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Today’s Top Tech Skills

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Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#71

Post by chaostheory »

dathinab wrote: post #25

In the recent two or so years I was surprised to see how many people don't _really_ know about SQL. Sure they can write a simple insert and update query and maybe a join, assuming they can just ignore that there actually are different types of joins. But if you ask them about other _still fundamental_ knowledge like a _rough_ idea about what the different transaction isolation level are/mean/imply for you, they fail…

I’ve used both relational DBs and nosql professionally. While in super specific use cases, NoSQL does shine; it’s a giant mistake to use them as a generic, general data store like with a traditional SQL database. You end up doing a lot more avoidable work in the long run especially if you’re doing reporting ie something that SQL can easily handle, you end up having to replicate it in your own code base

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#72

Post by tooop »

phit_ wrote: post #2

the lack of PHP is surprising to me, but I guess there isn't that many PHP full time roles to fill?

Either it is specific to USA or the data is weird, https://www.codingdojo.com/blog/the-7-most-in-demand-program... reports that in January (based on the same Indeed.com site) PHP is behind C#. PHP is powering >75% websites it just makes no sense to not even be in the Top20

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#73

Post by AlchemistCamp »

I've always been frustrated by the promotion of this kind of list. Yes, it matters what the demand for a given skill is but that knowledge is virtually meaningless without also having information about the supply side!

If 1,000,000 companies desire talent $foo which 2,000,000 workers have, it's not going to lead to as many opportunities or as much leverage as talent $bar that 300,000 companies desire but only 50,000 workers have.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#74

Post by snarfy »

brightball wrote: post #42
dathinab wrote: post #25

In the recent two or so years I was surprised to see how many people don't _really_ know about SQL. Sure they can write a simple insert and update query and maybe a join, assuming they can just ignore that there actually are different types of joins. But if you ask them about other _still fundamental_ knowledge like a _rough_ idea about what the different transaction isolation level are/mean/imply for you, they fail…

My go to interview question to test basic SQL knowledge is use of “HAVING”. 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 se…

I can barely get candidates to join two tables.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#75

Post by brendanw »

murukesh_s wrote: post #13

Java is still undisputed in the enterprise. Node.js was a contender but lost steam. May be .net once it becomes truly platform neutral have a chance to take on Java. Until then most probably it will remain widely popular.

As someone who loves kotlin on android, I have been searching for companies experimenting with kotlin jvm or kotlin node backends and have been surprised to see that companies are not making the jump. Swift is remarkably similar to kotlin. With a kotlin backend you have the benefits of the JVM or node ecosystem and a beloved language that a bunch of your frontend devs will understand.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#76

Post by samvher »

Seems to me that Java is also still one of the most supplied tech skills. So this does not necessarily make it a market you want to be in. Good SQL skills don't tend to be that common though, but I think a lot of the demand is more for CRUD-level operations than for complex analytics or performance-sensitive stuff.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#77

Post by ummonk »

There is demand from the average company treating "IT" as a cost center, and there is demand from top tech companies and startups which treat their software engineers as valuable. The latter are much less demanding of Java and SQL as required skills prior to joining, and I'd even say Go seems to be at least as popular as Java amongst top startups.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#78

Post by jackcodes »

mpartel wrote: post #60
jackcodes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don’t need to know transaction isolation to do the vast majority of work on a typical web app.

It can seem that way, but the consequence of not knowing them is lots of subtle race conditions. Granted, most webapps probably don't have enough users to trigger them too often, and the impact is often limited e.g. because the kinds of inconsistencies you can introduce don't actually matter that much in many cases. For the majority of webapps, I'm not sure the default isolation level of MySQL and Postgres is an appr…

The vast majority of work on web apps is probably writing CRUD controller methods, proxies to upstream services, or React components. It’s like saying CSS transitions are vital; they aren’t, but probably affect the user experience for the average Joe just as much if not more than a phantom read.

At that level of depth you just hand it over to the CSS champ or the DB champ.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#79

Post by vbezhenar »

momokoko wrote: post #61
taffer wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say so. Concurrency bugs, like lost updates, can be very subtle and hard to debug, and common databases don't prevent these kinds of bugs by default.

If someone on my team was writing a web app and spending time meddling around with transactions outside of whatever abstraction layer we were using on top of the DB without an incredibly good reason, we'd definitely be having a coaching moment, and if it continued, I'd likely help them find a role with another org where they might be a better fit. Any quality database abstraction provides fairly simple means to perfo…

Transactions are hard. You can't just abstract it. Those different isolation levels are there for a reason.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#80

Post by gigatexal »

dathinab wrote: post #25

In the recent two or so years I was surprised to see how many people don't _really_ know about SQL. Sure they can write a simple insert and update query and maybe a join, assuming they can just ignore that there actually are different types of joins. But if you ask them about other _still fundamental_ knowledge like a _rough_ idea about what the different transaction isolation level are/mean/imply for you, they fail…

I agree. Use the right abstraction and the right number of them: I’ve yet to find an ORM that didn’t kick you in the face In terms of performance to only hold your hand with queries.

SQL queries can be done in code in a sane way to avoid sql injection or you could implement stored procedures and functions to make operations more ORM-like but not pay any of the ORM tax.

It’s just annoying to see the DB treated so flippantly by devs who are Hussein Bolt quick in grabbing an ORM when it’s not always the right tool or even necessary. They’re great for prototyping but not for production imo

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