I’ve often read lists like this one, that suggest the skills IT employers want. Well, today at the Agile Vancouver conference, a room full of agile development employers was asked what they look for. I was expecting “machine learning,” “security,” “mobile applications,” and maybe “artificial intelligence.” Nope.
Here is the list they gave:
I’m not making any claims about the generalizability of this list. I’m just throwing it out there to let you know that maybe some of those popular lists floating about the web are not consistent with what one room full of presidents, CEOs and team leaders spent an hour and a half discussing.
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This is pretty much what my current employer ( http://www.codeweavers.net/ ) looks for. Certainly when I personally write a job spec, it looks like:
* Understanding PRINCPILES of object oriented development
* CONCEPTUAL understanding of relational databases
* Knowledge of design patterns
* TDD/BDD
I tend to use different words for the things in caps but the idea is the same. Abstract thinking is kinda implicit in all these.
Prototyping is not a word I am familiar with. It means you show the client the first version before you turn it into production code, right?
Have to say, I’ve never asked for accounting. Not sure why a developer would need this? Most understand it to the extent they know how much they are getting paid.
I think the particular person who said accounting ran a software company that developed accounting systems.
I think you’re talking about one of the major ‘tells’ between an agile and traditional shop… the job description
Employers who are using traditional ‘functional’ means look for ‘functional’ expertise like that other article mentioned (tech specific knowledge, ‘machine learning’, vendor expertise, etc).
The agile approach recognizes that you’ll be working very closely with eachother and all of that tech learning comes quickly if you can work well as a team, grasp object orientism, really understand good programming/engineering practices and know how to use good tools to your advantage.
There’s nothing new here… the ‘traditional’ or waterfall approach still culturally believes that through more technical knowledge they’ll be able to reach those pie in the sky gantt chart goals… because they also still believe every ‘road block’ they ever hit is because their people weren’t technically adept enough to handle it.
I was recently thinking about demand of TDD skills, for developers. Results, could be found here:
http://www.beletsky.net/2010/09/is-tdd-skill-actually-required-by.html