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Today’s Top Tech Skills

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Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#101

Post by littlecranky67 »

yowlingcat wrote: post #86
MatekCopatek wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would you say is the special thing about this particular bit of knowledge that made you point it out? To be perfectly honest, it seems quite arbitrary to me. I could say I'm surprised to see how many people don't know anything about the browser rendering pipeline and consequently produce badly performing interfaces. Someone else would complain about people's inability to do even the most basic Linux administrati…

It's not arbitrary because screwing up your data integrity is far and away one of the most painful and business critical mistakes you can make as an engineer. Your product isn't finished if it looks like it works, but is either storing data improperly at rest or doing the wrong thing with it.

Again, arbitrary. You could also argue a JavaScript bug on your site preventing a shop checkout is the worst, because you lose Cash by the minutes.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#102

Post by dadoge »

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…

Is the pun of saying knowing “HAVING” is a good filter intended?

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#103

Post by naner »

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…

A simpler explanation is that some people will just "learn" (via googling) the basic SQL they need to get something done. This is not uncommon across all domains in our industry.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#104

Post by karolist »

yamrzou wrote: post #15

I’m thinking about the future. What skills will dominate the software market 10-20 years from now? - Big companies use C++ heavily, besides being the language for deep learning/GPU programming. Will Rust/Go replace it anytime soon? - Will React still dominate front end development? - What about Python and the data analysis ecosystem?

- C++ is evolving at an increasing rate and after C++17 a lot of the projects in these big companies you have in mind prefer that to Go.

- Web is too dynamic to say for sure but I don't think we have something that might replace React for front end on the horizon yet.

- This is where Go might catch up but I have nothing to back up this opinion.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#105

Post by Aperocky »

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…

TBF, sql queries is something you _don't_ want to have in your code stack. It should be abstracted away in some kind of DAO, and no one should be worrying about SQL queries when they're developing new features.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#106

Post by skrebbel »

_bxg1 wrote: post #14

It remains weird and disturbing to me that "AWS" is treated as a skill. Not "cloud system management", but " AWS ". Edit: I do understand why it can be lucrative to have expertise with a specific cloud provider. It's just the status quo of these services being their own unique silos that disturbs me: I would personally be wary of making "ability to effectively use Amazon's servers" a pillar of my career.

It's the same as calling PostgreSQL a skill. You can know SQL in general, and you can know all Postgres's little ins and outs. It's not the same thing.

Personally I wouldn't make knowing all Postgres's ins and outs the "pillar of my career" but some people do. I don't see how doing that with AWS is any different.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#107

Post by [deleted] »

kweinber wrote: post #33
ravenstine wrote: post #3

I don't really understand the desire for skills to be in high demand. Obviously, you want your skills to be in demand in some capacity . But putting so much emphasis on whether some tech skill is a winner on a scoreboard can give people the wrong impression about other languages and technologies that appear to either be unpopular or dying. It's reassuring that Java and SQL are still in high demand after all these yea…

Library depth and growth are side-effects of a language ecosystems popularity. It doesn’t mean that all libraries are good ones, but remember the open-source rallying cry “many eyes make all bugs shallow”? Yeah, that tends to be true. Also, in-demand technologies tend to have a larger talent-pool to choose from. Not everyone is good, but you have a much better time finding the right skills and cultural fit if the tal…

[deleted]

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#108

Post by ownagefool »

chrisseaton wrote: post #18
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

It remains weird and disturbing to me that "AWS" is treated as a skill. Not "cloud system management", but " AWS ". Edit: I do understand why it can be lucrative to have expertise with a specific cloud provider. It's just the status quo of these services being their own unique silos that disturbs me: I would personally be wary of making "ability to effectively use Amazon's servers" a pillar of my career.

Different clouds operate in different ways - people probably want the skill of knowing how the various parts of AWS best integrate and I’m sure that there is a lot of subtlety and non-obvious things to this. Seems reasonable to me? I don’t think it’s disturbing to seek a specific practical skill that you know you need. Not everyone has to be a master of everything.

I think the biggest problem with hiring an AWS or Azure consultant, is you might not get someone who actually does infrastructure as code (at least this happens a fair bit in London).

I'd rather hire someone who knows terraform and another cloud, than somebody who'll click on the GUI for my preferred cloud, and make excuses around not being able to follow process.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#109

Post by yowlingcat »

littlecranky67 wrote: post #101
yowlingcat wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not arbitrary because screwing up your data integrity is far and away one of the most painful and business critical mistakes you can make as an engineer. Your product isn't finished if it looks like it works, but is either storing data improperly at rest or doing the wrong thing with it.

Again, arbitrary. You could also argue a JavaScript bug on your site preventing a shop checkout is the worst, because you lose Cash by the minutes.

I think you're proving exactly my point.

SQL is intrinsically very close to the metal of your business logic, especially when it comes to general business logic. General business logic is typically most critical and risky around the surface of payments. A JavaScript bug on your site around your shop preventing checkouts is very bad because you are indeed losing cash by the minutes. A poor domain model that doesn't properly associate active promotions to cart order lines could result in an incorrect charge amount and an irate customer.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#110

Post by bradleyjg »

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…

> Granted, most webapps probably don't have enough users to trigger them too often

It isn't purely a matter of number of users. You can have a billion users, but if your access pattern is embarrassingly isolated you are still probably okay. (And sharding is going to work great to boot.)

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