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Maybe I’m just swimming against the tide, but I work at a “big N” company and I am more impressed by “saved X dollars”, “made process Y faster” or “built featur

Maybe I’m just swimming against the tide, but I work at a “big N” company and I am more impressed by “saved X dollars”, “made process Y faster” or “built feature Z” than I am with a specific set of technologies. I’ve interviewed a lot of incredibly bright people that didn’t know any technologies more modern than C++.

72deluxe 8y ago
That's surely because C++ is the language To Rule Them All! I jest partly, because every time I write something in C# or PHP (even with the half-baked "strong" typing they are introducing), I constantly curse and think how easy it'd be in C++
draw_down 8y ago
That's nice, but unless you make hiring decisions, or decide what people get paid, not super relevant to what GP is saying
jypepin 8y ago
+1. It feels like most people making comments such as the OP are people actually not working in BigN companies and just making assumptions. I've done a lot of interviews at BigCo and definitely not looking much at the technology.
rjknight 8y ago
Part of the problem is that many software developers work in organisations where that kind of information - dollars saved or made, time saved, steps reduced - isn't shared. In a siloed org, the development team writes code to satisfy bug reports or feature requests, which come from a business analyst or product owner, who is the sole conduit to "the business". Why these things are needed, their relative priorities, or their ultimate impact, are not regarded as important concerns for the development team. tldr: software developers often can't measure the impact of their code, so they fall back on describing the technologies they use, which drives a counter-productive desire to employ "sexy" technologies.
- Udik 8y ago
  > Part of the problem is that many software developers work in organisations where that kind of information - dollars saved or made, time saved, steps reduced - isn't shared. It's not even that they are not shared. It's that the importance of projects is often measured in dollars spent, complexity, amount of people working on them. Which means that often the inefficient teams and solutions are considered more important- their managers and tech leads have more people under them and they are more visible to the rest of the business.

72deluxe 8y ago

That's surely because C++ is the language To Rule Them All! I jest partly, because every time I write something in C# or PHP (even with the half-baked "strong" typing they are introducing), I constantly curse and think how easy it'd be in C++

draw_down 8y ago

That's nice, but unless you make hiring decisions, or decide what people get paid, not super relevant to what GP is saying

jypepin 8y ago

+1. It feels like most people making comments such as the OP are people actually not working in BigN companies and just making assumptions. I've done a lot of interviews at BigCo and definitely not looking much at the technology.

rjknight 8y ago

Part of the problem is that many software developers work in organisations where that kind of information - dollars saved or made, time saved, steps reduced - isn't shared. In a siloed org, the development team writes code to satisfy bug reports or feature requests, which come from a business analyst or product owner, who is the sole conduit to "the business". Why these things are needed, their relative priorities, or their ultimate impact, are not regarded as important concerns for the development team. tldr: software developers often can't measure the impact of their code, so they fall back on describing the technologies they use, which drives a counter-productive desire to employ "sexy" technologies.

Udik 8y ago
> Part of the problem is that many software developers work in organisations where that kind of information - dollars saved or made, time saved, steps reduced - isn't shared. It's not even that they are not shared. It's that the importance of projects is often measured in dollars spent, complexity, amount of people working on them. Which means that often the inefficient teams and solutions are considered more important- their managers and tech leads have more people under them and they are more visible to the rest of the business.