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It's not just a matter of training. Let's say you get a job offer from a company which the worst case of NIH syndrome you've ever seen, and all their code is w

It's not just a matter of training. Let's say you get a job offer from a company which the worst case of NIH syndrome you've ever seen, and all their code is written in a programming language that the company created and the only code in the world written in this language is at this company. Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable, and not have invested years and years into a stack that's completely irrelevant to the rest of the world. So if the company is of such a literally enormous size and permanent standing to be able to make you a believable offer of lifetime employment / tenure for learning their untransferable skills, like a military or other government body, then maybe. For a defense contractor which could go belly up after some upper-management scandal? No way. For anybody else in the private sector? No way. Either way, it's still problematic because your hiring mechnanics now revolve around unfirable employees, and the easiest way to demotivate employees is by putting them in an environment where mediocrity is accepted because the perpetrators of the mediocrity can't be fired. Ada's problem is that it was only a defense-sector language, for reasons specified by others in the thread e.g. compiler cost. Ultimately, targeting tooling to only a specific industry is dooming it to failure; the tooling must stay relevant to many companies and industries both so that people will see it as a career-advancing skill and so that the labor market remains fluid.

gaius 9y ago
Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable A counter-example would be Goldman Sachs, with their own language (Slang) and their own database (SecDB), former Goldmanites have no trouble finding work after.
- solatic 9y ago
  An interesting point which I will concede. But I doubt the exception disproves the rule for the general case. For what it's worth, GS was founded in 1869, which makes it older than most of the behemoth systems companies like IBM (1911) or AT&T (1880). Big banks like GS may not be as invincible post-2008 as they used to appear to be, but if there are institutions which you could say "this institution is not going to evaporate in the next few decades which will make up my career", GS would not be a bad bet. Which brings an interesting question, how many former Goldmanites a) worked primarily in Slang (given that not all Goldmanite engineers work on SecDB) b) were laid off or otherwise left GS without having a job lined up and c) then found work? If you can prove that you can work on a different stack and get a job with no frictional unemployment, is a much different picture compared to engineers who stay out of work (the parallel question being, why is Slang so much more de-facto employable than COBOL or other languages which for one reason or another are now unpopular or unused in the wider industry?).

gaius 9y ago

Even if the company agreed to train you, would you take the job offer? Chances are, no, because if you were to ever switch jobs in the future, you want to still be employable A counter-example would be Goldman Sachs, with their own language (Slang) and their own database (SecDB), former Goldmanites have no trouble finding work after.

solatic 9y ago
An interesting point which I will concede. But I doubt the exception disproves the rule for the general case. For what it's worth, GS was founded in 1869, which makes it older than most of the behemoth systems companies like IBM (1911) or AT&T (1880). Big banks like GS may not be as invincible post-2008 as they used to appear to be, but if there are institutions which you could say "this institution is not going to evaporate in the next few decades which will make up my career", GS would not be a bad bet. Which brings an interesting question, how many former Goldmanites a) worked primarily in Slang (given that not all Goldmanite engineers work on SecDB) b) were laid off or otherwise left GS without having a job lined up and c) then found work? If you can prove that you can work on a different stack and get a job with no frictional unemployment, is a much different picture compared to engineers who stay out of work (the parallel question being, why is Slang so much more de-facto employable than COBOL or other languages which for one reason or another are now unpopular or unused in the wider industry?).