Skills-based hiring continues to rise as degree requirements fade
Hard skills, such as cybersecurity and software development, are still in peak demand, but organizations are finding soft skills can be just as importanr, according to Jamie Kohn, research director in the Gartner Research’s human resources practice. Soft skills, which are often innate, include adaptability, leadership, communications, creativity, problem solving or critical thinking, good interpersonal skills and the ability to collaborate with others. “Also, people don’t learn all their [hard] skills at college,” Kohn said. “They haven’t for some time, but there’s definitely a surge in self-taught skills or taking online courses. You may have a history major who’s a great programmer. That’s not at all unusual anymore. Companies that don’t consider that are missing out by requiring specific degrees.” ... Much of the recent shift to skills-based hiring is due to the dearth of tech talent created by the Great Resignation and a growin number of digital transformation projects. While the US unemployment rate hovers around 3.5%, in technology fields, it’s less than half that (1.5%).
Do digital IDs work? The nation with one card for everything
No system is foolproof: a potential security flaw uncovered in 2017 required the
temporary suspension of 800,000 cards. Users occasionally receive notifications
that some data may have been compromised. Nor does it eliminate fraud. According
to official figures, Estonians were scammed out of €5 million (£4.4 million)
last year, through a familiar mixture of fraudulent calls, phishing messages and
fake websites in which they were tricked into handing over passwords. But in two
decades no one has decrypted the technology itself. Indeed, the system has
become so embedded in Estonian life it is hard to find anyone who knocks it. Its
few critics are mostly to be found among the ranks of the populist right-wing
Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (Ekre), which is expected to take third
place in the election. The party has expressed scepticism about the security of
online voting — and its supporters are less likely to use it than supporters of
mainstream parties. But although it spent two years in a coalition government
from 2019, Ekre did nothing to dismantle the system.
Microsoft trains ChatGPT to control robots
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The team plans to leverage the platform's ability to develop coherent and
grammatically correct responses to various prompts and questions and see if
ChatGPT can think beyond the text and reason about the physical world to help
with robotics tasks. "We want to help people interact with robots more easily,
without needing to learn complex programming languages or details about
robotic systems." The key obstacle in the way for a language model based on AI
is to solve problems considering the laws of physics, the context of the
operating environment, and how the robot’s physical actions can change the
state of the world. Even though ChatGPT can do a lot alone, it still needs
some help. Microsoft has released a series of design principles, including
unique prompting structures, high-level APIs, and human feedback via text.
These models can be used to guide language models toward solving robotics
tasks. The firm is also introducing PromptCraft, an open-source platform where
anyone can "share examples of prompting strategies for different robotics
categories."
Job Interview Advice for Junior Developers
Remember the audience you are talking to. Human resources personnel are very
different to the dev guy sitting in the interview with them. You won’t be
working with anyone in HR, but they are the gatekeepers. In smaller outfits,
there will probably be a manager type and a dev guy. It doesn’t hurt to
empathize with how their views differ. Make sure you are comfortable with all
the parts of the agile development cycle, not just the bits your team happened
to pick up in your last project. I have never used pull requests, but they are
de rigueur in may places. Similarly code reviews. Retrospectives might seem
pointless to you, but how else do you improve a process? Don’t assume that
what your team called DevOps or Kanban is exactly the same as what everyone
else does. One of the biggest snags in an interview — I think the most common
— is when the interviewee shows little enthusiasm for an aspect of development
the interviewer happens to thinks is important. Your negative hot take on a
mainstream process, especially without experience weighing in behind you, may
well be seen as a sign of rigidity.
Cyberattacks hit data centers to steal information from global companies
Resecurity identified several actors on the dark web, potentially originating
from Asia, who during the course of the campaign managed to access customer
records and exfiltrate them from one or multiple databases related to specific
applications and systems used by several data center organizations. In at
least one of the cases, initial access was likely gained via a vulnerable
helpdesk or ticket management module that was integrated with other
applications and systems, which allowed the threat actor to perform a lateral
movement. The threat actor was able to extract a list of CCTV cameras with
associated video stream identifiers used to monitor data center environments,
as well as credential information related to data center IT staff and
customers, Resecurity said. Once the credentials were collected, the actor
performed active probing to collect information about representatives of the
enterprise customers who manage operations at the data center, lists of
purchased services, and deployed equipment.
Avoiding vendor lock-in and the data gravity trap
Today, enterprises are adopting hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies to
avoid vendor lock-in and the data gravity trap. In fact, many enterprises are
choosing vendors who provide cloud-agnostic services that are also open source
to benefit from the most freedom and to avoid vendor lock-in. In addition,
working with vendors with large partner ecosystems can help reduce the risks
of lock-in. Open standards are the antidote to proprietary technology. Open
standards allow users to move freely between vendors—to mix and match or
integrate—with competing vendors to create their own solution. They allow you
to compose your service or system freely and liberate you from the proprietary
interfaces of a vendor. Open standards came about from our prior experiences
of vendor lock-in. If we forget that history, we are condemned to repeat it.
... While the general movement is toward the concept of “composable IT,” where
software-defined infrastructure and application components interoperate
seamlessly to make businesses nimble, there are times when vendor lock-in
makes sense.
Boards tapping CIOs to drive strategy
“CIOs are playing a leading role in orchestrating transformation and are
stepping up in response to the changing industry dynamics,” said Logicalis CEO
Bob Bailkoksi, “yet they are faced with challenges to navigate, including a
potential recession and talent shortages.” “In addition to this, they are
experiencing increased pressure to deliver digital-based outcomes for their
organisations, giving them more exposure to their boards and requiring a
different way of operating.” In many companies, that “different way” seems to
be that their traditional remit – implementing technology to support business
strategy – has changed dramatically: 41 per cent reported having some level of
responsibility for business strategy as well as the technology to deliver it,
and 80 per cent said business strategy will become a bigger part of their role
in the next two years. Innovation and digital transformation are two of four
primary areas of focus for CIOs identified in the study – the others being
strategy and the reimagination of service partnerships, which is expected to
see three-quarters of CIOs spending more on IT outsource management this year
than last.
How Companies Are Using Data to Optimize Manufacturing Operations
Real-time agility requires combining data from multiple sources to create new
insights for use cases like machine learning. Manufacturers are familiar with
streaming data today, but this is nowhere near the point of saturation.
Everything from supply chain shortages to COVID-19 sick time and weather
disruptions has made the simple task of getting shipments from point A to B
complicated and uncertain. However, companies that consolidate data from
asset-based sensors, predictive maintenance algorithms, and ordering and
staffing systems (such as enterprise resource management, supply chain
management and human resources software), can use it to respond much more
quickly, and keep assets operating at maximum efficiency. Industrial asset
management, especially in transportation, allows companies to showcase the
value of real- or near-real-time data in a range of scenarios, from airlines
to railroads. Large-scale assets deployed in the past few years generate a
tremendous amount of streaming data.
3 ways to retool your architecture to reduce costs
When you have one team developing and operating one application deployed on
one server, it's not difficult to figure out the infrastructure, labor, and
software costs of developing the application. However, when you have thousands
of applications, it becomes a real mess to trace every penny flowing into your
application's TCO. ... The reality is far more complicated. For platforms,
especially hybrid cloud, some costs may go away immediately, while some will
be redistributed to new application portfolios. The labor costs associated
with the application will remain unless you actually eliminate that labor;
otherwise, those costs will be redistributed across the other applications the
team supports. In other words, labor costs will increase for those other
applications. ... There are two views of measuring excess capacity. First, to
decrease unused reservations by application owners, you must allocate total
platform cost by total reservations. However, for platform owners to
understand excess capacity compared to the total built capacity, you must
allocate the total platform cost by the total built capacity.
4 steps to supercharge IT leaders
IT leaders understand well that it’s not just willpower that leads to success;
it’s also “way power,” or the “how” of achieving your goals. Being able to find
a pathway forward is just the starting point. Leaders today must be able to
pivot in real time when a new opportunity, obstacle, or crisis surfaces. The
more options you have, the more likely you are to achieve your goals. Consider
the example of a complex digital initiative. Let’s say you’ve identified a way
forward plus a backup plan for your top purposes. Implementation will almost
certainly be nonlinear. What happens when you hit obstacles? ... Many things
cloud or limit our vision or even blindside us. We are all affected by our
personalities, beliefs, and assumptions. We are also affected by the data that
we choose to rely on. How can you be more confident that what you’re seeing is
real? Start by taking another look at your external priorities. You might be
exaggerating or discounting the opportunities or threats that you see. ... How
confident are you about timing for essential deliverables on your critical
path?
Quote for the day:
"The speed of the leader is the speed
of the gang." -- Mary Kay Ash
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