Live data from Hacker News

Today’s Top Tech Skills

hiringlab.org

191–200 of 373 posts

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#191
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.

I am a mechanical engineer. Mechanical engineering jobs ask for SolidWorks/AutoCAD/CATIA/Creo/etc experience, not just computer-aided design; ANSYS/ABAQUS/NASTRAN/etc expertise, not just finite element method; Fluent/CFX/OpenFOAM/etc knowledge, not just computational fluid dynamics.

With the exception of OpenFOAM, all of these software are proprietary, largely non-interoperable, and expensive—like thousands to tens of thousands of dollars for the cheapest option with basic functionality kind of expensive; like I can never imagine opening my independent consultancy business because how expensive the basic tools are kind of expensive.

Outside of programming, this is the norm. The number of free and/or open-source tools available to a mechanical engineer or an electrical engineer are infinitesimally small and it is almost impossible to do a serious engineering project with only free tools.

Since this is quite lucrative for the companies making those tools, I can only imagine tech companies would be more than happy to lead us to a future where software engineering is similar in this regard to other engineering disciplines. Perhaps this is what happens when a field matures, and since software is maturing, it will become more and more like this as the time goes on.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have got to be kidding. Corrupting data for a sale already made is far worse than losing a sale because of an outage.

> Corrupting data for a sale already made is far worse than losing a sale because of an outage. I mean, this is still arbitrary. There are millions of small businesses worldwide that do fine with terrible records, but making on-going sales. If you don't make any sales because of constant outages, you could argue that's worse than trying to deal with corrupted data, especially if you have log files or some other metho…

You're getting to the crux of the issue now. If you don't have log files to recover corrupted data anyways, or that is you never saved it in the first place -- you CANNOT recover it. If you risk irreparably corrupting old data and new data, what is the value of your software system in the first place? Why not use google forms and google spreadsheets, data entry analysts and a call center and be done with the whole thing anyways?

My point is that the very root of what gives software value is something deeply industrial -- it is a machine that can do something over and over correctly, reliably and without regressions. If you take away that reliability to be depended upon by a business, you are no longer building an industrial strength solution -- you're building a toy.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#193

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…

>> many people don't know anything about the browser rendering pipeline if you can recommend a good source for learning the browser rendering pipeline please post it here, everyone I have asked just shrugs it off and says that no one really knows.

This series is also quite good, a bit more modern:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/09/inside-bro...

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#195

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…

Not everyone is a DBA?

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#196
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Eh, HAVING is something that can be learned in 5 minutes. So filtering out for that is probably generating a lot of false negatives. I quiz them on indexes and table design. Those can be done without writing a single SQL query.

I look up HAVING every time I write it.

I just don't use it enough to keep it in memory as a first class concept. A quick google search with an example is enough to jog my memory.

If I got asked about it on an interview, I'd be completely blank.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some months ago I sat in a meeting to discuss design and implementation details for a medicine delivery system. The fact that it was about medicine I thought it would be obvious to everyone that we would have to use a relation database with ACID properties. Last thing we want is to send medicine at best effort, I assumed everyone would be on the same page on the need to use transactions, foreign keys and all other da…

Blech, the worst thing I've noticed after moving to document databases even when scale does matter is the loss of the relational data model. A nice ERD that shows relationships between your entities makes everything so simple. You could have one for document database as well but people stare at you strangely. So now it's just a random collection of collections of stuff, and it takes 10x more words to describe your de…

This is a really good read: http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2013/11/11/why-you-should-never...

It shows what happens when you have exactly the misunderstandings being discussed here. Also note that the author still has absolutely no idea how to do a simple ER diagaram.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#199

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 really don't get all the hoopla about learning SQL. There's really not much to it. It can be learned in an afternoon. It's by far the easiest language I've ever learned.

To all the naysayers and downvoters: There's a difference between knowing SQL and being an SQL ninja or a master of database architecture. Those are three different things. The former, and what my original comment concerned, was just learning the language itself.

I concede that learning to be able to craft complicated, performant queries and design complex databases with any desired property you might dream of is not quick or easy, but I still maintain that learning the language itself (sans extensions) is.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#200
post #36
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The skill sets needed for the three big cloud providers are very different. At a high level it seems the same... VMs, VPC, Firewalls etc. but they all are configured and managed differently on each platform. You need the experience as an AWS, GCP or Azure expert.

Then it's disturbing that they're so non-standardized. I personally wouldn't want to spend a bunch of time becoming an expert in a skill that only applies to one company's physical servers.

If we can learn anything from history, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the standardization. Just look at situation on the operating system side. Different flavors of Unix, VMS, z/OS, Windows. Sure there are concepts that apply to all of them, but if you want to be an expert you really need to go deep on the vendor specific things.
Post reply on HN