clarify since this got more attention than I expected...I don’t disqualify any candidate based on the answer to a single question. I just use that question to assess their actual SQL experience. If you’ve spent any amount time writing raw queries by hand for reports or just to pass through to a web service, you’re going to have run into HAVING. It’s a simple part of the basic SELECT syntax without needing to involve joins, subqueries, index optimizations or specific knowledge of database internals.

It’s a fair question and the only way you wouldn’t have run into it is from working purely with ORMs or NoSQL. There’s a lot you can do without it, but it goes a long way in determining my ability to ask you to open up a query analyzer in different environments. It’s also going to tell me a lot about the way you think about data problems and where you are going to gravitate for certain types of logic.

But the absolute number of people earning a lot (100k, 200k, whatever you think that is) might well be higher for Java than for anything else, because it's used in some significant big tech companies and in finance.

So, if you're of average ability, learning Java might not juice your pay much, but if you're highly talented, it might.

While I agree with the sentiment, I think there's a flipside to this. Certain communities cough cough ahem have the luxury of not caring at all about skills in broad demand, hopping from technology to technology because the market allows it.

I've seen a lot of "expert beginnerism" from that group of people, and a little bit of disdain for the people who do schlep work day in and day out to make a living. In my experience, a lot of the people who work with the boring technology have more seniority and depth because they're not relearning the window dressing that is syntax/framework/language constantly.

If anything, I think these reports (from Indeed... real data, not some meaningless top ten) just indicate that employers don't really care about whatever's hot right now, and that a surprising amount of the economy is powered by unglamorous tech.

Honestly how is javascript (and thus typescript) ever going away at this point? I honestly mean _ever_. Like until the day I die. Almost the entire web is using it. Frameworks like React, Angular, Vue have made it so I basically don't care that much about javascript. Most of my code is server-side and the client is largely handled by Angular as a framework so the amount of JS I have to write in my angular components is so minimal.

All that being said, I personally am not a fan of javascript.. at all. The learning curve to know what's going on is horrific in my opinion, and code is not meant to be written clearly but have a small footprint which is terrible. It's too flexible.. though typescript has solved 90% of that.

Even if something like Blazor completely transforms the web, it seems like there will ALWAYS be the case for streamlined simple sites that only need very simple javascript transformations..

Anyway- unfortunately I think javascript is here for the next billion years!

We can easily enumerate dozens of other technologies that developers hard push on only to years later realize they’ve swung too far.