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> Why would a company choose someone who doesn’t know the stack they are using over someone who does? If the two candidates are perfectly identical on every o

> Why would a company choose someone who doesn’t know the stack they are using over someone who does? If the two candidates are perfectly identical on every other criteria, sure. But that's not the case, the point is that most other criteria are more important that the specific tech experience when dealing with competent people. > Sure I could learn Java or Swift in a few weeks, but does that mean I would be a competent Android or iOS developer? If you have web experience, I'm not too worried about your productivity on Android or iOS. If I'm hiring for Django and you have experience with any of Symfony, Rails, Spring, .Net or NestJS, the tech expertise is the least of my concerns.

scarface74 7y ago
You’re not worried about their mobile experience until the app fails to work in a tunnel because they are expecting an always on connection or they have half their records on their mobile and half on their server and need to figure out which to use or they never had to figure out a syncing algorithm because you usually don’t have to sync things on the web since you never expect long periods of not being connected. Edit: and I forgot to mention the biggest UI failure I made when I did mobile development a decade ago on WinCE ruggedized devices. I didn’t even think about actually taking the device out into the sun where are all of the field service techs would be working and seeing how the screen, colors and contrast looked.
- thestepafter 7y ago
  I would argue that this isn’t solely the responsibility of the programmer. This is where testing and QA comes in. Also, these are pretty basic considerations when building mobile apps and I would argue that they aren’t language specifics.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    So now we are going to spend more on development and probably rework because the developer decided he was just going to wrap the website in a webview and call it a “mobile app” because he didn’t think through these scenarios. Anytime that you have to go through the development -> QA cycle more then once it costs money and time. That’s kind of my point. Learning a language is easy and for the most part useless without knowing the frameworks and architectural best practices. I don’t know what Android has, but iOS has built in frameworks for handling syncing. If an Android developer didn’t know all of the built in frameworks available to them and re-invented the wheel, that would also be a waste of money.
    - palerdot 7y ago
      The argument made here is a good generalist tech guy would definitely think these things beforehand as much as an android or iOS guy ... That is language knowlegde !== problem solving ...
      - scarface74 7y ago
        I know all of this because I’ve Architected two solutions on Windows CE devices and built one on top of proprietary mobile/web form builder that would let you do real coding in Javascript. Any company that would hire me as a modern “mobile developer” would be absolutely foolish. I have only written 30 lines of Java my entire 20 year professional career, never written a line of Swift or Objective C. Why would they hire me over someone with relevant experience as a developer? If they want to hire me as a team lead/architect and then find mobile developers, I would know what to look for.
  - bcyn 7y ago
    While it's not solely the responsibility of the programmer, most of the responsibility should fall on the programmer. It's a much more efficient system for the programmer to own UI/UX and for testing and QA to simply verify. In contrast the the programmer doing whatever, and leaving the full responsibility of UI/UX to the testing & QA cycle.
- bhldev 7y ago
  I notice this a lot on apps in the subway (who doesn't) and the app just dies A lot of problems in life can be simply avoided this is no different... If you're getting that tiny last bit of differentiation because you're 90% market share and you can afford to hire people to solve that exact specific problem then great. But that isn't most places. Most apps would do better to 100% avoid the problem and just say "No Internet Connection" if there's no WiFi or 3g. On top of that you get mobile developers who swore to God they solved this problem but guess what they actually have no idea what they are doing. They think it works but it doesn't because it's actually a database concurrency control problem. This https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html and what I expect for someone who claims to "solve the problem" not some "algorithm" they invented. So I don't buy it, and I don't buy the business need for it unless it's an app specifically made for disconnected use. Unfortunately it sounds like one of those things people do to make themselves feel important or smart (no nice way to put it; I see it as bad as someone who invents their own encryption "algorithm" without realizing how ridiculous that is). In short I would say don't do it. And if someone does it better be a real business requirement.
  - codetrotter 7y ago
    I recently came across a company similar to Udemy offering cheap “on sale” video courses like Udemy does. This company has an app and in it you can download the videos and watch them offline, just like Udemy. That’s great, I have a limited amount of data on my plan. And better yet, I can watch these videos when I am completely offline, for example on the 30 hour connecting series of flights I went on recently. Except... whereas the Udemy app actually works completely offline, this other app needs internet access in order for the “my courses” tab to work. You still have access to the videos through the “downloads” tab. But there they are not organized neatly. So I decided to do other things than to look at any of the videos. Also, a lot of apps are bad at properly syncing data. For example I think neither Udemy nor this other one properly syncs the course progress data. Even when they do have a connection.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And you’re kind of demonstrating my point - the difference between people who think it’s an easy problem and the proportion who have experience. Enterprise mobile apps aren’t about the apps you download from the App Store. Usually they are distributed using an on-site mobile device management system. 1st use case: I worked for s company that wrote field service applications for ruggedized Windows mobile devices. Some had cellular, some had WiFi, and some had neither. You had to actually dock the device. The field service techs had to have all of the information they needed on the device to do service calls including routes whether or not they had connectivity. They would record the information and it would sync back to the server whenever they had a connection. 2nd use case: worked for a company that wrote software for railroad car repair billing. Repairs are governed by Raillinc (https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260737/CRB_ProceduresManual.pdf https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260737/CRB_Proc...) all of the rules and audits had to be on the device and the record of the repair had to be available whether or not they had connectivity. It had to sync back with the server whenever a connection was available. 3rd case: software for doctors. Hospitals are notorious for having poor connections. 4th case: home health care nurses had to record lots of information for Medicare billing. Again you can’t count on having mobile connections.
dragonwriter 7y ago
> But that's not the case, the point is that most other criteria are more important that the specific tech experience when dealing with competent people Unfortunately, the more important criteria are harder to assess, and hiring in the real world very heavily weights the east-to-assess bits whether or not they are actually important.

scarface74 7y ago

You’re not worried about their mobile experience until the app fails to work in a tunnel because they are expecting an always on connection or they have half their records on their mobile and half on their server and need to figure out which to use or they never had to figure out a syncing algorithm because you usually don’t have to sync things on the web since you never expect long periods of not being connected. Edit: and I forgot to mention the biggest UI failure I made when I did mobile development a decade ago on WinCE ruggedized devices. I didn’t even think about actually taking the device out into the sun where are all of the field service techs would be working and seeing how the screen, colors and contrast looked.

thestepafter 7y ago
I would argue that this isn’t solely the responsibility of the programmer. This is where testing and QA comes in. Also, these are pretty basic considerations when building mobile apps and I would argue that they aren’t language specifics.
- scarface74 7y ago
  So now we are going to spend more on development and probably rework because the developer decided he was just going to wrap the website in a webview and call it a “mobile app” because he didn’t think through these scenarios. Anytime that you have to go through the development -> QA cycle more then once it costs money and time. That’s kind of my point. Learning a language is easy and for the most part useless without knowing the frameworks and architectural best practices. I don’t know what Android has, but iOS has built in frameworks for handling syncing. If an Android developer didn’t know all of the built in frameworks available to them and re-invented the wheel, that would also be a waste of money.
  - palerdot 7y ago
    The argument made here is a good generalist tech guy would definitely think these things beforehand as much as an android or iOS guy ... That is language knowlegde !== problem solving ...
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I know all of this because I’ve Architected two solutions on Windows CE devices and built one on top of proprietary mobile/web form builder that would let you do real coding in Javascript. Any company that would hire me as a modern “mobile developer” would be absolutely foolish. I have only written 30 lines of Java my entire 20 year professional career, never written a line of Swift or Objective C. Why would they hire me over someone with relevant experience as a developer? If they want to hire me as a team lead/architect and then find mobile developers, I would know what to look for.
- bcyn 7y ago
  While it's not solely the responsibility of the programmer, most of the responsibility should fall on the programmer. It's a much more efficient system for the programmer to own UI/UX and for testing and QA to simply verify. In contrast the the programmer doing whatever, and leaving the full responsibility of UI/UX to the testing & QA cycle.
bhldev 7y ago
I notice this a lot on apps in the subway (who doesn't) and the app just dies A lot of problems in life can be simply avoided this is no different... If you're getting that tiny last bit of differentiation because you're 90% market share and you can afford to hire people to solve that exact specific problem then great. But that isn't most places. Most apps would do better to 100% avoid the problem and just say "No Internet Connection" if there's no WiFi or 3g. On top of that you get mobile developers who swore to God they solved this problem but guess what they actually have no idea what they are doing. They think it works but it doesn't because it's actually a database concurrency control problem. This https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/mvcc-intro.html and what I expect for someone who claims to "solve the problem" not some "algorithm" they invented. So I don't buy it, and I don't buy the business need for it unless it's an app specifically made for disconnected use. Unfortunately it sounds like one of those things people do to make themselves feel important or smart (no nice way to put it; I see it as bad as someone who invents their own encryption "algorithm" without realizing how ridiculous that is). In short I would say don't do it. And if someone does it better be a real business requirement.
- codetrotter 7y ago
  I recently came across a company similar to Udemy offering cheap “on sale” video courses like Udemy does. This company has an app and in it you can download the videos and watch them offline, just like Udemy. That’s great, I have a limited amount of data on my plan. And better yet, I can watch these videos when I am completely offline, for example on the 30 hour connecting series of flights I went on recently. Except... whereas the Udemy app actually works completely offline, this other app needs internet access in order for the “my courses” tab to work. You still have access to the videos through the “downloads” tab. But there they are not organized neatly. So I decided to do other things than to look at any of the videos. Also, a lot of apps are bad at properly syncing data. For example I think neither Udemy nor this other one properly syncs the course progress data. Even when they do have a connection.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And you’re kind of demonstrating my point - the difference between people who think it’s an easy problem and the proportion who have experience. Enterprise mobile apps aren’t about the apps you download from the App Store. Usually they are distributed using an on-site mobile device management system. 1st use case: I worked for s company that wrote field service applications for ruggedized Windows mobile devices. Some had cellular, some had WiFi, and some had neither. You had to actually dock the device. The field service techs had to have all of the information they needed on the device to do service calls including routes whether or not they had connectivity. They would record the information and it would sync back to the server whenever they had a connection. 2nd use case: worked for a company that wrote software for railroad car repair billing. Repairs are governed by Raillinc (https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260737/CRB_ProceduresManual.pdf https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260737/CRB_Proc...) all of the rules and audits had to be on the device and the record of the repair had to be available whether or not they had connectivity. It had to sync back with the server whenever a connection was available. 3rd case: software for doctors. Hospitals are notorious for having poor connections. 4th case: home health care nurses had to record lots of information for Medicare billing. Again you can’t count on having mobile connections.

dragonwriter 7y ago

> But that's not the case, the point is that most other criteria are more important that the specific tech experience when dealing with competent people Unfortunately, the more important criteria are harder to assess, and hiring in the real world very heavily weights the east-to-assess bits whether or not they are actually important.