I was in the senior leadership team of a company a while back (I was brought on to build a software team from scratch). I worked with the other execs to ask the

I was in the senior leadership team of a company a while back (I was brought on to build a software team from scratch). I worked with the other execs to ask the question "what culture do you want in your software development team; what will be compatible with the rest of the company culture?" Some of the options we discussed... - Is your plan to sell the company in a year or two? Then you will probably write a lot of throwaway code, and speed of development of basic stuff is most important. If you want this, I'll hire you a team of Python or NodeJS or Ruby programmers. - Is your plan to have software that supports your company over the long term, but the goal of the software itself is more around cost savings? Is the software development team going to be a cost centre? If so, you will end up with a revolving door of programmers coming in for short periods of time to work on it? If you want this, I will hire a team of Java or Go or C# programmers. - Do you want to build very technically complicated software as a differentiation strategy? Then you will be looking at a team of very smart software developers who love their craft with a passion that will be a bit foreign to non-technical staff. If you want this, I'll hire a team of Haskell / Lisp / Ocaml / F# programmers. At the time, the rest of the leadership team wanted the last option, so that's the software team we built. As far as I remember it worked quite well, I remember that there was only one significant bug that made it into production.