These are the skills you need to get hired in tech
While soft skills are important, communicating them to a prospective employer
can present a conundrum. Tina Wang, division vice president of human resources
at ADP, said there are a few ways for job seekers to bring attention to their
behavioral skills. It goes beyond just listing “strong work ethic” or “problem
solving” on a resume, “though it’s good to add it there too,” she said. Job
seekers can incorporate behavior skills in a track record of job experiences.
... An interview with a prospective employer is also a good time to introduce
behavioral skills, but time is limited and job-seekers won’t likely be able to
share all their demonstrated skills and experience. “Preparation will go a
long way, so think through your talking points and what is important to share,”
Wang said. “Think about a few applicable, real work experiences where you
demonstrated these skills and sketch out how and when to bring them during the
interview process.” References can also be an excellent way to highlight
behavioral skills. Intangibles such as a strong work ethic or attention to
detail might be something former managers, team members or peers
identify.
Ideal authentication solution boils down to using best tools to stop attacks
Given the shifting nature of work, with more employees working remotely, the
variety of gaps in protection is manifold. Clunky authentication experiences
mean users are often asked to sign in multiple times a day for different
applications and accounts. “Users get extremely frustrated when this occurs, and
they end up having resistance to adopting these authentication methods,”
Anderson says. To improve the situation, organizations need to manage
authentication scenarios in onboarding, session tokens to remember login – and
the reality of username and password authentication still being used extensively
throughout the security landscape, leaving vulnerabilities to fraud. “Passkeys
are good for users because they simplify and streamline the actual
authentication ceremony itself, where the user is actively involved,” Miller
says. “It doesn’t necessarily decrease the number of times they have to
authenticate but it does make it simpler and less taxing.” “They also have
knock-on benefits of reducing the amount of information that leaks in the case
of a database leak that can be used by an attacker. It shrinks the blast radius
of account compromise.”
Should Today’s Developers Be More or Less Specialized?
“The need for specialists is not going to change. If anything, I expect it to
increase,” says Hillion. “We still have a number of clients who rely on
full-stack developers. I would say the general trend is towards businesses
needing more specialized developers who have the right combination of technical
skillsets and sector knowledge to deliver what is needed into the complex tech
stack. There is significant demand for developers who specialize in particular
industry sectors.” ... “Without basic knowledge, pursuing any specific
development area is challenging,” says Ivanov. “That’s why starting by mastering
basic technologies that someone is most proficient in, which helps them learn
new things faster,” says Ivanov in an email interview. “However, core
technologies should not be the end goal. It is also essential to stay up to date
with technology trends and always continue using new technology.” Tasks that go
beyond standard or general requirements need the involvement of specialists who
have knowledge and experience in specific areas. For example, a project that
requires complex algorithms or specific technologies will require a specialist
with a deep understanding of them.
Between sustainability and risk: why CIOs are considering small language models
“In LLMs, the bulk of the data work is done statistically and then IT trains the
model on specific topics to correct errors, giving it targeted quality data,” he
says. “SLMs cost much less and require less data, but, precisely for this
reason, the statistical calculation is less effective and, therefore, very
high-quality data is needed, with substantial work by data scientists.
Otherwise, with generic data, the model risks producing many errors.”
Furthermore, SLMs are so promising and interesting for companies that even big
tech offers and advertises them, like Google’s Gemma and Microsoft’s Phi-3. For
this reason, according to Esposito, governance remains fundamental, within a
model that should remain a closed system. “An SLM is easier to manage and
becomes an important asset for the company in order to extract added value from
AI,” he says. “Otherwise, with large models and open systems, you have to agree
to share strategic company information with Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. This
is why I prefer to work with a system integrator that can develop customizations
and provide a closed system, for internal use.
Why geographical diversity is critical to build effective and safe AI tools
Geographical diversity is critical as organizations look to develop AI tools
that can be adopted worldwide, according to Andrea Phua, senior director of
the national AI group and director of the digital economy office at
Singapore's Ministry of Digital Development and Information (MDDI). ... "The
use of Gen AI has brought a new dimension to cyber threats. As AI becomes more
accessible and sophisticated, threat actors will also become better at
exploiting it," said CSA's chief executive and Commissioner of Cybersecurity
David Koh. "As it is, AI already poses a formidable challenge for governments
around the world [and] cybersecurity professionals would know that we are
merely scratching the surface of gen AI's potential, both for legitimate
applications and malicious uses," Koh said. He pointed to reports of
AI-generated content, including deepfakes in video clips and memes, that have
been used to sow discord and influence the outcome of national elections. At
the same time, there are new opportunities for AI to be tapped to enhance
cyber resilience and defense, he said.
Cloud Migration Regrets: Should You Repatriate?
With increasing pressure to cut costs, many CTOs and CIOs are considering
repatriating cloud workloads back on premises. As hard as it may seem, it’s
important to think beyond just the cost. You must understand workload
requirements to make sound decisions for each application. ... A lot of
organizations have forgotten how much IT operations have changed since moving
to the cloud. Cloud transformation meant revamping ITOps based on the chosen
mix of Infrastructure-, Platform- or Software-as-a-Service (IaaS, PaaS or
SaaS) services. Bringing applications back on premises strips away those
service layers, and Ops teams may no longer be able or willing to accept the
administrative and maintenance burden again. One final consideration before
moving workloads off the cloud is security. I think security is one of the
many advantages of cloud infrastructure. When businesses first started moving
to the cloud, security was one of the biggest concerns. It turns out that
cloud providers are better at security than you are. They can’t fix security
holes in your software or other operator error scenarios, but a cloud
infrastructure provides greater isolation if a breach does occur.
Chess, AI & future of leadership
As computing power increases and its access cost reduces, AI will become the
central force that drives all activities, including imagination! So, imagine
the chessboard being AI-enabled. The board now has its intelligence with the
ability to understand the context of the game to prompt the next set of moves.
The difference between the board-level AI and the AI used by the player as her
assistant is that the assistant knows the player’s psyche of defending or
attacking, strengths and weaknesses of the player and her opponent, and
factors these while offering suggestions. The two AIs may or may not be
aligned in their suggestions since both may be accessing different references.
Let’s activate the third dimension in chess – the pieces are also intelligent!
They know their roles and those of the others. They too can think, strategise,
and suggest. For instance, in a choice to move between the rook and the
knight, the rook suggests the knight moves. The knight feels the Queen should
move! This is the egalitarian version of chess! Does it feel real and
practical? In the context of AI, there’s the Large Language Model, which
processes data from a vast set of sources with a large number of constraints
and rules.
DigiCert validation bug sets up 83,267 SSL certs for revoking
One of the validation methods approved by the Certification Authority Browser
Forum (CABF), whose guidelines provide best practices for securing internet
transactions in browsers and other software, involves the customer adding a
DNS CNAME record that includes a random value supplied by its certificate
provider. The provider, in this case DigiCert, then does a DNS lookup and
verifies that the random value is as provided, confirming that the customer
controls the domain. The CABF requires that, in one format of the DNS CNAME
entry, the random value be prefixed with an underscore, and DigiCert
discovered that, in some cases, that character was not included, rendering the
validation non-compliant. By CABF rules, those certificates must be revoked
within 24 hours, with no exceptions. However, DigiCert said in an update to
its status page Tuesday, and in an email to customers, “Unfortunately, some
customers operating critical infrastructure are not in a position to have all
their certificates reissued and deployed in time without critical service
interruptions. To avoid disruption to critical services, we have engaged with
browser representatives alongside these customers over the last several hours.
...”
Mind the Gap: Data Quality Is Not “Fit for Purpose”
When talking about data quality, we must therefore be clear about whose
purpose, what requirements, established when, and by whom. Within the context
of the DMBoK definition, the answer is that every consumer evaluates the
quality of a data set independently. Data is considered to be of high quality
when it is fit for my purpose, satisfies my requirements, established by me
when I need the data. Data quality, defined in this way, is truly in the eye
of the beholder. Furthermore, data quality analyses cannot be leveraged by new
consumers. For decades, we in decision support have been selling the benefits
of leveraging data across applications and analyses. It has been the
fundamental justification for data warehouses, data lakes, data lakehouses,
etc. But misalignment between the purpose for which data was created and the
purpose for which it is being used may not be immediately apparent. Especially
when the data is not well understood. The consequences are faulty models and
erroneous analyses. We reflexively blame the quality of the data, but that’s
not where the problem lies. This is not data quality. It is data
fitness.
Navigating Hope and Fear in a Socio-Technical Future
It is not about just spending more, that isnt really working, you must SPEND
BETTER. I and other architects litterally train for decades to both cut costs
and make great investment decisions. Technical debt acrual, technical health
goals, technical strategy dont just deserve a seat at the table. They are
becoming the table. A little more rationally, in all complex engineering
fields, we are required to get signoff from legitimate professionals who have
been measured against legitimate and hard-earned competencies. Not only does
this create more stable outcomes, it actually saves and makes the economy
money. Instead of ‘paying for two ok systems’, we pay for ‘one great one’. ...
In all complex engineering ecosystems it is not just outputs and companies
that are regulated. The role and skills of architects and engineers are not
secret and they really aren’t that different by company. I believe I am the
worlds expert on architecture skills or at least one of a dozen of them. I
have interviewed and assessed hundreds of companies, and thousands of
architects. It is time to begin licensing. And it must be handed to a real
professional society. It cannot be a vendor consortium.
Quote for the day:
"You’ll never achieve real success
unless you like what you’re doing." -- Dale Carnegie
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