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For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to work o

For the specific example given I have turned down many individuals who sound like they have a similar background because they could not figure out how to work outside of their toolchain. I see it all the time with .NET and Java developers, if they are not in Visual Studios or Eclipse they don't know how to even compile their software. Both those ecosystems are fantastic and developers can be very productive, especially in an enterprise setting, but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training. Which leads to the second problem. Fenerally I have found a lot of the Enterprise developers to be very resistant to training and change. They don't know how to deal with a world where they have to be responsible for the entire software project not just one small module, and they definitely don't know how to deal with any part of operations like deploying the software or troubleshooting problems. As soon as something goes wrong they blame the tech stack and pine for the days when they could just push a button on Visual Studios and have everything build and test for them without actually understanding what was going on.

leetrout 7y ago
I agree with your sentiment but it's not good to blame an entire class of people. I've had the same thing happen with devs who were using Python + Django and popular frontend toolchains. What you hit exactly square on the head is the lack of caring about what is going on. At larger corporations or at places with a rigid developer experience they do only have to care about their small piece of the pie. This especially doesn't exist in startups but people still don't want to learn the tools. Every day I try to encourage my team members to learn more about what npm actually does, for example. I think it's just a personal preference toward priorities. I like to understand the ins and outs of my tools.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  I agree that you can't typecast everyone who has worked in a specific platform. There are lots of high quality developers out there working on all sorts of things, and as an industry we put too much emphasis on resume's which can't really display what you actually did at a company
simion314 7y ago
I think you are projecting your biases. A developer that has 10 years of experience solving problems, debugging though issues can learn faster the cool language of the day then a 1 year dev can learn the 10 years of experience.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  Its not about learning the language. Take a Java developer who is used to Eclipse and tell them from now on they need to write Maven files directly and learn how to build and test from the CLI because thats how your CI works. Same thing with version control. I am always amazed at the number of development shops that still work by emailing around zip files with code in it, or places where the only place you can build software is on a developers workstation. There is so much more to software development then the language you use.
  - notdang 7y ago
    I work for enterprise companies for many years. All maven/gradle files are modified manually, builds, tests, checkstyles are run from CLI. IDEs are used for writing the code.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    That Java developer might have started out using make anyways, and this is would be the 5th or 6th build system they are going to have to learn how to use anew. It isn’t really weird since build system fads change faster than fashion. But if you really don’t want to hire someone, just ask a few esoteric GIT questions.
  - simion314 7y ago
    I think you are still generalizing, say you bring me in your project, is your job to let me know how to integrate in your tools, there are too many tools out so I can learn them all. Like in Web when we bring a new developer we don't expect them to just start coding , maybe they did not used gulp but some other similar tool, maybe they did not used less but used css. I am not sure why you would generalize that most Java developers can't use CLI tools or a VCS, there are some bad developers in the world and some of them are also writing shit in cool languages and spam everywhere some toy project like a TODO app and you see it upvoted just because is in Rust/GO or Shiny.js 7.0
vector_spaces 7y ago
One data point but I have a ".NET background", primarily write "Enterprise software" in Windows stacks, but although I have a Windows Amazon Workspace at my disposal my daily drivers are Linux and Emacs. That said I haven't really observed this phenomenon among any of my coworkers who run on Visual Studio and Windows full time. I think experienced devs who care about their craft enough to know a modicum of computer science understand what is happening "under the hood" when tooling like Visual Studio abstracts build steps away from them, or at least enough to be able to manually replicate it themselves if needed.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  I don't want to contest your personal experience, however I find it very hard to believe you could work in an enterprise environment and not know people like the one's I have described. I have met these kinds of people at all the FAANG companies as well as every single software development firm I have worked with.
  - vector_spaces 7y ago
    I have known people like this, but my point (poorly articulated) is that I don't think these biases against enterprise devs who happen to have experience with a particular toolchain are appropriate, since not all enterprise devs are like this, and, as others have mentioned, they aren't unique to developers with experience in those technologies -- for example, I've run into this issue pretty much exclusively with folks on the data side (not in the company I work for) using Python via Jupyter Notebooks and R via RStudio. Anyway -- I think it's fairly straightforward to filter these kinds of people out of your pool without going the nuclear option?
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
So what? Everyone has a chain they are used to. Setup that make file and forget about it is very common, even if they aren’t using an IDE. Yes, I can figure out how to work my tools by hand going through a bit of the references, but no, not in the 45 seconds you give me to answer the question of how to do it. > but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training. There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies are different. There are definitely a lot of hacks who find one niche or another and can fake it, but it doesn’t mean the real deals who somehow start out on .NET will have crippled career potential.
- dilyevsky 7y ago
  Anecdotal but at previous job I interviewed quite a lot and found that java devs were as good on coding sessions but did worse on architecture and design / systems. Not particularly surprising really
- dkhenry 7y ago
  > There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies are different. There is overwhelming evidence for this, and its been known to anyone who has had to hire engineers for a very long time. Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't do any of the things you listed there.
  - seanmcdirmid 7y ago
    Overwhelming evidence? For such claims, citations are generally requires, or is the evidence all anecdata? > Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't do any of the things you listed there. Again, I don’t think this is born out at all. Yes, a lot of people fail or answer that LeetCode question with that special trick solution in 45 minutes, but we don’t really have any quick tests to gauge actual ability in the hiring process.

leetrout 7y ago

I agree with your sentiment but it's not good to blame an entire class of people. I've had the same thing happen with devs who were using Python + Django and popular frontend toolchains. What you hit exactly square on the head is the lack of caring about what is going on. At larger corporations or at places with a rigid developer experience they do only have to care about their small piece of the pie. This especially doesn't exist in startups but people still don't want to learn the tools. Every day I try to encourage my team members to learn more about what npm actually does, for example. I think it's just a personal preference toward priorities. I like to understand the ins and outs of my tools.

dkhenry 7y ago
I agree that you can't typecast everyone who has worked in a specific platform. There are lots of high quality developers out there working on all sorts of things, and as an industry we put too much emphasis on resume's which can't really display what you actually did at a company

simion314 7y ago

I think you are projecting your biases. A developer that has 10 years of experience solving problems, debugging though issues can learn faster the cool language of the day then a 1 year dev can learn the 10 years of experience.

dkhenry 7y ago
Its not about learning the language. Take a Java developer who is used to Eclipse and tell them from now on they need to write Maven files directly and learn how to build and test from the CLI because thats how your CI works. Same thing with version control. I am always amazed at the number of development shops that still work by emailing around zip files with code in it, or places where the only place you can build software is on a developers workstation. There is so much more to software development then the language you use.
- notdang 7y ago
  I work for enterprise companies for many years. All maven/gradle files are modified manually, builds, tests, checkstyles are run from CLI. IDEs are used for writing the code.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  That Java developer might have started out using make anyways, and this is would be the 5th or 6th build system they are going to have to learn how to use anew. It isn’t really weird since build system fads change faster than fashion. But if you really don’t want to hire someone, just ask a few esoteric GIT questions.
- simion314 7y ago
  I think you are still generalizing, say you bring me in your project, is your job to let me know how to integrate in your tools, there are too many tools out so I can learn them all. Like in Web when we bring a new developer we don't expect them to just start coding , maybe they did not used gulp but some other similar tool, maybe they did not used less but used css. I am not sure why you would generalize that most Java developers can't use CLI tools or a VCS, there are some bad developers in the world and some of them are also writing shit in cool languages and spam everywhere some toy project like a TODO app and you see it upvoted just because is in Rust/GO or Shiny.js 7.0

vector_spaces 7y ago

One data point but I have a ".NET background", primarily write "Enterprise software" in Windows stacks, but although I have a Windows Amazon Workspace at my disposal my daily drivers are Linux and Emacs. That said I haven't really observed this phenomenon among any of my coworkers who run on Visual Studio and Windows full time. I think experienced devs who care about their craft enough to know a modicum of computer science understand what is happening "under the hood" when tooling like Visual Studio abstracts build steps away from them, or at least enough to be able to manually replicate it themselves if needed.

dkhenry 7y ago
I don't want to contest your personal experience, however I find it very hard to believe you could work in an enterprise environment and not know people like the one's I have described. I have met these kinds of people at all the FAANG companies as well as every single software development firm I have worked with.
- vector_spaces 7y ago
  I have known people like this, but my point (poorly articulated) is that I don't think these biases against enterprise devs who happen to have experience with a particular toolchain are appropriate, since not all enterprise devs are like this, and, as others have mentioned, they aren't unique to developers with experience in those technologies -- for example, I've run into this issue pretty much exclusively with folks on the data side (not in the company I work for) using Python via Jupyter Notebooks and R via RStudio. Anyway -- I think it's fairly straightforward to filter these kinds of people out of your pool without going the nuclear option?

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

So what? Everyone has a chain they are used to. Setup that make file and forget about it is very common, even if they aren’t using an IDE. Yes, I can figure out how to work my tools by hand going through a bit of the references, but no, not in the 45 seconds you give me to answer the question of how to do it. > but it is rare you can take a .NET developer put them in front of Python or Go and have them actually be able to be productive without extensive training. There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies are different. There are definitely a lot of hacks who find one niche or another and can fake it, but it doesn’t mean the real deals who somehow start out on .NET will have crippled career potential.

dilyevsky 7y ago
Anecdotal but at previous job I interviewed quite a lot and found that java devs were as good on coding sessions but did worse on architecture and design / systems. Not particularly surprising really
dkhenry 7y ago
> There is absolutely no evidence for this whatsoever. The ability to program or not, the ability to abstract, generalize, arrange your code right, solve problems, ask questions, and so on, changes little when the tooling ceremonies are different. There is overwhelming evidence for this, and its been known to anyone who has had to hire engineers for a very long time. Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't do any of the things you listed there.
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  Overwhelming evidence? For such claims, citations are generally requires, or is the evidence all anecdata? > Something like 95% of people with CS degrees can't do any of the things you listed there. Again, I don’t think this is born out at all. Yes, a lot of people fail or answer that LeetCode question with that special trick solution in 45 minutes, but we don’t really have any quick tests to gauge actual ability in the hiring process.