Ask HN: What tech stack is in demand, and why? - pydox
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LiamPa
Slightly out of date now but this gives you a good idea of what companies want
(no why though)

[https://blog.whoishiring.io/june-2017-in-
numbers/](https://blog.whoishiring.io/june-2017-in-numbers/)

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shakna
COBOL and Fortran. Probably with some z/OS as well.

Much of the world's financial systems run on it, replacing it is infeasible,
but the expert's in this area are aging out (and many have retired more than
once). But the tech still needs maintaining, and is difficult to work with.

Fewer and fewer grad students seem interested in learning it, and the
expectation that you'll stay and work on this stack for 20+ years is something
that drives others away.

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raverbashing
These systems will be fixed and then tossed out

Nothing is infeasible to replace, it might be costly, but not infeasible

And of course IBM is happy to get paid millions to keep backward compatibility
on the systems they sell

Nobody wants to invest their time learning a dying platform that is good for
nothing but a dead end job at a bank and won't teach anything usable in any
form of modern system (hope you like wearing a tie for your job as well)

(Fortran is still used, z/OS might be dying down as well but it runs some
modern software)

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Juliate
That's exactly what we were told in 1996 (21 years ago that is) when I entered
my engineering school: to disregard Cobol and Fortran, because, you know, OLD
tech. Won't matter much longer.

If the cost of training peons to make it last and run is less than the cost of
rebuilding it, be it from scratch or piece by piece, it will matter longer
(that's the point of view of insurances, banks and big corps today, and what's
still happening in the IT industry).

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dtech
They might be maintained for a foreseeable time, but if you take a job
maintaining them you've committed your entire career to only do that. That's
not appetizing to young engineers.

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expertentipp
As for the web development the situation currently stabilized as an oligopoly
between Facebook (React) and Google (Angular). Some projects are trying Vue,
some leftover ones with Backbone, Meteor here and there, but it's overall a
minor share.

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sp527
Share of new projects being spun up in Angular is probably on a serious
decline as well. I don’t see too much future potential there. React will
probably dominate for the immediate future.

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kamac
Why nobody mentions ember? I thought it was the third most popular thing
behind react and angular?

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kenhwang
I think ember will stick around. I even think it'll overtake Angular one day
since it has a better dev/upgrade experience. I don't think it'll ever hit
mass appeal, partially because it's quite a niche cookie cutter and the
frontend world seems to value flexibility above all else.

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pandler
I have high hopes for Glimmer[1] though as something that can compete with
other view libraries and/or frameworks. I'm especially glad that Glimmer
diverges from the Ember brand a bit, because there seems to be a lot of
outdated (mis)conceptions about Ember from older versions.

I personally feel productive with Ember, but the custom object models and
getters and setters for everything are a bit of a turn off, especially after
working on an Angular project recently with typescript support. Mobx, for
instance, seems to be able to accomplish similar things as Ember but without
the custom object model and getters/setters.

[1] For those wondering, Glimmer is Ember's next iteration of view layer and
rendering engine, pulled out into a separate library. It's built from the
ground up (and so isn't subject to backwards compatibility with Ember just
yet), uses typescript, is component based, and it compiles down to op-codes
that are used to update the DOM instead of DOM-diffing.
[http://glimmerjs.com/](http://glimmerjs.com/)

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discordance
Stackoverflow Insights might help answer your question:

[https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-
la...](https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2017#technology-languages-
over-time)

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synicalx
Honestly not very exciting, and possible region specific to my neck of the
woods (South Australia): Office 365 and Azure.

Every non-tech company, and even some tech companies seem to be moving
whatever they can into Office 365 and Azure. Some are just moving Exchange,
others are moving Sharepoint, and some are just using Azure as an alternative
to running a VM farm on-prem (bit boring really). But MS is marketing this
HARD here and everyone seems to be buying the message.

Plenty of lower-tier 'Infrastructure Admin' type roles going all over the
place, most MSP's are looking for architecture and engineering types as well
in fairly high numbers (I count about 20-30 such roles on Linkedin). A lot of
Dev roles also seem to be angling towards "Experience with Data Lake/App
Service/Some other Azure-ey thing is preferred".

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pgsandstrom
Living in Sweden, it seems to be to be Java and .NET that keeps the world
running. React might be the most popular frontend library though.

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expertentipp
... and Java (i.e. TypeScript) in the front end, until someone realizes that
Java is nothing like JavaScript... now we have to hire some front end w* * *
*s and throw the pile of TS at them.

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EnderMB
In the .NET universe, demand seems to continue to grow in the UK, especially
in the CMS landscape.

However, demand for lower-paying jobs using open-source CMS's like Umbraco
seems to be rising, whereas the rates for contractors are rising for the
enterprise level choices like Sitecore.

I mention contractor rates because in Bristol companies are struggling to keep
experience in full-time development. For Umbraco, we're seeing the space grow
with more full-time people, whereas if you're a developer that can work with
Sitecore you can earn a LOT more by moving into contracting. Developers are
going from £40-50k roles into £550-600 a day roles as contractors, earning
over double what they were before. It's also lucrative for recruiters, as they
get a percentage of a bigger overall salary.

Sure, it's fairly niche, and it's as unglamorous as it gets, but the work is
there if you know this proprietary CMS as it is widely used by a number of
large businesses based on its marketing platforms.

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zaarn
Looking at the local newspaper, C# Client Applications, C++/Java Business
Applications and PHP+MySQL Websites with a few Node.js Jobs sprinkled in.

Some lonely ads are also asking for Ruby or Python.

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toyg
Do people still look up jobs in newspapers? I thought those ads were just
legally-mandated foils to prove companies had looked for local people before
importing cheaper foreign talent.

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zaarn
I do and they may be foils, I'm not sure on that, but if you send in your
application it's unlikely to get handled differently. It's a job ad.

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sabalaba
TensorFlow, Linear Algebra, Calculus and Probability are in high demand right
now. They’re the building blocks for Machine Learning.

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SimonPStevens
I'd question this. These things might be trending in mind share. And companies
looking to hire people with these skills might have somewhat of a shortage.
But I'm not sure they are actually in high demand.

It's easy to forget on HN that 90% of tech jobs are in 'dull' bread and butter
languages used in enterprises, and nothing to do with the latest trends.

I think the stack overflow jobs stats linked elsewhere in this thread says it
all... Java, JavaScript, Python are the most in demand languages right now.
Tensorflow doesn't even show up on their list of popular tools.

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collyw
SQL has been up there for the last 20 years. I doubt its going away any time
soon either.

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ojhughes
Kubernetes, not a stack per say but increasingly important and worth
understanding.

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mycat
Verilog and VHDL, and related software suite; Quartus, ISE, Vivado, etc.

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kyriakos
PHP, believe it or not there's huge demand

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rkwasny
This awesome new framework called PlainJS :)

Really efficient some say :)

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gotofritz
Absolutely not - very hard to get hired in any senior capability if that's all
you know

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arca_vorago
Bash and sql, because it's what really keeps things running, despite constant
claims by hipster-hackers about how you should be using something else.

Real IDE usage (vim/emacs).

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icebraining
Bash may keep things running, but how many developers need to know it? In my
limited experience, maybe 10%, and even they barely use it. It's just for
writing some bits of the infrastructure, which is then calcified for years.

~~~
pandler
I'm always really impressed when I check out the source of a bash program that
I use, and part of me wishes I could be at that level, but really I'm more
likely to use python for any non-trivial cli scripting. It's more that
sufficient for everything I've had to do so far, and python skills have much
wider applications beyond just scripting.

