Ask HN: What skills should an aspiring web developer focus on? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What skills should an aspiring web developer focus on?

7 pointsJ-dawg6 comments

I'm an aspiring web developer looking for my first role. I keep finding junior roles which are low paid yet have very long lists of required skills, and I often fulfill no more than ~50% of the requirements. As a result, I find myself running around like a headless chicken trying to learn everything, dabbling with different languages and frameworks and doing endless tutorials. This approach is just getting me frustrated and depressed, as nothing seems to stick. What approaches should I try when it comes to learning new things? Seeing as it's impossible to learn everything, how do I pick which skills (languages, frameworks etc) to focus on?

Here's an example taken straight from an ad for a job paying £18,000 per year. (This is a fairly low salary for the UK, it's about 1.5x the minimum wage).

•Proficient use of HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, Photoshop •Sound knowledge of JQuery, Ajax and PHP and cross browser requirements •Proven responsive web design and progressive enhancement techniques •Experience of working with tabular HTML emails and deployment platforms •Working knowledge of Flash, After Effects, Edge or HTML 5 animation •Comfortable with CMS platforms including Wordpress / Drupal / Umbraco etc •Keen interest in the application of new trends and software developments •Attention to detail and the ability to QA own work •Ability to multi-task and prioritise •Excellent communication skills •Team player - cross departmental teamwork required

They seem to be asking for an awful lot for £18k - an experienced Javascript and PHP developer, who also knows Photoshop, Flash and 3 different CMSs. I feel like it would take months to aquire all of these skills, are they really expecting a candidate to have all of them? If not, which ones should I concentrate on?

A common phrase my colleagues often hear out of me goes something like this: "The two greatest works of 21st century fiction are technical job descriptions and the resumes that were written to match those descriptions." A high percentage of the time they aren't looking for all of those skills at all, and sometimes none of those skills at all. They just hope that description will attract resumes. They have cast a wide net and are looking to see what they will catch.

I put out an "intern" level job description about 5 years ago now. At first I put down the bare minimum skills we needed. We were not only willing to train but expected we would have to, so the description was little more than "Good personality", "desire to learn to develop software", "can type", things like that. We got zero response. So I added in more and more things until I had a wide enough net to get the right person. We hired a person who had two years of school under his belt and hadn't worked in a professional development position at all. He had no idea how to develop and was scared to death that he didn't have the skills we needed! We convinced him it would be fine and we would train him. He did a lot of learning on his own after he took the job and we did a lot of helping him with training. He didn't make much but he learned a lot. Fast forward 5 years and now he's quite an adept engineer and works consulting in the DevOps area of things, doing exceptionally well (better than many of the people who trained him!).

A few take aways for you: First, don't try to learn everything in a job description before going in for an interview. You might find that they don't really want all of that stuff anyway.

Second, if you want to know the best skill you can work on as a Web Developer it is simply your personal and speech skills. I hired that guy above because he was nice to talk to, easy for the team to get along with, and honest. He was also obviously smart but definitely new in his skills. His personality got him the job.

Finally, as for actual technical skills, HTML, CSS, and Javascript in general will get you through most of the "technical" questions in a junior interview. Keep up on those and you'll do fantastic.

Edit: I obviously can't type today. Fixed some of the many typos.

Thanks for your post, I found it encouraging. I still don't quite understand the logic behind posting intimidating-looking job ads. It seems the likely outcome is scaring away the "shy but potentially good" candidates like the guy in your example, while favouring self-confident types who are able to talk up their skills and blag their way through. Maybe this is even deliberate?

Your post has given me some hope. I'd love to find a role like the one in your example.

Again, one of the biggest problems I had was when I didn't add enough things to the job description, people didn't apply. I think people are just conditioned to look for lists of skills. The entire job hunt is currently a mess in this business.

I did, and still do, have to "weed out" a lot of the horrible candidates. A lot of people can talk up their skills and brag through an interview and you have to be quite careful.

If I can help you further in finding your first gig, I would be glad to. Feel free to kick me an email at my HN username at that giant Google owned email service ;) you'll find something great! Keep your chin up and you'll make it.

All the answers that the other guys provide is awesome, but let me give you an answer from the other side of the pond...

There is just one skill you need:

The ability to persevere and actually build something that other people can/will use.

Once you're there (like really really there), you won't need some role where they paint a rosy picture but you end up doing WordPress hacks for a living (although to me personally, I'd never overlook any type of work that puts food on the table).

Also, you'll become more confident in yourself and end up doing things like 12 startups in 12 months [1].

Truth be told, if I had to run a survey on HN right now and ask just one question: "How many of you are coming to HN everyday hoping to be inspired but haven't written one line of production-code for some idea you have?"

I will get at least 40 "Yes" answers. Take that answer and multiply it for bigger communities, because while we're all reading about awesome Growth Hacks or that 1 guy who builds cool side-projects, the rest of us are doing jack.

[1]: http://www.wired.com/2014/08/12-startups-in-12-months/

They're not expecting a professional with all of that. They probably don't know what they're asking and just copied and pasted acronyms from another job openings.

You should be skeptical with jobs requiring both coding skills and artistic ones. Photoshop is a nice tool, but hardly a requirement for a web developer. Same for Flash nowadays.

Focus on core web technologies: HTTP, HTML, CSS and Javascript for browsers. These will give you strong background to understand more technologies and tools.

If you're doing frontend work, then Photoshop will almost certainly be used at some point, so it'd be useful to have at least some working knowledge of it (i.e. slicing, picking colours etc).

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