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Programming IT

What Tech Skills Do Employers Want? SQL, Java, Python, and AWS (ieee.org) 121

Posted by EditorDavid from the outlook-is-cloudy dept.
"What tech skills do U.S. employers want? Researchers at job search site Indeed took a deep dive into its database to answer that question," reports IEEE Spectrum: [A]t least for now, expertise in SQL came out on top of the list of most highly sought after skills, followed by Java. Python and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are coming on fast, and, should trends continue, may take over the lead in the next year or two...

Indeed's team considered U.S. English-language jobs posted on the site between September 2014 and September 2019; those postings encompassed 571 tech skills. Over that period, Docker, the enterprise container platform, sits at number 20 on the list today, but that is the result of a dramatic climb over that five-year period. Demand for proficiency in that platform-as-a-service grew more than 4000 percent, from a barely registering share of 0.1 percent of job post mentions in 2014 to 5.1 percent today. Azure jumped more than 1000 percent during that period, from 0.6 percent to 6.9 percent; and the general category of machine learning climbed 439 percent, closely followed by AWS at 418 percent.

Indeed's researchers note that the big jumps in demand for engineers skilled in Python stems from the boom in data scientist and engineer jobs, which disproportionately use Python.
"Python" has overtaken "Linux" in just the last two years, while in the same period "AWS" overtook C++, C, C# and .net.
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What Tech Skills Do Employers Want? SQL, Java, Python, and AWS More

What Tech Skills Do Employers Want? SQL, Java, Python, and AWS

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  • How to update your resume (Score:5, Funny)

    by Way Smarter Than You ( 6157664 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @03:42AM (#59447900)
    Add: 20 years Azure, 12 years docker, 15 years kubernetes, 17 years AWS, 15 years Amazon (yes, I know), 10 years of machine learning and 15 years of AI. Do not add SQL! The last thing you want is to be the dba.

  • How is "AWS" a "tech skill"? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24, 2019 @03:53AM (#59447904)

    Shit has gone beyond hopeless.

    • I can haz cheeseburder api?

    • Re: How is "AWS" a "tech skill"? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by astrofurter ( 5464356 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @05:22AM (#59448000)

      How is AWS not a tech skill?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cshark ( 673578 )

      AWS is more or less essential in real enterprise shops these days. Everything's containerized, usually with docker, and AWS buckets work well with it. AWS does have a learning curve. It's got a nice friendly web ui, but if you don't know what you're doing with it, you will blow something up. So yes, it's definitely a skill, and I would argue, an absolutely essential one in today's job market.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • it's just an admission that we value our in-house IT so little

          That's all there is to it. On site IT is expensive in the eyes of upper management, unless your domain requires custom everything. Additionally, if on-site fucks up, then it's on you. If off-site fucks up, you can just sue. Litigation is super cheap and insanely accessible in the US, so things that lend that will be more favored than not.

          we'd rather give up any opportunity of innovating

          Small and middle sized companies aren't in that business in a pure sense. Innovation at anything less than a large player is basically figuring out ways to rearrange t

      • Nothing of any real importance uses AWS. AWS is for entertainment systems, not actual work.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Njovich ( 553857 )

      Experience with AWS is a pretty real thing, especially if you are a 'modern' employer that expects people to be at 100% efficiency in their first week of starting on a new project.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Nah... (Score:2, Troll)

    by cshark ( 673578 )

    If you're in the commodity skill market, you're a sucker. High demand is a game that gives employers all the negotiation power.

    You don't want the jobs that anyone can fill. You want the jobs that people are killing their brothers and flying people across the world to staff. Trust me on this.

    And in 2020 the two hot skills are Golang and Magento.

    You're welcome.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      When you say "Magento", you actually mean LAMP. And that was a commodity skill in 2010 already.

      Thanks for nothing.

    • Re:Nah... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @04:30AM (#59447938)

      Ohh. Thank you for reminding me that we're in another dotcom cycle, one with new exciting technologies which will evaporate within 2 years. "Magento"? Please permit me to quote the Wikipedia article:

      > Magento employs the MySQL or MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework

      Thank you for making me laugh about a completely unstable fad technology.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cshark ( 673578 )

        Uh huh, and nobody freaking knows how to write for it.
        Jobs in this particular toolset are going unfilled for years.
        But if you want to laugh at something like that, be my guest.

        • "Jobs in this particular toolset are going unfilled for years."

          Guess those jobs must pay like shit? It's a web framework, not rocket surgery.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cshark ( 673578 )

            It's a web framework, not rocket surgery.

            Exactly. And yet, here we are. We've got 8 open positions for any M2 back end skills on the team I work on. And the eta is anywhere from 9-12 months to fill, and these guys, the stuffed shirts, guys who are very formal and old fashioned, are willing to consider remote workers for the first time in the history of the corporation. It's pretty common. Every magento shop I've ever worked in has had problems like this. Different companies have flown me across the country a dozen times to work in their implementa

            • "It's the most money you'll ever see writing php."

              So it pays better than flipping burgers at McDonald's - that's a start. Care to quote the hourly rate or salary your company is offering? I still suspect that's the biggest part of the staffing challenge.

              • We weren't hiring magneto but we're paying a long term contractor $250/hr to set up some rrd based monitoring crap for 6+ months. If I had time I could've done it myself in a few weeks. But: I didn't have time and more importantly.... it wasn't my budget. Welcome to big company life. Is $250/hr, full time, remote, for 6 months, to do easy work, too little for you?

                • That sounds okay. And you found no takers? Where did you advertise?

                  • Lots of takers. Probably a lot of people have the right skills (or could easily learn them) but they failed some moronic whiteboard coding test.

                    The hiring difference between tech and engineering is staggering.

                    My engineering resume has little to no technologies on it. It's about the projects I did. Tech seems to just be full of what languages/frameworks/stacks someone used.

                    The same goes for the interview. White board coding interview tests prove nothing. It'd be the engineering equivalent of just throwing "W

                    • We do practical coding exercises with a full ide and auto complete. If you cant easily do simple exercises like flip a string youâ(TM)re out.

                    • practical coding exercises
                      flip a string

                      How many times do you flip a string in production code? Are you seriously having every single coder flip strings all day every day? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just make one library to flip strings and call it a day?

                      I can think of zero times in my 10+ years of working that I've needed to flip a string. Lots of other edge things like fixed pointing (that was learned on the job) that isn't really ever taught but glossed over.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

                      How many times do you flip a string in production code? Are you seriously having every single coder flip strings all day every day?

                      If you can't do it, then you're not a coder. Seriously. You're just a trained monkey.

                    • Making someone write a string flip sounds like a monkey doing trained tricks more than not.

                      So I ask again, how many times to you flip a string in production? You can say you ask people to flip strings in an interview, but you can't say you have them do 'practical' coding exercises.

                    • ... seriously? Its an ARRAY and we ask you to flip the order of the content. If you cant do that you might be working in tech but youâ(TM)re not a software engineer. You learn that shit in your first CS class. Weâ(TM)re not even asking an optimized way to do it, we just want to see if you can do it at all. Working with arrays is a pretty darn common job in CS.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                      Sorry, monkey. Ability to improvise is a sign of intelligence that trained monkeys lack. Do go back to your pre-trained "in production" code in PHP.

                      And it's not even like string reversal is a super-complicated task.

                    • Is "flipping a string" like "flipping a burger"?

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Cyberax ( 705495 )
                      More like "flipping a house", it seems.

                    • Swing and a miss.

                      Ability to improvise is a sign of intelligence that trained monkeys lack.

                      Then why not ask a question that requires improvisation?

                      And it's not even like string reversal is a super-complicated task.

                      I never said it was. I asked how you reconcile saying "practical coding exercises" and "flipping a string".

                      Do go back to your pre-trained "in production" code in PHP.

                      ISO-26262, ASIL-D, C & Simulink Models. Web is boring.

                    • Re: (Score:2)

                      by Cyberax ( 705495 )

                      Then why not ask a question that requires improvisation?

                      Like, string reversal?

                      I never said it was. I asked how you reconcile saying "practical coding exercises" and "flipping a string".

                      Quite easily. If you can't do basic stuff like reversing a string, then you don't have any coding experience. You are simply a trained monkey.

                      ISO-26262, ASIL-D, C & Simulink Models. Web is boring.

                      OK, a Simulink trained monkey.

                    • Like, string reversal?

                      Rote memorization.

                      Quite easily. If you can't do basic stuff like reversing a string,

                      Rote memorization. Just like asking memorizing the steam table. Because clearly if you haven't memorized the steam table then you've never done any HVAC calculations

                      then you don't have any coding experience

                      You can tell yourself whatever you want. Rote memorization is rote memorization. Especially if you're not doing it in production code.

                      OK, a Simulink trained monkey.

                      Because that code never gets turned into C and no one has to make that interface.

                      Go flip some strings Boomer.

                    • You can tell yourself what ever you want you think about my career. It doesn't change what I actually do for a living.

                      You learn that shit in your first CS class

                      Thank God engineering doesn't hire like CS. I couldn't imagine how far behind we'd be if we forced all mid career engineers to memorize something from statics or dynamics. Engineering resumes and interviews are structured around actual projects, not pop quizzes.

                      Working with arrays is a pretty darn common job in CS.

                      Because all languages treat strings as arrays. /s

                • I'll take it as a fixed price contract. You deliver the specifications and the $240,000 and I will deliver you what you require specified in exactly six months time. You will not pay "by the hour", you will pay a fixed price for the performance of the work contracted. I will not do work that is not in the contract. Deal?

                  • Lol sorry, it was a year ago and the guy was a known factor and helped from original design and specs through production launch and did some other random stuff on the side. But appreciate the offer.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by nagora ( 177841 )

                "It's the most money you'll ever see writing php."

                So it pays better than flipping burgers at McDonald's - that's a start. Care to quote the hourly rate or salary your company is offering? I still suspect that's the biggest part of the staffing challenge.

                I don't know about cshark but we pay our PHP coders £45,000 (~$57K) per year at start, along with 25 days paid holiday (with public holidays on top of that) and a very large pension. Senior posts get more.

                I don't know why you'd think it was cheaper to hire good PHP programmers than any other type of good programmer (while idiots seem to be cross-platform).

            • Great. So are you paying $800,000 to fill though positions? Oh no, you are paying $40k? Why? And LOL at "hourly rates".

        • Because Magento is a crap framework. You can't find anyone with experience because no one with experience with Magento wants the job.

          The only way around that is to increase salaries to the point where you could just hire really talented people to make a bespoke system that blows Magento out of the water.

      • Those aren't tears of laughter, and this is where IT is today.

        Don't doubt for a second there are high paying jobs to work with that "solution". It's par for the course now because open source is the new "enterprise software".

        Go slap a python sticker on a MacBook and enjoy the ride. Or rust, or golang, or fucking Perl, I don't think it even matters right now, you could just pick anything because your job is to integrate a bunch of shitty software any means necessary, the brand of duct tape is kind of point

    • Bitch, please. (Score:5, Funny)

      by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @04:39AM (#59447946)
      I'm pretty sure a hotter skill than Magento is migrating from Magento to Shopify. Sometimes Woocommerce, but mostly Shopify.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Would be nice to see the relative value of skills, i.e. some combination of how in-demand they are and how they pay.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cshark ( 673578 )

        That would be great, but pay for this stuff varies dramatically by region in the US. Outside the US, it swings even more chaotically. Rates in places like Barcelona aren't going to match up with Omaha or India, is what I'm getting at.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cshark ( 673578 )

          My rule of thumb, feel them out when you talk to them. Quote a rate that's almost high enough, but not quite high enough for them to walk away, and let them come back with a counter offer. You'll know when you get there if you went too low.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The moment I hit submit I thought of that too. So we need pay, demand and cost of living in the area where the jobs are. £100k goes a lot further in some places than in others.

    • The hottest skill is managing other people.

      But on the tech side, one of the hottest skills is mathematical modeling. Do that, and you're definitely not competing with bootcamp script kiddies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cshark ( 673578 )

        Yeah, but managing other people, while a good stable long term job, doesn't pay for shit.
        I've been making more than anyone who manages me for well over a decade.

        You're probably right about modelling though.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Trust me on this.

      If anybody says "trust me on this", the one thing you should do is be very suspicious. This almost universally is used in connection with very bad advice, and this instance here is no exception.

  • if you write it in Bash.

    These are all popular skills, though there are common practices to dislike about all of them. Python is burdened by the instability of "pip install", and Java is burdened by ant, maven, and gradle all pulling in unknown modules with unknown dependencies. AWS's relience on Python for modules such as "boto3" and "botocore" are themselves unstable.

    SQL means different things to different people. For some, it's only Microsoft SQL. For others, it means one mysql, postgresql, SQL, mariadb,

    • It is just simple stuff like in MS SQL you have to shout GO all the time to get it to do anything. The important stuff is mostly the same.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DeBaas ( 470886 )

        in MS SQL you have to shout GO all the time to get it to do anything.

        oh no, did they implement Cortana in it now...

    • and Java is burdened by ant, maven, and gradle all pulling in unknown modules with unknown dependencies.
      Ant does not manage dependencies.
      Maven and Gradle, use dependency descriptions: so the damn dependencies are well known, that is the purpose of those tools!!

      If you mean transitive dependencies then again: no, they are not unknown. They are noted in the build files of the referred dependencies, obviously. Both Maven and Gradle have a command line option to simply show all dependencies, can hardly be that a

    • 'Python is burdened by the instability of "pip install"'

      Try pip-tools

      https://github.com/jazzband/pi... [github.com]

      • The problem is not listing the dependencies after the fact. It's using pip, at all, to pull in quite unpredictable and often conflicting dependencies. The Java build tools have the same problem, as does CPAN for perl.

  • C++ Programmers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lucasnate1 ( 4682951 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @04:47AM (#59447952) Homepage

    Do you think it is a bad time to be a C++ programmer? or a good one because we are becoming rare and still required?

    • C++ programmers are not exactly rare.
      People who still want to program in it are.
      Especially when they enter an embedded C++ shop and get told after they signed: those features we don't use in our development here ... /me counting features, shacking heads: ah you are using a C++ compiler to compile "C like" code ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cshark ( 673578 )

      I really hate to say this, because I still have a soft spot in my heart for C++, but people in the private sector talk about it with a kind of disdain that you usually only see reserved for dinosaurs like Cold Fusion or ancient Microsoft technologies. The big place you see C++ today is in embedded mobile systems, a lot of small devices, a lot of war. Some online trading, but most of that's moving to more modern stuff like Go.

      Like I said, I don't believe in the whole high demand thing. I think it's a huge sc

    • Most of the tech industry isn't C++. If you are good in C++, you will need to be good in a field that C++ is used in. Some kind of performance-critical, low-level, number-crunchy sort of thing.

      But if you like the world of metal, speed, and danger, the jobs are there. People who work in that space know better than to deploy Python.

    • If you are doing mathematical modeling then c++ is pretty big. Your choices for that are basically C, C++ and Fortran and C++ is usually be far the best option, especially with things like Threading Building Blocks.

      This also takes you way outside of the normal code monkey stuff.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      It always was and always will be a bad time to be a 1-trick pony. Sure, for a short time, your skills may be sought after, but that can change rapidly.

      That said, C++ was always a barely usable monster that failed to solve the thing it was designed for. It is probably not going to be used for a lot of new projects. My recommendation: Add at least Python to your skills and maybe some proficiency to add C modules (warning: OO C, not C++, used may blow your mind...).

      • Joel Spolsky hiring C++ programmers (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Latent Heat ( 558884 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:22AM (#59448552)

        Some long while ago when he was posting a lot on his blog, Joel Spolsky explained why he was hiring coders skilled in C++ to work in Visual Basic 6.

        His shop used Visual Basic because he didn't want to pay for the time to develop desktop client-side apps in C++. He wanted C++ programmers because they would find Visual Basic easy and pound out GUI code with it. The Microsoft way of doing GUIs in Windows is, shall one say, baroque. He didn't want people qualified as Visual Basic programmers because they would do Visual Basic-y things and turn his software product into a pile of, ahem, mud.

        Maybe a C++ programmer who was willing to swallow their pride and code in Visual Basic was also someone who would take orders from Joel without complaining?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Sounds like a very good reason not to advertise yourself as C++ coder. Primarily being used as a GUI monkey is just an insult to any real coder.

          Incidentally, I think OO is mostly a failure. GUIs and some data-structure libraries may actually be the only good application areas. I have mostly gone back to procedural, it is clearer, simpler and easier to write.

    • Well, the games industry uses C++ a lot. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @09:09AM (#59448370)

      It is the traditional "fast, but not too low level" language, and that is not going away.

      Maybe a less ugly language will be used. But since everyone in the field comes from C++, a new language would have no chance, unless it was sufficiently easy to transition to from C++. So you're safe.

      And I say that as somebody who hates C++'s living guts (and the undead ones too) (as well as the skin and bones and everything ;).

      • a new language would have no chance, unless it was sufficiently easy to transition to from C++. So you're safe.

        This is exactly why Java and C# were able to catch on so fast. If you already know C++ the syntax is extremely similar and the only learning bit is learning the libraries (Java and .NET specifically). Realistically you could think of Java and C# as C++ "skins" to interface with their respective libraries.

  • "proficient at dealing with managers" (Score:5, Funny)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @06:10AM (#59448066)

    Always put that on my resume.
    At least it keeps away the employers you don't want to work for.

  • everything. They expect you to be an expert at everything. No, they're not willing to pay what someone who really is an expert at all tech would cost though.

  • And they are _still_ doing it wrong (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @08:26AM (#59448294)

    What they need is competent engineers. What they ask for is narrow-band specialists.

  • Whole industries where I wod join the competing movement just to completely eradicate them.

    Like the "Webify ALL the things!" inner-platform effect fallacy crowd that grew around the WhatWG, and sadly doesn't have Xzibit as a honorary member.

    These days, I write mission-critical software in Haskell, and (literal) toys (and games) in functional-stylel Python, and if somebody would demand a "web" version, and I had no choice, he would probably get the code compiled to WebAssembly, and a HTML adapter using a (GL

  • Rather niche definitions? (Score:3)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday November 24, 2019 @10:05AM (#59448512)

    This seems to be a rather niche definition of tech and technologies.

    No C? Simulink Embedded Coder? CAN/LIN/FlexRay, RS485, UART/RS232?

    And if we get into process buzzwords: DO178, ISO26262, IEC61508.

  • After I became an escaped mental patient from Intel Corporation, I learned Verilog to program and FPGA and I found it very exciting and satisfying. Because I am not looking for a job, I don't know what the market is. However, it's a fun hobby .

    If you are interested, I have a project for a persistence of vision light wand. If you are in Bellingham, Washington, you may have seen me dancing in the streets with it.

    If you are interested in the code, I do have it on github at Here [github.com]

    Mark Allyn

  • Do that and you're employable.

  • The problem with these kinds of articles is that we forget that "tech" has a wide reach, and any particular skill set will only apply to a particular job. Tech includes bio-engineers, food chemists, and UX designers as much as it does programmers or admins, and all of those have wildly different skill sets.

  • that is all they really want.

  • The holy grail of software managers, agile philosophy etc is to break down the software projects into sufficiently small number of basic coding issues, Almost to a function level. That way your resources are large number of bodies, who are totally interchangeable. This allows them to slice and dice the projects ship them to wherever you can find those bodies cheaply. They are largely interchangeable and they move around a lot. So there will be lots of open positions posted for them. These guys are the moder

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