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If you really are a senior technical person, you have many valuable skills that are not tied to a tech stack. Otherwise you may have a related title but you ar

by ska 8y ago

If you really are a senior technical person, you have many valuable skills that are not tied to a tech stack. Otherwise you may have a related title but you are really just a technology domain expert - which is sometimes very useful and valuable, but it's not the same the same thing at all. So yes, it's helpful that people keep current, and obviously waiting for a new developer to get up to speed on the particular stack is always a cost (and it isn't a couple of weeks, for anyone). However, if what you really need is a senior person, it may well be worth that time. Seeing this assumes the hiring manager understands how software is actually produced and maintained, not just what their current tech stack needs. It's surprising how often this isn't true, but a contributing factor is how mid level mangers are made - which is related to this discussion I think.

mkozlows 8y ago
What I'd say to that is, yeah, it's true that a senior dev will have skills that go beyond a particular tech stack -- but if you're working as a dev, then those skills are still tied to your technical knowledge. You might be great at mentoring... but you have to know the stuff to mentor people in it. You might be great at communicating with stakeholders... but you have to understand the technical constraints of your system in detail to have that communication. You might understand principles of software design and debugging... but you still need to understand the particulars of these technologies to make your design or to focus your debugging. And yeah, you can learn the tech stack, and a company that really needs a senior dev eventually could do okay to hire a senior dev with out of date skills, and wait for them to get trained up. But don't plan on it taking three weeks, is all I'm saying. To really get to that point of fluency and domain expertise takes longer. (And also, one of the things that senior devs are supposed to do is evaluate new technologies and figure out when and where adopting them can make sense. If you've fallen so far behind on learning new tech, then it's not clear if this is something you're able to do -- maybe it is, and you just worked for a workplace that stifled adoption of new tech, or maybe you're someone who'll just learn what you need and then stop paying attention.)
- ska 8y ago
  While I see what your saying, a lot of your language seems to come from the idea that tech is a progression, that we are moving "ahead" always, and that people get "left behind". That's mostly not true. While there definitely have been advances, tech is also very faddy and repeats itself. Trends are often reactive, techniques repetitive. Someone who has been around for long enough to see some of these waves resolve themselves is in a much better position to evaluate current and upcoming approaches. Technologists also tend to be myopic, and view the things happening in their own tiny slice of the industry as "what's happening". There is a whole universe of interesting stuff on the go that you are at best barely aware of. Personally, if I'm hiring senior technical people I'm much more interested in their continuing level of curiosity and engagement with something, rather than particular stacks. So maybe you are worried that your candidate who has been doing ASP.NET WebForms for the last decade on IIS will have a hard time getting up to speed on your use of TypeScript and React ... but if I find out that she's also being building raspberry PI infrastructure for fun and messing around with the Julia language to implement a cellular automata project I'm not all that worried about their ability to get up to speed, even though none of that stuff will get used by the team. But yeah, it doesn't take 3 weeks. It doesn't actually take 3 weeks for a new dev already well versed in your technologies, with rare exceptions. At least not to be firing on all cylinders. The thing is, a huge number of teams really, really need a good senior dev. They often don't think so, and often erroneously think they already have some... but they don't. Instead they have people who had "Senior" (or "Staff" or whatever) added to their title because they'd been there for a little while. And every piece of work the team produces suffers for it. So yeah, it's typically worth the investment. Now granted, that assumes you are good at identifying talented people. This is actually a big ask - and one of the issues surrounding the OP's questions really comes back to that. I think that a lot of software and technology development suffers fairly systematically from poor quality middle management. One of the symptoms of this is the "ageism" discussed here, but it's only one of many....
  - ngneer 8y ago
    Yes. These days gRPC is a new technology. And yet RPC has been around in one form or another since the 1960s.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

by ska 8y ago

mkozlows 8y ago

What I'd say to that is, yeah, it's true that a senior dev will have skills that go beyond a particular tech stack -- but if you're working as a dev, then those skills are still tied to your technical knowledge. You might be great at mentoring... but you have to know the stuff to mentor people in it. You might be great at communicating with stakeholders... but you have to understand the technical constraints of your system in detail to have that communication. You might understand principles of software design and debugging... but you still need to understand the particulars of these technologies to make your design or to focus your debugging. And yeah, you can learn the tech stack, and a company that really needs a senior dev eventually could do okay to hire a senior dev with out of date skills, and wait for them to get trained up. But don't plan on it taking three weeks, is all I'm saying. To really get to that point of fluency and domain expertise takes longer. (And also, one of the things that senior devs are supposed to do is evaluate new technologies and figure out when and where adopting them can make sense. If you've fallen so far behind on learning new tech, then it's not clear if this is something you're able to do -- maybe it is, and you just worked for a workplace that stifled adoption of new tech, or maybe you're someone who'll just learn what you need and then stop paying attention.)

ska 8y ago
While I see what your saying, a lot of your language seems to come from the idea that tech is a progression, that we are moving "ahead" always, and that people get "left behind". That's mostly not true. While there definitely have been advances, tech is also very faddy and repeats itself. Trends are often reactive, techniques repetitive. Someone who has been around for long enough to see some of these waves resolve themselves is in a much better position to evaluate current and upcoming approaches. Technologists also tend to be myopic, and view the things happening in their own tiny slice of the industry as "what's happening". There is a whole universe of interesting stuff on the go that you are at best barely aware of. Personally, if I'm hiring senior technical people I'm much more interested in their continuing level of curiosity and engagement with something, rather than particular stacks. So maybe you are worried that your candidate who has been doing ASP.NET WebForms for the last decade on IIS will have a hard time getting up to speed on your use of TypeScript and React ... but if I find out that she's also being building raspberry PI infrastructure for fun and messing around with the Julia language to implement a cellular automata project I'm not all that worried about their ability to get up to speed, even though none of that stuff will get used by the team. But yeah, it doesn't take 3 weeks. It doesn't actually take 3 weeks for a new dev already well versed in your technologies, with rare exceptions. At least not to be firing on all cylinders. The thing is, a huge number of teams really, really need a good senior dev. They often don't think so, and often erroneously think they already have some... but they don't. Instead they have people who had "Senior" (or "Staff" or whatever) added to their title because they'd been there for a little while. And every piece of work the team produces suffers for it. So yeah, it's typically worth the investment. Now granted, that assumes you are good at identifying talented people. This is actually a big ask - and one of the issues surrounding the OP's questions really comes back to that. I think that a lot of software and technology development suffers fairly systematically from poor quality middle management. One of the symptoms of this is the "ageism" discussed here, but it's only one of many....
- ngneer 8y ago
  Yes. These days gRPC is a new technology. And yet RPC has been around in one form or another since the 1960s.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]