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Ask HN: What is one learnable skill you wish was more common in job applicants?

17 pointsfloatingatoll29 comments

HN, what is ONE learnable skillset you wish was more common in applicants to jobs at your company?

We all take for granted the various views we have about skills versus demand, and hiring ads always show the “bucket list” but never say “We want more applicants with a focus on skill XYZ this time around”. So, for those of you that have hired or are hiring in the past year, what is the one skill you wish more applicants had experience with, over all other skills that they could learn?

- Please choose one skill; no ties, no top three, no shopping lists. Picking one is hard, but it’s worth it.

- I’d especially enjoy hearing from YC startups that posted hiring ads on HN this past year.

- Sample answers: C# operations, git rebase, resolving differences through compromise, understanding EDR/XDR

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Written communication, with a special focus on “writing for an audience” (and by that I mean understanding what your audience needs and not trying to impress them). My company is now almost entirely remote and my team works with a lot of internal stakeholders. Being able to write clearly in a way that makes sense to your target audience is seriously underrated. Some people may think it’s “just” IM and Email but it makes a huge difference, at least for me.

A million times this, like fuck me I'm from the IM/SMS generation but I swear the ability to write a decent email is god tier. One solid email can save tens of man hours of meeting time.

Yes, in the past week I've had two unclear emails from lower level staff. The second one I picked up on the error quickly, the first had me chasing my tail for a while. Words have meanings, and learning to use industry jargon correctly is important.

Proficiency in any reasonably common scripting language. I don't even care which. PowerShell, Z shell, Python, Ruby, just please know enough of something to write scripts to perform the odd task we don't have a dedicated tool for. Feels like I'm always running into a new employee who freezes when asked to, like, write a script to pull our phone number inventory and compile a list of vendor IDs for the numbers. Here are the API docs, here is the format of the file I need you to produce, please figure it out.

Bat and ksh here. Powershell a little, but I think there's some limited execute ability due to some security setting where I work (don't remember exactly). Still, I suck because I'm "slow".

> Feels like I'm always running into a new employee who freezes when asked to, like, write a script to pull our phone number inventory and compile a list of vendor IDs for the numbers. Here are the API docs, here is the format of the file I need you to produce, please figure it out.

Why did they get hired in the first place?

Compromises are a fact of life and I don’t fault hiring decisions for making them. We already know the relevant answer — scripting language familarity enough to do adhoc data processing — and this question doesn’t focus on understanding of that desire and could be seen as providing sensitive hiring decision information, so I discourage answering it.

It's hard to just pick one but I'll mention one that I don't think get's enough attention: Working on external codebases.

We all use frameworks and libraries that are maintained outside of the company we work for. Those frameworks and libraries help us to do our job faster and it's fantastic that they are available to us. However, sometimes those external codebases cause a problem for us. The abstraction breaks or falls down. There's a bug in that external codebase. If no one at the company is capable of debugging and understanding that codebase then when the abstraction fails us a lot of time is wasted.

It's also really good for a company to be able to contribute fixes to an open source codebase back. It's healthy for the open source project and in turn makes that project better for the company.

I'd say communication (speaking 'client'), just being able to get on with other people.

Code is very easy, people are 'hard'.

Years back I worked with a gent who developed the back end of the site that saw enough traffic to support our team via advertisements.

He was, from my perspective, very sharp. He said that his manager at a previous job stated that the most valuable skill was getting along with others. The manager stated that he could train any human monkey to code, but the interpersonal relationships skills were tops in his view.

Seems like the current labor market disagrees. Nobody wants to train.

That is just false.

Very few people can code.

Almost everyone is capable of getting along with other people.

The ability to type 30 WPM or more.

Too many co-workers type very slowly, and I have to shamefully admit, I avoid helping them at times because to much time is wasted on simply watching then type.

This is such a strange comment for me.

It reminds me when I sometimes ask younger developers for advice, and I can feel their frustration when I don’t do things at the speed they would like.

But, for me that is missing the point. I generally ask advice to spark conversation and learn from each other. The speed of carrying out the act is irrelevant.

Not pushing complexity to appear more 'intelligent'

Author, what does "C# operations" mean to you?

It was my brain’s first output for RAND<programming-language> CONCAT RAND<dev, ops, qa, sales, pm>.

Asking questions and listening to stakeholders.

People say that. Then I get told stuff like "just build it the way I say" (and then they discover they're wrong 3 weeks later). And I get a bad rating.

I wish the HN crowd would talk more about this.

I find the key to this is documentation.

Outlining clearly that you disagree with this approach, the risks involved and suggest an alternative but in the end you’re happy to build it as they suggest.

Listening skills.

Math

Could you be more specific?

rust programming,

gdb/lldb/windbg

multi-thread programming

Which one of these five skills mattered most to you, and was hardest to find, this past year?

> rust programming

Why do you need all candidates to know this?

My original Ask question offers a more nuanced approach here:

“Why do you desire that more candidates know Rust?”.

(I don’t need to know personally, but duly noted anyways.)

This did not answer my question.

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