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>And the reality is that dropping stack requirements drastically improves the candidate pool. For one you have way way more candidates to select from. There's

>And the reality is that dropping stack requirements drastically improves the candidate pool. For one you have way way more candidates to select from. There's definitely a sweet spot in terms of stack specificity. There's very little issue hiring a flask developer if you need somebody to work on django. However, if you're a ruby shop and you hire a java developer - even if they are great - you've potentially doubled or tripled your onboarding time. >All of which means that if you insist on [X] experience, most of the time you're scraping the bottom of the labor market barrel and getting mediocre engineers. I don't think that's necessarily true. Nonetheless, this could be market specific. I can imagine that hiring a developer in, say, Ohio might make your approach more worthwhile compared to hiring in SF, where the talent pool is deeper.

marcosdumay 7y ago
> There's definitely a sweet spot in terms of stack specificity. The GP's calculation had a very important weakness that it does not take retention under account. The sweet spot will be mostly determined by retention. And the very bad places that have impossibly (sometimes literally) specific requirements are probably correct on requiring a narrow set of competences. But of course, they would gain more by improving themselves so the developers don't quit as often.
sanderjd 7y ago
> However, if you're a ruby shop and you hire a java developer - even if they are great - you've potentially doubled or tripled your onboarding time. You think? I went the other direction and I don't think it was so hard. The language was the easy part of onboarding, the hard part was all the company specific stuff.
AlchemistCamp 7y ago
> However, if you're a ruby shop and you hire a java developer - even if they are great - you've potentially doubled or tripled your onboarding time. I don't think that's true at all. I've met tons of Java devs who moved to Ruby with minimal pain. It's still OO and many of the same patterns apply.

marcosdumay 7y ago

> There's definitely a sweet spot in terms of stack specificity. The GP's calculation had a very important weakness that it does not take retention under account. The sweet spot will be mostly determined by retention. And the very bad places that have impossibly (sometimes literally) specific requirements are probably correct on requiring a narrow set of competences. But of course, they would gain more by improving themselves so the developers don't quit as often.

sanderjd 7y ago

> However, if you're a ruby shop and you hire a java developer - even if they are great - you've potentially doubled or tripled your onboarding time. You think? I went the other direction and I don't think it was so hard. The language was the easy part of onboarding, the hard part was all the company specific stuff.

AlchemistCamp 7y ago

> However, if you're a ruby shop and you hire a java developer - even if they are great - you've potentially doubled or tripled your onboarding time. I don't think that's true at all. I've met tons of Java devs who moved to Ruby with minimal pain. It's still OO and many of the same patterns apply.