Live data from Hacker News

Today’s Top Tech Skills

hiringlab.org

11–20 of 373 posts

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#11

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…

This sounds horrible but maybe the people who would take these lists seriously are precisely the kinds of people who are careerist programmers. And they really just want the maximum value from their “investment” in learning programming.

In college I didn’t learn Java at all because it didn’t seem very fun. Python did and I learned that. Then Go came along which was easy to pick up. But once you know a general purpose language well, it doesn’t take long to learn another one (maybe not the most performant code right away but that’s what code reviews by peers are for).

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#12
post #2

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

I can't speak for the US market, which this data apparently focusses on, but in Germany I think that PHP is still in fairly high demand, but definitely not nearly as well compensated as the more "enterprisey" technologies (eg Java/React)

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#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.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#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.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#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?

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#16

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 figured that was mostly due to legacy code at this point; is it undisputed for new code too?

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#17
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.

No weirder than putting "Java" instead of "Object Oriented Programming"

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#18
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.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#19
post #11

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…

This sounds horrible but maybe the people who would take these lists seriously are precisely the kinds of people who are careerist programmers. And they really just want the maximum value from their “investment” in learning programming. In college I didn’t learn Java at all because it didn’t seem very fun. Python did and I learned that. Then Go came along which was easy to pick up. But once you know a general purpose…

Is there anything inherently wrong with that? They know where the butter for their bread comes from and make it work for them and reap from it.

As far as individual career choices go, seems like a winning move.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#20
post #16

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 figured that was mostly due to legacy code at this point; is it undisputed for new code too?

There are few competitors that have strong, static typing, great test tooling and broad library support.
Post reply on HN