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Comment by jraines | Hacker News Reader

You do security stuff right? Yeah, I'm pretty ignorant about that (regretfully). But I've seen you post about hiring, saying that you are looking for smart people, and have specified Rails. OK, so if I contacted you about a job and had solid Rails skills, what else would you want me to be knowledgeable about, even if not directly related to what you do, that would convince you that I'm the sort of hacker you'd give a second look?

I'm honestly curious, not fishing for a job. It's part of why I created the poll. I have felt boxed in doing just what you're deriding, and I want to know what others here are finding interesting.

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I've never hired someone who knew Rails. I'm not even sure I've hired anyone who knew Ruby. My lead product dev is a Lisper. Here's an industry pro-tip: when you want to optimize for "good programmer", don't put "must know Rails 2.3.x+ and have experience with one of Sinatra, Ramaze, or Rack". Just look for the smug lisp weenies.

The people who do best in security are the ones who understand computer science. They are:

* Very solid C programmers, or

* Understand compiler design, or

* Know a thing or two about signal processing, or

* Know how to implement compression algorithms, or

etc etc etc.

That's exactly the issue I have with this poll. The cart appears to be dragging the horse. You write web applications to solve problems. What problems are you solving? Very few people will put money up against the problem of "need a better web framework".

Signal processing is fun, and its principals crop up in unexpected ways. Grokking convolutions and auto-corelations is a nice "bump" in the way I think about data processing. Seeing data as a stream instead of discrete chunks sometimes helps a simple convolution be apparent when facing a naive implementation's taxing computation. What this would have to do with security, I don't know.

I think that tptacek's point is that he wants someone that "digs deeper".

"I've never hired someone who knew Rails."

Looks like you will soon. :)

"We're hiring a Rails/jQ developer. NYC or Chicago."

We've had a Rails product for something like 3 years now. Everyone is expected to write in Rails. I'm not so much expecting them to come in the doors knowing it.

Well, that's a valid question to ask (what problem are you solving), but it lends itself to a poll even less than this question. This was, though, the one that I personally wanted to see answers to, and I'm just as interested in specific niche answers than my intentionally mainstream categories. I'm sorry if those made you sad -- I wasn't trying to be exhaustive or represent the totality of HN interests.

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