[scryder]

As a preface, I’m not saying that those are inherently bad choices per se, because the underlying ideas are obscure enough that anyone who knows them at this moment probably knows other things you care about.

That said, never forget that ultimately your filtering criteria leak, and candidates will begin coming in with knowledge JUST about that, because you care.

Furthermore, you’re currently optimizing for trivia obtained in CS education that skilled programmers from other STEM fields and non-traditional backgrounds will lack. Besides people directly working on SSL, very few people need to know about symmetric encryption schemes at any practical level, and at best remember it at the same level I just stated it at, as a factoid. So you’re going to mostly find people who’d know that factoid and who’d remember that factoid; put another way, canned-answer spouters.

[blfr]

If you set up a web server for anything in the last few years you would have picked up something about SSL. Even if you just skim the rationale before copying the configs from Mozilla.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Server_Side_TLS#Modern_com...

If you used git, you probably even did a rebase. Or at least tried to. Or at least saw it as an option.

These aren't obscure university topics.

[jordanpg]

Right. They were chosen because experienced Java devs should be extremely comfortable with them. Not just familiar, but basically experts. And if they're not, it's a big red flag that casts a shadow over really anything else they have to say.

I'm sure each language/technology has a small list of universals that experienced practitioners should be quite comfortable with. Of course there are exceptions, it's not perfect, but my point is that these things are a good proxy for estimating overall competence level.

[rhizome]

By what measure are you prioritizing Java+git over e.g. Java+Perforce in terms of universals?

[oehn34the9]

Thank you for saying this! I have 30 years of paid CS experience, a degree, owned my own software company, worked for Fortune 50 companies and don't use any of those technologies. (I have used git, and used rebase, but like everything in git, it's so poorly named for what it does, that I don't remember exactly. I wouldn't even want to try to explain it at this point.)