Hottest IT skills for 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Hottest IT skills for 2010

computerworld.com

15 pointsSandman13 comments

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Tom Silver, senior vice president for North America at Dice Holdings Inc is quoted in the article:

"Demand is growing for people who know specialized programming languages like Ruby on Rails and AJAX"

So clearly clueful recruitment is not a skill in demand.

Having spoke with the press, I give him a lot of latitude on that one.

There are lots of explanations that come to my mind before I'd assume he's clueless.

Right. People don't realize it, but quotes are not "quotes", because most people do not naturally speak in flawlessly edited quotable soundbites.

It probably sounded like:

Interviewer: So what, uh, do you see as the big, you know, trends in the coming year? In the industry?

Interviewee: Well, I think, you know, there's something of a t-trend towards specialization.

Interviewer: You mean in programming lang--

Interviewee: Exactly. Languages, specialized techniques, you know, Rails, AJAX, all that jazz.

Exactly. And even when the person does manage to speak in a perfect soundbite, they're often talking to somebody who isn't an expert, and it might well get screwed up during transcription, writing or editing.

The first time I talked to a reporter, the reporter swapped my descriptions of opportunities and threats, so I looked like I had absolutely no understanding of the market at all. After that, I started taking "quotes" with a much larger grain of salt.

It's so refreshing and simplifying to look at what people need - what is actually useful and helpful to them - rather than what is technically "cool" at the moment.

Anyone else notice that their "6 hottest skills" cover nearly everything?

No sysadmins or DBAs to implement and operate all these new systems? Seems a bit strange and undermines the rest of the article.

"He also needs developers with open-source expertise -- a rare talent, he says" - Shane Kilgore

Surely OSS developers aren't particularly rare beasts. But perhaps they don't want to talk to him. That and the bit about AJAX the programming language make me think these folks are barking up the wrong trees.

It is pretty rare. If you hire someone with, I dunno, 5 years experience in industry X (where I mean an actual industry, not "the web industry") the chances that they were using what most people would understand as open source are pretty low. I mean, using bash as your shell or emacs or whatever doesn't count - no-one gets paid for their amazing shell and text editing skills...

Is it just me or is Performance Tuning distinctly missing from this list?

It kind of scary that tech support is #2... I still have nightmares.

As someone who does tech support for a living, I'm thrilled that it's #2. This is a job I enjoy doing and that, I believe, serves a useful purpose. Pity too many companies that supply tech support believe it's best done for pennies on the dollar somewhere else (on the basis that it's a "cost center"). The value of a company backing its products with knowledgeable, helpful staff, especially when it's accessible to the small-to-medium business market, is incredibly high.

I also like doing help desk work, so maybe I'm just crazy.

Crazy in a good way! Thank god for people like you!

Like many people here I've done my dues in tech support and I know what you mean about the difference between genuinely trying to help and train people, and providing minimal "cost centre" level support. Maybe I would like the first kind. Never seen it though.

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