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Today’s Top Tech Skills

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Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#51
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.

Lol. Are you new to technology or something?

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#52

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 like to structure my questions such that they could using HAVING or a CTE or subquery and not test on the piece of knowledge directly, but the application of knowledge.

Like in Python if you asked lots of questions with list of numbers ... and then generalized it to infinite lists of numbers. If the first case I'd like to see list comprehensions, and then generator expressions or possibly the use of itertools.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#53
post #47
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say smithing like, “weird to see Linux admin, instead of OS admin”. But doesn’t make sense in a business context, if you want a Linux admin.

The difference is that Linux isn't owned by a single company. It runs on virtually every platform, including all of these hosting providers.

Windows Admin vs OS Admin then.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#54
post #41

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…

because price ( aka salary / fee) is a function of supply and demand and it grows the more the skill is in demand. As simple as that. Let’s say you want to start a career as a freelance for example : what skill to you put forward ? You may say « but jobs requiring elixir are probably more interesting than sql/java ». I agree, but that is if there’s one position open at the time you’re looking , in the area you’re loo…

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.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#55

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…

You really don’t need to know transaction isolation to do the vast majority of work on a typical web app.

I wouldn't say so. Concurrency bugs, like lost updates, can be very subtle and hard to debug, and common databases don't prevent these kinds of bugs by default.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#57
post #47
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say smithing like, “weird to see Linux admin, instead of OS admin”. But doesn’t make sense in a business context, if you want a Linux admin.

The difference is that Linux isn't owned by a single company. It runs on virtually every platform, including all of these hosting providers.

Bingo! There isn't a cloud OS and then an standards-ish implementation of that standard. All of the clouds are bespoke and closed source. That said, nothing weird about needing specific knowledge for running on the specific thing.

If I run a motorpool that is all Prius, then I'll want Prius mechanics.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#58
post #29
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes, it is. I can build anything in Java and run it on any computer owned by anybody. AWS isn't a technology, it's just Amazon's computers and the constraints and interfaces they wrap around them.

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.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#59

How come C# is on the rise 11% but .NET is on the down -15%? Seems a bit odd to me

Well, it seems likely a lot of that is just measurement error, but there’s a lot of arenas where you’ve got “not quite .NET” environments. I’m thinking Unity and Mono for iPhone/Android.

Re: Today’s Top Tech Skills

#60

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…

You really don’t need to know transaction isolation to do the vast majority of work on a typical web app.

It can seem that way, but the consequence of not knowing them is lots of subtle race conditions. Granted, most webapps probably don't have enough users to trigger them too often, and the impact is often limited e.g. because the kinds of inconsistencies you can introduce don't actually matter that much in many cases.

For the majority of webapps, I'm not sure the default isolation level of MySQL and Postgres is an appropriate tradeoff, since I'd rather have correctness by default than performance by default.

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