[aggp11]

I am guessing that if somebody is thinking of applying for a postdoc in Bioinformatics, they would have some knowledge about what Bioinformatics is. Is it too much to ask/assume that these smart "fresh PhD graduates" (hopefully in something related to Bioinformatics) have experience with NGS data (irrespective of RNA/DNA), some microarray data, unix and R/Matlab? In today's "Biology/Bioinformatics" world, I don't see how one can get through without encountering any/all of these. People read all these research papers and these days pretty much everything is Sequencing/array based and there is always a section on "Statistical Data Analysis" methods which includes the use of R/MATLAB.

I would think that people who post these job-requirements don't really expect a candidate to have hands-on experience in all of these, but it is very helpful to have candidates with atleast the knowledge of their existence. I would think this is actually a good screen, otherwise anybody could/would apply for these and it takes more than a few weeks to learn/train in any of these things. It is really not as trivial as a lot of people make it sound.

Just my opinion! Happy coding!

[rskr]

Graphics and I/O are OS-specific.

We may be in violent agreement here, but as I said earlier. Java is a trivial skill java programmers don't even have to know I/O...

[vivek_]

I'll echo the "what Brian said" sentiment. I get the feeling that many ads are written by HR departments or PIs who don't actually have a clue.

This is true, I had a HR lady call me once regarding a job posting and kept asking me if I knew object oriented programming around 5 times and when I asked if she knew what it meant, she promptly dropped the topic.

[gringer]

At the language level, I see Java and C++ as being very similar. Perl is also similar, but a bit less so. I've got no argument about those three languages, I just think lumping R in with them is a bit of a stretch too far.

But then, when looking at different programming languages I am more interested in the syntax and language, rather than what the language actually does at a system level. I would use Java in a particular instance because features of the language (or the default API, or the available help) make it more efficient to use Java. For things that I only need to do once, where debugging time swamps out excecution time, it makes a lot more sense to write and debug a few lines of R code than to write and debug 100 lines of C++ code.

In the "what can it do", or "what can it be used for" sense, I consider most languages to be the same (turing complete, and all that). It doesn't really matter to me that the java virtual machine interprets bytecode and interfaces with a system C (or C++) library and the system kernel to actually get stuff on the screen, or that Dylan code is pre-compiled into C code before it can be run.

[rskr]

At the language level, I see Java and C++ as being very similar. Perl is also similar, but a bit less so. I've got no argument about those three languages, I just think lumping R in with them is a bit of a stretch too far.

But then, when looking at different programming languages I am more interested in the syntax and language, rather than what the language actually does at a system level. I would use Java in a particular instance because features of the language (or the default API, or the available help) make it more efficient to use Java. For things that I only need to do once, where debugging time swamps out excecution time, it makes a lot more sense to write and debug a few lines of R code than to write and debug 100 lines of C++ code.

In the "what can it do", or "what can it be used for" sense, I consider most languages to be the same (turing complete, and all that). It doesn't really matter to me that the java virtual machine interprets bytecode and interfaces with a system C (or C++) library and the system kernel to actually get stuff on the screen, or that Dylan code is pre-compiled into C code before it can be run.

I agree with you, many single skilled programmers don't have this perspective. However in the context of a skills inventory, C++ is a superior skill. Most of these open source programs were written it(or derived from it with simplifications), including bioinformatics packages. Not to mention the unix and Linux command line tools as well as Microsoft windows.

For example what is a pipeline really? It is a stream. How do processes communicate, what is buffer flushing... How do you process system events... Just the other day I was looking up Static in VB, so they had to give it a different name fine shared, same thing.

[vyellapa]

I would apply for a job if Im interested in it. If that jobs is given to someone who has all those 5+ skill sets, well, I gotta accept it that theres someone else who has a better skill set.