Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#201

Post by jasonmacdee » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 10:47 PM UTC

awinter-py wrote: post #187

ryandrake wrote: post #93

Interesting. Lots of picky responses here--people prepared to wait it out and go through tons of candidates looking for perfection: Need this language. And that platform. Must know such and such database. And DevOps. Front end and backend. Full stack. And these four key abilities. And passion. Prepare for the interview. Be ready to explain this and that. Be good at whiteboard coding. Went through 400 candidates. If y…

I've seen a lot of disagreement about whether you should 'hire for your stack', i.e. hire narrowly for your team's current work and tools. I briefly ran hiring for a team with a core skillset that I thought was pretty general (python/web), but a lot of the python resumes I got turned out to be 'I used it in college', 'haven't used it recently', or django-focused devs who were uncomfortable with anything non-django. I…

Short term hires should hit the ground running. Long term hires should have core skills and don't need your stack first day. If you don't know which you're hiring for then they won't ever fit correctly.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#202

Post by lordCarbonFiber » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 11:28 PM UTC

jayajay wrote: post #69

beachstartup wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here, i'll paraphrase for you, since i'm a "real world" hiring manager as well, with a business that i keep anonymous/secretive on hn. "a reliable person who can actually, really, like, totally for real drive a problem to resolution and then go spend time with family. if there's an emergency, they pick up their phone and try to help." this is a small percentage of the population, but big enough. it's why we (based in…

That's because super "smart" people are taught that they will have 2-3 weeks to prepare for their biggest problems. In real life, big problems happen overnight, and you wake up to shitstorms. That said, some brilliant people emerge from Ivy Leagues, too.

An ounce of prevention beats a cure. The "smart" people are the ones that know taking the extra time to set up tests, controls before production, effective logging and documentation, are the ones that DONT have to wake up overnight to shitstorms.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#203

Post by lordCarbonFiber » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 11:28 PM UTC

jayajay wrote: post #69

beachstartup wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

here, i'll paraphrase for you, since i'm a "real world" hiring manager as well, with a business that i keep anonymous/secretive on hn. "a reliable person who can actually, really, like, totally for real drive a problem to resolution and then go spend time with family. if there's an emergency, they pick up their phone and try to help." this is a small percentage of the population, but big enough. it's why we (based in…

That's because super "smart" people are taught that they will have 2-3 weeks to prepare for their biggest problems. In real life, big problems happen overnight, and you wake up to shitstorms. That said, some brilliant people emerge from Ivy Leagues, too.

An ounce of prevention beats a cure. The "smart" people are the ones that know taking the extra time to set up tests, controls before production, effective logging and documentation, are the ones that DONT have to wake up overnight to shitstorms.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#204

Post by vorg » Tue, Dec 13, 2016, 11:59 PM UTC

reitanqild wrote: post #155

kitd wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with all of this, apart from Gradle. It has saved my life a few times. Gradle plus the BuildShip plugin [1] for Eclipse is a great combo IMHO. [1] - https://projects.eclipse.org/projects/tools.buildship

It has saved my life a few times. Compared to mvn or ant or something else or compared to not using a build system? Honest question. I'm trying to figure out if I have missed something when I dismissed Gradle last time.

> I'm trying to figure out if I have missed something when I dismissed Gradle last time

Which version of Gradle were you using last time? Gradle 3.0, released 3 months ago, offers Kotlin as the preferred language for scripting builds and writing plugins, instead of the ageing Apache Groovy which is still available for those who still need it.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#205

Post by bananamansion » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 12:17 AM UTC

brongondwana wrote: post #85

FastMail in Melbourne is going to be hiring for skills in three languages: middleware (Perl), frontend (Javascript) and support (English) early next year. It's not so much specific tech skills as attitude. We're strong on pragmatism with a touch of pride in doing it right. Pragmatism without that pride in quality leads to hacks that are unmaintainable - obsession over perfect without pragmatism leads to never deliver…

any internships available?

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#206

Post by bananamansion » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 12:22 AM UTC

sanswork wrote: post #51

sanswork wrote: post #24

I am looking to hiring a jr ruby or elixir developer in the next few months that doesn't mind cross training on the job. They will probably be remote since I live in a small surfing town half way up the Australian coast at the moment. Since it's a jr role I'm looking more for evidence that they want to learn than examples of accomplishments.

Just a note since I've had a few emails and I can't edit it at the moment we're only looking at Australian developers for this position.

what abotu someone with 0 experience in ruby but has experience react/js c

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#207

Post by hoorayimhelping » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 1:21 AM UTC

eganist wrote: post #5

So given that I may likely be hiring in the web and mobile application security spaces again next year (I've _somehow_ filled all of my open positions this year; appsec is difficult to fill with external hires), I'm focusing specifically on three skills: • ability to assess tech/architecture risks in apps • experience in devops automation ("secdevops" if you will) • proven skill in communication regardless of depth T…

Thanks for this post. I've had that book on my shelf for months now, and I'm going to start reading it. Thanks in general for the information here, it's helped validate a few suspicions I've had, cheers!

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#208

Post by eganist » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 1:32 AM UTC

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #207

eganist wrote: post #5

So given that I may likely be hiring in the web and mobile application security spaces again next year (I've _somehow_ filled all of my open positions this year; appsec is difficult to fill with external hires), I'm focusing specifically on three skills: • ability to assess tech/architecture risks in apps • experience in devops automation ("secdevops" if you will) • proven skill in communication regardless of depth T…

Thanks for this post. I've had that book on my shelf for months now, and I'm going to start reading it. Thanks in general for the information here, it's helped validate a few suspicions I've had, cheers!

Of course! And by showing initiative, you're also motivating others and thereby live up to your username (for what it's worth =).

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#209

Post by dang » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 1:40 AM UTC

jayajay wrote: post #68

You sound like a very cynical, older person. I'm interested to hear your story and why you have developed strong views on things that make a pretty small difference in the grand scheme of things. Any bad experiences that we could learn from? Thanks in advance. Edit: I'm not trolling, sorry if my post sounds insincere. If there's a good fucking story behind your statements, I want to hear it.

Personal attacks are not welcome on HN and your uncivil behavior in this thread is easily a bannable offence, so please don't do this again. Instead, please read the site rules and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13165043 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Ask HN: Hiring managers, what tech skills will you be hiring for in 2017?

#210

Post by fma » Wed, Dec 14, 2016, 2:14 AM UTC

eganist wrote: post #150

sidcool wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my absolutely favorite work. I love coding, but I absolutely love enabling developers by providing a solid architecture and DevOps ready infrastructure. Would love it.

Nice. If your background is strong in automation engineering, you can frankly probably get an appsec engineer position at most decent in-house shops right now just because so many of them are trying to avoid relying on consultants for pentests and assessments. One of the larger challenges right now at most firms building out internal appsec programs is to get to a point where security-focused static code analysis and…

I wasn't aware that was a big problem. My company is a large corporate company and I feel we lag behind a lot of things. However we have automated static code analysis through HP Fortify. It points to our build, scans and reports are generated automatically. Someone on the app security team needs to run the HP Webscan for pen test.

I'm a senior developer and I made a name for myself when we started having the requirement. I helped secure ~10 webapps as I was the most knowledgeable about security amongst the devs.

The app sec guys I know at my company, though intelligent, are not strong developers. There were times I spun a story to get them to mark something as false positive - or I knew what the scan flagged for and coded around it. I know, bad practice, but sometimes the scanners mark something as critical when IMHO it's not.

Once our apps were secure, maintenance is pretty low as we'd just fix any new vulnerabilities introduced by coding, or updated by the scanner tools.

Do you see a need for strong developers in app sec world? If so, any recommendations on ways to make the leap? Not really looking for something where I just click a button and scan...but something more in depth that would use my development experience. I have a Security+ cert, doubt I can get a CISSP since I don't know anyone with it to get sponsored.