HACKER Q&A
📣 floatingatoll

What is one learnable skill you wish was more common in job applicants?


HN, what is ONE learnable skillset you wish was more common in applicants to jobs at your company?

We all take for granted the various views we have about skills versus demand, and hiring ads always show the “bucket list” but never say “We want more applicants with a focus on skill XYZ this time around”. So, for those of you that have hired or are hiring in the past year, what is the one skill you wish more applicants had experience with, over all other skills that they could learn?

- Please choose one skill; no ties, no top three, no shopping lists. Picking one is hard, but it’s worth it.

- I’d especially enjoy hearing from YC startups that posted hiring ads on HN this past year.

- Sample answers: C# operations, git rebase, resolving differences through compromise, understanding EDR/XDR

  👤 thatsamonad Accepted Answer ✓
Written communication, with a special focus on “writing for an audience” (and by that I mean understanding what your audience needs and not trying to impress them). My company is now almost entirely remote and my team works with a lot of internal stakeholders. Being able to write clearly in a way that makes sense to your target audience is seriously underrated. Some people may think it’s “just” IM and Email but it makes a huge difference, at least for me.
👤 FroshKiller
Proficiency in any reasonably common scripting language. I don't even care which. PowerShell, Z shell, Python, Ruby, just please know enough of something to write scripts to perform the odd task we don't have a dedicated tool for. Feels like I'm always running into a new employee who freezes when asked to, like, write a script to pull our phone number inventory and compile a list of vendor IDs for the numbers. Here are the API docs, here is the format of the file I need you to produce, please figure it out.
👤 zaphar
It's hard to just pick one but I'll mention one that I don't think get's enough attention: Working on external codebases.

We all use frameworks and libraries that are maintained outside of the company we work for. Those frameworks and libraries help us to do our job faster and it's fantastic that they are available to us. However, sometimes those external codebases cause a problem for us. The abstraction breaks or falls down. There's a bug in that external codebase. If no one at the company is capable of debugging and understanding that codebase then when the abstraction fails us a lot of time is wasted.

It's also really good for a company to be able to contribute fixes to an open source codebase back. It's healthy for the open source project and in turn makes that project better for the company.

👤 new_guy
I'd say communication (speaking 'client'), just being able to get on with other people.

Code is very easy, people are 'hard'.

👤 Buttons840
The ability to type 30 WPM or more.

Too many co-workers type very slowly, and I have to shamefully admit, I avoid helping them at times because to much time is wasted on simply watching then type.

👤 errantmind
Not pushing complexity to appear more 'intelligent'
👤 sk5t
Author, what does "C# operations" mean to you?
👤 gregjor
Asking questions and listening to stakeholders.
👤 taubek
Listening skills.
👤 questionablean
Math
👤 billconan
rust programming,

gdb/lldb/windbg

multi-thread programming