Hi Toupeira,

I didn't find some of those jobs, so thanks for linking them.

As a side note I just went through those job descriptions and I -really- like the layout.

On topic: Unfortunately they really do prove my point. There is a very strong focus on "strong" programming skills which is rather undefined. It's literally mentioned in every single role description.

The overwhelming majority of staff that knows how to run software reliably ironically are not software engineers, although there certainly are some software engineers who also possess this skill.

The people I'm speaking about typically understand concepts and solutions (like PAXOS, filesystems or public cloud) more than they understand software development methodology or software product structure.

I guess you have a global reach and can be quite picky about who you hire, maybe you /do/ exclusively hire architecture and systems focused programmers, or maybe "strong" programming skills are a different definition to mine.

Why is significant Rails experience a requirement for a database engineer position? That will quite drastically limit your options. Yes, it is a useful skill but hardly necessary to do this job. I know a lot of really good database consultants and they can usually identify and fix bad queries in virtually any framework or ORM. The skills are really transferable.