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Today’s Top Tech Skills

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Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#281

Post by kod »

sidlls wrote: post #227
NikolaNovak wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://h1bdata.info/topjobs.php

Software engineer and senior software engineer are 100k+, among many others.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#282

Post by james_s_tayler »

auspex wrote: post #27
_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.

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.

Not sure I buy it entirely. I've found that once you become an expert in a particular vendors technology to the point you have a reasonably complete mental model on how it works and how to solve all kinds of problems with it and the specific solutions tailored to specifc problems, then learning another vendors specific technology comes at deep, deep, discount.

Tbh if you are an expert in X and I need you for Y and Y is analogous to X and there is time allowed for ramp up, then it's all the same to me.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#283

Post by freehunter »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #266
freehunter wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All true. Point is that it used to be that a key piece of intrastructure was based on "open", general tech, and now it's not, and that's regrettable.

I’m not sure enterprise computing was ever based on open/general tech. In the 80s everything ran on closed-source for-pat Unix systems and big-iron proprietary mainframes. In the 90s that shifted more to Linux but increasingly companies would buy “appliances”, which are pieces of general purpose hardware combined with specific software. Those appliances were never meant to be opened or toyed with and the hardware lifecycle was based on the software lifecycle. If the software was discontinued, the hardware was thrown out as well. Appliances are still very popular today because again enterprise companies like stability and predictability.

An appliance is the ultimate lock-in and enterprise companies LOVE them.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#284

Post by eloisant »

smnrchrds wrote: post #231
cushychicken wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 sof…

> 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? I can only speculate, since I am not a software engineer, but I think part of maturing is things get more complex and making things more difficult and expensive. Thirty years ago, someone could say "Fuck it…

I don't think it's about software getting more complex. It does become more complex, but you don't actually write more code or handle a more complex architecture, you just build it from more complex blocks. Those blocks are packaged so their own complexity is hidden from you.

And you can write software on you spare time, and distribute it. Like it was done for Linux, gcc, git, and many other open source software. The other reason we have free software is because many software companies write their own tools and distribute them as Open Source because those are just tools, not what makes them money.

AWS on the other hand, is not just software but it's infrastructure. It's servers that are running, maintained, etc. There are already Open Source alternatives to AWS, that you can install on your servers and maintain, but it's a very different experience from using the AWS tools on Amazon's servers.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#285

Post by Guest42 »

kjerzyk wrote: post #186
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…

What would you recommend to pass the level where you can use SQL to get the data you need and move on to a more advanced level? Any particular book/course?

Itzik Ben Gan has excellent books and sql for smarties by celko is great as well.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#286

Post by thejigisup »

_bxg1 wrote: post #36
auspex wrote: 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.

the implementation details are different but the concepts don't change across the cloud providers. serverless compute is serverless compute. object storage is object storage. a vm is a vm.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#287

Post by secabeen »

cushychicken wrote: post #223
smnrchrds wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sof…

> 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?

That's part of it. There's also the element that in many engineering fields, there is a floor on project pricing. Think Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, etc., most of those projects start at 6-figures, and often go into 7 or 8-figures. A per-engineer cost of $Xk/yr for tools is really not that much, in the scheme of things. I think you're seeing a similar increase with web designer tools. Adobe doesn't want you to think of a Creative Suite license as $500 or $1000, they want you to think of it as 1% of your employee's salary.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#288

Post by simonsarris »

_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.

"AWS" seems like a much more useful delineation over "cloud system management" than "Java" does over "Programming"

I could be super wrong but I'd expect a Java programmer to become useful on a C# project faster than I'd expect an AWS person to become useful building out other cloud infrastructure.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#289

Post by amp108 »

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 went to a job interview recently where the interviewer was trying to phrase the question properly: "I'm trying to figure out how to ask this next one, so if you have a lot of Customers, and... umm..."

And I interjected during a long pause and said "It sounds like you're trying to ask a question which could be answered by using a HAVING clause. So something like, only those Customers who have two or more orders, which would be 'GROUP BY Customers HAVING count(Orders) > 2'."

I was right, he was looking for that. Still didn't get the job.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#290

Post by thejigisup »

cutler wrote: post #269
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.

I was hoping Kotlin might challenge Java outside Android but it seems unlikely to make a dent in Java's dominance of enterprise computing.

too many dinosaurs in enterprise IT who don't want to learn new things.
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