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Today’s Top Tech Skills

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Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#221

Post by ordinaryperson »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #196
kradroy wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly.

"I use [x] all the time and know it well, so [x] will be a good filter for evaluating someone's technical skills."

No. People do different work tasks depending on the project or company.

Sometimes I'm knee-deep in SQL. Others in React. I'm often forced to do PHP. My familiarity with specific SQL syntax ebbs & flows with what I'm doing.

There's no point in keeping something in your brain if you're not going to use it every day. Just remember the general concept and Google the specifics when you need it.

Just one example why interviewing is terrible and interviewers really should be trained on what not to do.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#222

Post by alasdair_ »

babuskov wrote: post #210
SkyPuncher wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm curious now. What's there to look up? It's just like WHERE, but you use it on aggregate values. WHERE filters the data before you aggregate it, HAVING afterwards. That's all there is to it.

Simply remembering that fact is language trivia that is easy to refresh when needed.

It’s like asking if intel x86 is big-endian or little-endian. It’s trivial to check but if I haven’t had to use that fact in a while, I likely won’t bother to remember because it’s trivial to search for.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#223

Post by cushychicken »

smnrchrds wrote: post #191
_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.

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 o…

>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.

That's a really great insight. (Sr EE here.) I wonder sometimes about the fact that SW engineers are capable of making their own tools in a way that we are not. Do you think this helps to combat some of the super high pricing associated with their tooling?

For example: it'd be pretty hard for me as an EE to say "Fuck it! I'm fucking sick of Orcad! I'll just go write my own fucking Orcad!" (OK, well, easy to say. Hard to do. I've spent plenty of days cursing Orcad, but none building a suitable replacement.)

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#224

Post by marcosdumay »

lesservehicle wrote: post #195
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…

Not everyone is a DBA?

You mean that only DBAs need to know SQL?

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#225

Post by freehunter »

_bxg1 wrote: post #65
sgt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could then argue that Java is owned by Oracle, and could be called Oracle Java, an Oracle technology. I tend to agree with you though, AWS is more of a company's interpretation of the cloud hosting technologies. It's too close for comfort, to be honest. I prefer to self host, but I tend to host in the cloud due to financial constraints.

I don't have any problem with cloud hosting, as long as there's portability. I wouldn't want to design my architecture to be completely specific to one hosting provider.

It's nothing to do with the hosting or portability and everything to do with talking the language and navigating the interface. You can set up a bare VM and install your own OS and manage everything yourself and avoid any kind of lock-in, but if you don't know how to navigate AWS your entire operations collapses with bad IAM policies, world-readable S3 buckets, and VPCs that let the entire world in.

On the other hand, enterprises don't care as much about vendor lock-in or portability as people on HN do. As a consultant working with many Fortune 500 enterprises, "we're an IBM shop" or "we're a Dell shop" or "we're a Windows shop" is more common than you might think. Enterprise companies want relationships, stability, and a business partner. They don't care about anything else. If they're an IBM shop, your default choice is IBM and any exceptions have to be run up through management. If they're a Windows shop, any request for Mac desktops or Linux servers has to be an exception as well. I've seen clients ditch million-dollar products they've used for years just because their digital transformation was AWS-only and that product didn't support running in AWS.

Enterprise companies WANT to be locked to one vendor, as it makes choices easier, makes the relationship easier, and provides stability to their IT operations. Cost and portability doesn't even factor into it. Lock-in is just a part of enterprise IT, has been for decades.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#226

Post by ereyes01 »

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…

Trivia

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#227

Post by sidlls »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #132
sidlls wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't that simple. Most "Java + SQL" jobs are run of the mill cost-center type jobs at companies that aren't tech companies. Their salaries, benefits, and locales are generally poor relatively to other software engineering jobs. The demand is high, and so is the supply of labor, but that isn't the whole picture.

I would agree with that picture. In other comments on this thread, I've indicated Java & SQL are the #1 demands on any project I've ever worked on. At the same time though, none of those people have earned anything remotely what I tend to see on HN in general, and SF area in particular. From my limited experience, it feels like a good, experienced, hardened, senior Java developer in Toronto, Canada (not a tiny/cheap…

Tech "hubs" like the Bay Area are rare: most software developers earn far less, and our salaries shouldn't be taken for a typical salary.

The vast majority of software developers will never see six figures (adjusted for inflation) unless they move to management, just like most of their white-collar peers.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#228

Post by _bxg1 »

apta wrote: post #166
_bxg1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess "great test tooling" and "broad library support" are subjective, but there are several contenders these days that I would say might fit those criteria

> "great test tooling" and "broad library support" are subjective Not really the case when it comes to Java (and the JVM in general). It objectively has great test tooling, and a very diverse library ecosystem, not to mention monitoring, introspection, management, tunability, etc. are second to none. The only other ecosystem that arguably comes close is .NET.

The point is the words "great" and "broad" are relative.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#230

Post by brightball »

alasdair_ wrote: post #219
brightball wrote: post #42

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…

I’ve hand written thousands of sql queries, including a year spent writing nothing but PL/SQL stored procedures. I’d fail your test, not because I’ve never used it but because I’ve not had to use it in years and, importantly, I rely on Google to remind me of syntax trivia when moving back to a language I haven’t actively worked in in a while. I HATE trivia questions and I’m convinced they are a sign of a lazy intervi…

It’s not a trivia question. It’s directly related to GROUP BY and is a core part of standard SELECT syntax.

I’ve never met somebody who has spent any amount of time writing raw SQL who didn’t know it.

I’ve met a lot who overly rely on their ORM but “have done a lot of SQL” who don’t.

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