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That was my point: by choosing an esoteric language, you raise the bar for the people you need to hire, which makes hiring very challenging. Now go scale that
by billmcneale 16y ago
That was my point: by choosing an esoteric language, you raise the bar for the people you need to hire, which makes hiring very challenging.
Now go scale that up to 50 or 100 engineers and you understand why it's not a viable strategy.
Try it yourself, go pitch a startup and then tell the VC's and their consultants that you're going to use Scala...
I know you're going to say that they don't know their stuff and you should be the one deciding, but it's actually the other way around: they know how to grow a business, and nobody with that knowledge will ever recommend to go with non mainstream language and technologies.
- technomancy 16y agoIt almost sounds like you're saying raising the hiring bar is a bad thing.
- technomancy 16y agogot cut off on my phone; meant to add: why would you ever need 50 Clojure engineers?
- billmcneale 16y agoFor the exact same reason you might one day need 50 programmers in any language: if your company flourishes. What makes Clojure so special that you'll never need that many?
- harryh 16y ago1) raising the bar for the people you need to hire is a good thing. If you think that settling for mediocre engineers is ok, then you're doing it wrong 2) We've already have ~20 engineers writing scala code at foursquare. Not 50 yet, but the challenge of getting there will having nothing to do with our choice of language. If anything it's helped with hiring so far. 3) I did tell our VCs that we'll be using scala. They didn't have a problem with it. In fact a VC on our board agreed with me that "using cutting edge technology can give a real edge in recruiting." Basically my experience growing the engineering team at foursquare has been the exact opposite of your claims.