Global demand for software engineers continues to strain the technology sector with unfilled software engineering positions and stiff competition for hiring developers who are on the market. To attract more candidates, technology firms have increasingly been working closely with universities to recruit new graduates to fill their jobs. Universities hoping to minimize mismatches in job placement for new software developers should teach the skills and attributes that enable entry-level software developers to succeed. This paper presents a case study of hiring demands at one large, well-established technology company that reveals the most sought-after attributes in new hires. We discuss results of our interviews with five software development hiring managers and the results from a wide survey of engineers and architects from various levels and experiences. The interviews and surveys reveal that some qualifications are widely desired, and others have varying demand based on functional area, technology, or type of development. Ultimately, professional skills (e.g., teamwork) and personality traits (e.g., strong initiative) top the list of desired attributes, along with a few fundamentally broad technical skills. One key takeaway is that candidates who learn professional skills from university programs may be more readily hired into their first software engineering job than those whose education focused mostly on technical areas.

The last three years have seen a dramatic increase in both awareness and exploitation of Web Application Vulnerabilities. 2008 and 2009 saw dozens of high-profile attacks against websites using Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) for the purposes of information stealing, website defacement, malware planting, clickjacking, etc. While an ideal solution may be to develop web applications free from any exploitable vulnerabilities, real world security is usually provided in layers.

We describe the detrimental effects of browser cache/history sniffing in the context of phishing attacks, and detail an approach that neutralizes the threat by means of URL personalization; we report on an implementation performing such personalization on the fly, and analyze the costs of and security properties of our proposed solution.