

Hottest IT skills for 2010 - Sandman
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/345529/6_hottest_skills_for_2010?taxonomyId=10&pageNumber=1

======
ojbyrne
Tom Silver, senior vice president for North America at Dice Holdings Inc is
quoted in the article:

"Demand is growing for people who know specialized programming languages like
Ruby on Rails and AJAX"

So clearly clueful recruitment is not a skill in demand.

~~~
mschy
Having spoke with the press, I give him a lot of latitude on that one.

There are lots of explanations that come to my mind before I'd assume he's
clueless.

~~~
patio11
Right. People don't realize it, but quotes are not "quotes", because most
people do not naturally speak in flawlessly edited quotable soundbites.

It probably sounded like:

Interviewer: So what, uh, do you see as the big, you know, trends in the
coming year? In the industry?

Interviewee: Well, I think, you know, there's something of a t-trend towards
specialization.

Interviewer: You mean in programming lang--

Interviewee: Exactly. Languages, specialized techniques, you know, Rails,
AJAX, all that jazz.

~~~
mschy
Exactly. And even when the person does manage to speak in a perfect soundbite,
they're often talking to somebody who isn't an expert, and it might well get
screwed up during transcription, writing or editing.

The first time I talked to a reporter, the reporter swapped my descriptions of
opportunities and threats, so I looked like I had absolutely no understanding
of the market at all. After that, I started taking "quotes" with a much larger
grain of salt.

------
10ren
It's so refreshing and simplifying to look at what people need - what is
actually useful and helpful to them - rather than what is technically "cool"
at the moment.

------
ryanpetrich
Anyone else notice that their "6 hottest skills" cover nearly everything?

------
gaius
No sysadmins or DBAs to implement and operate all these new systems? Seems a
bit strange and undermines the rest of the article.

------
hcayless
"He also needs developers with open-source expertise -- a rare talent, he
says" - Shane Kilgore

Surely OSS developers aren't particularly rare beasts. But perhaps they don't
want to talk to him. That and the bit about AJAX the programming language make
me think these folks are barking up the wrong trees.

~~~
gaius
It is pretty rare. If you hire someone with, I dunno, 5 years experience in
industry X (where I mean an actual industry, not "the web industry") the
chances that they were using what most people would understand as open source
are pretty low. I mean, using bash as your shell or emacs or whatever doesn't
count - no-one gets paid for their amazing shell and text editing skills...

------
polynomial
Is it just me or is Performance Tuning distinctly missing from this list?

------
j_baker
It kind of scary that tech support is #2... I still have nightmares.

~~~
techsupporter
As someone who does tech support for a living, I'm thrilled that it's #2. This
is a job I enjoy doing and that, I believe, serves a useful purpose. Pity too
many companies that supply tech support believe it's best done for pennies on
the dollar somewhere else (on the basis that it's a "cost center"). The value
of a company backing its products with knowledgeable, helpful staff,
especially when it's accessible to the small-to-medium business market, is
incredibly high.

I also like doing help desk work, so maybe I'm just crazy.

~~~
sailormoon
Crazy in a good way! Thank god for people like you!

Like many people here I've done my dues in tech support and I know what you
mean about the difference between genuinely trying to help and train people,
and providing minimal "cost centre" level support. Maybe I would like the
first kind. Never seen it though.

