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> Recruiting new engineers was sometimes a challenge because candidates had to accept that they were joining an organization with a homegrown programming langua

> Recruiting new engineers was sometimes a challenge because candidates had to accept that they were joining an organization with a homegrown programming language and build system. I got an offer from NYT in 2009, but rejected it because of the custom language thing. My interview was conducted entirely using this custom language, and the interviewers were uninterested in discussing any other technology. Even architectural questions, which I attempted to answer in terms of industry standards, were steered towards Context.

scottlamb 8y ago
> My interview was conducted entirely using this custom language, and the interviewers were uninterested in discussing any other technology. Bizarre! Writing their system in a custom programming language isn't _that_ unusual, I think. But why on earth during an interview wouldn't they let candidates program (entirely or mostly) in a language they'd heard of before that morning? Couldn't they assume that if someone has achieved a working knowledge of one or more similar languages, they can learn another in some reasonable time (days, weeks, months)?
- mjburgess 8y ago
  Sounds like maybe they weren't that up on industry and felt unable to evaluate candidates outside their narrowed skill scope.
  - bryanrasmussen 8y ago
    I went on an interview one time in which the job was not for python, but in which the coding exercise was in python, the assumption being that they wanted to see how you handled something you didn't know. The interviewer mentioned having another guy in who announced flat out he was not going to do it even though it was explained that you didn't need to know the language to solve the problem. I of course had some python familiarity, but I still failed because I couldn't remember the name for binary search and that threw me for a loop when the obvious answer I should have gone for in the exercise was 'here we should use binary search'.
cryptonector 8y ago
A lot of companies have proprietary programming languages. Goldman Sachs, for example. So what? Are you a specialist, or can you specialize as needed? But you can't focus an interview on a proprietary language that the interviewee is bound to not know.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  It’s usually a massive red flag of extreme tech dysfunction if someone was able to get buy-in to build entirely custom languages / platforms / compilers / etc. (a) management was not competent enough to realize this is universally a poor investment and refute the project. (b) tech leads either chose this to solidify job security and leverage for bonuses, or else the choice reflects incompetent tech leads you don’t want to be working with or inheriting code from (especially not in a custom language). Some notable other examples: - Danish startup Area 9, which wrote an utterly embarrasingly bad custom language called Flow, which was acquired by McGraw-Hill Education as part of some software that manages student progress in digital materials. - Goldman Sachs famously with slang - Standard Chartered with their own custom Haskell compiler and language extensions - Dropbox (sort of) with Pyston (custom jitted Python implementation) that thankfully is defunct now. These are bad bad bad signs about a workplace...
  - willtim 8y ago
    So if Google or Facebook write themselves a new language (or two), I'm guessing you are ok with that? I have worked at Standard Chartered and their compiler was written by a world renown former CS professor, who also wrote the worlds first Haskell compiler. The quant code written in this language is some of the best I have ever seen on the street; certainly better than the python shops (who are using forked hacked-up variants of Python anyway). Goldman Sachs also had a huge advantage for many years thanks to their proprietary technology. Sometimes an in-house language is actually a sign of innovation.
    - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
      > “So if Google or Facebook write themselves a new language (or two), I'm guessing you are ok with that?” What gives you that impression? It would be equally (perhaps more) red flag if Google permitted this in-house, much like Google’s in-house monorepo tooling that grew out of a series of historical Perforce accidents is a huge red flag of dysfunction.

scottlamb 8y ago

> My interview was conducted entirely using this custom language, and the interviewers were uninterested in discussing any other technology. Bizarre! Writing their system in a custom programming language isn't _that_ unusual, I think. But why on earth during an interview wouldn't they let candidates program (entirely or mostly) in a language they'd heard of before that morning? Couldn't they assume that if someone has achieved a working knowledge of one or more similar languages, they can learn another in some reasonable time (days, weeks, months)?

mjburgess 8y ago
Sounds like maybe they weren't that up on industry and felt unable to evaluate candidates outside their narrowed skill scope.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  I went on an interview one time in which the job was not for python, but in which the coding exercise was in python, the assumption being that they wanted to see how you handled something you didn't know. The interviewer mentioned having another guy in who announced flat out he was not going to do it even though it was explained that you didn't need to know the language to solve the problem. I of course had some python familiarity, but I still failed because I couldn't remember the name for binary search and that threw me for a loop when the obvious answer I should have gone for in the exercise was 'here we should use binary search'.

cryptonector 8y ago

A lot of companies have proprietary programming languages. Goldman Sachs, for example. So what? Are you a specialist, or can you specialize as needed? But you can't focus an interview on a proprietary language that the interviewee is bound to not know.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago
It’s usually a massive red flag of extreme tech dysfunction if someone was able to get buy-in to build entirely custom languages / platforms / compilers / etc. (a) management was not competent enough to realize this is universally a poor investment and refute the project. (b) tech leads either chose this to solidify job security and leverage for bonuses, or else the choice reflects incompetent tech leads you don’t want to be working with or inheriting code from (especially not in a custom language). Some notable other examples: - Danish startup Area 9, which wrote an utterly embarrasingly bad custom language called Flow, which was acquired by McGraw-Hill Education as part of some software that manages student progress in digital materials. - Goldman Sachs famously with slang - Standard Chartered with their own custom Haskell compiler and language extensions - Dropbox (sort of) with Pyston (custom jitted Python implementation) that thankfully is defunct now. These are bad bad bad signs about a workplace...
- willtim 8y ago
  So if Google or Facebook write themselves a new language (or two), I'm guessing you are ok with that? I have worked at Standard Chartered and their compiler was written by a world renown former CS professor, who also wrote the worlds first Haskell compiler. The quant code written in this language is some of the best I have ever seen on the street; certainly better than the python shops (who are using forked hacked-up variants of Python anyway). Goldman Sachs also had a huge advantage for many years thanks to their proprietary technology. Sometimes an in-house language is actually a sign of innovation.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    > “So if Google or Facebook write themselves a new language (or two), I'm guessing you are ok with that?” What gives you that impression? It would be equally (perhaps more) red flag if Google permitted this in-house, much like Google’s in-house monorepo tooling that grew out of a series of historical Perforce accidents is a huge red flag of dysfunction.