Ask HN: What Skills Are Important Today?

2 points•nphardon•about 4 hours ago•2 comments•

#skills #important #still #hired #x27 #hiring #seeing #browsing

Browsing through the Ask Hn: Who Wants to be Hired and Who's Hiring, and I'm still seeing coding skills like python being listed as attributes, especially on the Who Wants to be Hired. In the presence of an LLM, are these skills still relevant to the hiring process? What are the technical skills needed to pass interviews now?

2 comments

verdvermabout 4 hours ago

an Ai is only as good as the person driving it, expertise in languages, tools, and company code bases is still very relevant

case in point, I explained the change to a CTO and their agent, got asked to review, and it missed the point - even as the CTO of the company, they lacked to nuanced understand I have as the author of the code, to notice the obvious error

diaeabout 3 hours ago

AI being only as good as the person driving it is becoming less and less true with each passing month. If I were to hire tomorrow a developer for my company The least I would focus on is his expertise in languages. It just doesn't seem to matter anymore how good you are at a language for the vast majority of software development cases.

If I had to say, I think steering in the AI to achieve a certain task is one of the main broad skills you need to have, but what that means exactly is a little bit hard to define. It's less about knowing exactly what to tell the AI and more about knowing how to break down a problem, give it the right context, recognize when it’s going in the wrong direction, and keep it moving toward the outcome you actually want and doing all that in the most efficient way you can.

verdvermabout 3 hours ago

> AI being only as good as the person driving it is becoming less and less true with each passing month.

I'll believe when I see credible evidence and evals, everyone is making claims, the evidence I see IRL points elsewhere (vibes still, but actual evidence and cases to the contrary)

A good self check is to go read Terence Tao's conversation with ChatGPT, we developers could never do something like that, and tend to extrapolate our expertise to other fields where it is not warranted, even within our own domain. Another check is all the app slop we still see from non-developers. Cool and I encourage for personal learning / usage, but not for other users and putting them at risk.

nphardonabout 3 hours ago

I'm wondering how this plays out in the interview process though, just a year or two ago it was still leetcode and hours upon hours of technical interview. Has that changed in the context of LLMs? If you were hiring, how would you go about it? Does knwoing python really matter anymore? In my shop it 100% does not, and I'm guessing that in the 75% of posts in Who's Hiring that are for Ai startups it also does not, just curious to find out if thats true.

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