Ask HN: What skills are essential for a back end engineer?

2 points·powerslacker··2 comments

What skills would you consider to be necessities when hiring for a backend engineer for the web? Soft skills, related software skills, programming knowledge, or anything else you can think of.

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(disclamer: I belong to the "show me your tables, and I don't need to see your code" camp)

- Strong data modelling skills

- Strong SQL skills

- Fluency in at least two of PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, Go, C, C++, C#, Java (more exotic languages like haskell, erlang, lisp a plus)

- Basic unix (most likely Linux) skills (basic commands, ip-route, unix-permissions, acls, superuser vs normal users, unix sockets, sysv, systemd, basic bash scripting) and hands on of at least two different "families" (redhat, debian, arch, slackware, gentoo, exherbo, and many more - ubuntu is in the debian family for example) of linux (or BSDs).

- Conceptually understanding of how networking works (ip-addresses (4&6), ports, unix sockets, subnets, routing, nat, ).

- Curious nature and an ability to keep asking questions in a friendly fashion (if the answer is not complete or shows that the question has been misunderstood)

- Basic HTML/CSS/Javascript skills

- Pragmatism - CVS - Ability to identity and isolate tasks and rely on CVS for incremental changes - Strong Database knowledge - Strong Algorithm & Data Structure knowledge - Any kind of C-derived programming language - Unix

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