Top Developer and Engineering Skills Employers Will Look in 2012

For a competent developer the difference between not knowing an obscure technology and being proficient in it is about 6 months.<p>Smart employers concentrate on finding smart people.

Forgive a naive question. When posts like this (or actual job listings) say "HTML5", is what they're really saying "sites which use a lot of front end js and feel more app like"? I'm assuming there's not that much of a demand for people who can shorten a doctype, leave off closing tags in tables, re-encode audio files to ogg, wav and mp3 and who know how to make pretty canvas based demos...

&#62; The Ubermedia team wants developers to build Java-based iOS apps.<p>There are a few ways you could explain this sentence, but its existence makes me distrust the article's premise of scouring Indeed's listings for "valued" skills as a whole.

Is Puppet actually "winning" the DevOps battle for server deployment? Just curious as I was under the impression that both Chef and Puppet were top-tier, and you really couldn't go wrong either way.

Really? Puppet over Chef? Mongo over Redis? No Ruby, no Erlang, no EC2? I am skeptical of these choices.<p>I suppose if that is what the data says...

You will have to forgive my ignorance on the matter as I have not been paying close attention to the popularity of NoSQL databases but has MongoDB taken the crown. Cassandra seemed to be widely popular for a while but this article seems to imply that MongoDB is the skill to have, which would lead me to believe that more people are adopting it than the other offerings in this space. Can someone enlighten me to the state of the NoSQL industry, has it picked the winner and losers yet? Or is MongoDB just enjoying it's moment in the sun?

These are trends and while important a bit misleading.<p>Yes HTML5 has seen 350,000% increase (yes, I typed that correctly) in job postings over the years, but it is still only in 0.3% of all job postings. Meanwhile C# is in ~1.6% and Java in ~3.3% of all postings.<p>Not saying you shouldn't get some HTML5, MongoDB, Android or iOS knowledge but these are hardly the "most looked for" skills.

I wish I could cause physical harm to people who write and post these types of articles.

Can someone explain to me what "top 10" means?<p>The same source (Indeed) shows that the "top" HTML5 trend is a baby close to Sharepoint: <a href="http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=html5%2C+sharepoint&#38;l=" rel="nofollow">http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=html5%2C+sharepoint&#38;l=</a>

I'm thinking something like this could be more relevant:<p>- html / javascript / php - ability to read code - ability to read poorly written code - charisma / good communication - personal appearance - relationship with someone in the company - ability to create a decent resume / cv

I keep on top of tech news and I haven't even ever heard of a couple of those. I'm sure they exist and are important in some very small niche, but if they were the "top" skills currently sought, I would have heard of them, seen them posted in articles, etc. Based on this my conclusion is that the article is up to something. Perhaps they need technology H and P people and thought that posting an article with several "real" top skills along with their pet fringe tech would result in people going back to school for training at no additional cost to the hopeful employer facing a shortage of people competent in their fringe technology.

In D&#38;D style, I strike back with a Brad-Feld rebuttal:<p><a href="http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/12/top-10-reasons-top-10-lists-suck.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2011/12/top-10-reasons-top-1...</a>

Knuth just told us, most of the Trend/Hot techs are bullshit.

MongoDB is killing it in the NoSQL space. 10Gen proves it. Cassandra is still in the game but Apple and others are on a steep adoption curve for MongoDB.<p>Results for this list came from Indeed.Pretty reliable source.