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The interesting thing this brings up is whether programming hiring is too specific. Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of rea

The interesting thing this brings up is whether programming hiring is too specific. Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers? To me this guy sounds like he could do anything, just see if he's easy to work with and see if he likes your domain. He's certainly said enough about programming over the years that he shouldn't need a leetcode grilling. Anyway my point was it can get quite narrow what we look for in a coder when in fact some broad experience might be just what is necessary. For instance I've coded apps for iPhone and Android despite being ostensibly a back end financial trader. I'd think a lot of coders wouldn't want to be siloed into the first thing they get a job in.

kragen 5y ago
He's easy to work with. I was a technical reviewer on his book, and not only was he extremely good at communication, he gracefully handled stupid bullshit from me that nobody could reasonably be expected to handle. In terms of interpersonal ability, I think he's head and shoulders above the crowd.
- mjd 5y ago
  I have looked back at Kragen's review comments from 2002 and they were (as I remembered) unusually thoughtful, detailed, and helpful. I sent him a more detailed message about this but I wanted to have it on the record here. Kragen: Thanks for your kind words. I am happy to know that you found me easy to work with.
  - kragen 5y ago
    Aw, thanks! I was thinking of the review comments where I was unusually aggressive, detailed, and impatient, and, I should add unreasonably so. I think the fact that to you they only seemed thoughtful, detailed, and helpful speaks volumes about your character.
mcv 5y ago
We tend to get hired for what we've done before, rather than for what we want to do in the future. Although it wasn't always like that for me. For a long time I felt it was totally normal to learn a completely new language for a new job. My first job was Visual C++, my second job was Java and XSLT, my third job was Ruby, my fourth was Groovy with some Java and Ruby. Then after some more Java and Ruby, I ended up in Javascript + Angular, then Typescript + Vue, now Typescript + React. I feel like I'm fairly lucky in that I at least still get to hop frameworks; there are tons of people who've been doing Java+Spring for 20 years now. I wouldn't mind moving to Kotlin or Scala, but that's hard to find. At least for me; most recruiters still look at what I did in the past, and they see a lot of Java, so they assume that's what I do.
claudiawerner 5y ago
I've had a very hard time finding a new job given that my current job doesn't use any kind of "tooling" or outside libraries to get things done, other than rather obscure and domain specific ones (e.g. libgps). Ideally I'd like to pivot to web development given that I have some hobbyist experience with it, but I'm not very good at "specific frameworks". If someone were to ask me to sit down and write something in React/Vue.js/whatever on the first interview, I don't think I could without the docs or a tutorial available. I can write JS just fine, I can't write any specific framework, even though I have the mental model and concepts behind how they work and how to use them. So when I see a job that specifically asks for e.g. React, I just don't apply. Same story with companies that ask for Django rather than the more generic "Python web development experience". I could pick up Django within two weeks if you hired me. I know what it is and what MV(C) is. Isn't that enough?
- egeozcan 5y ago
  > If someone were to ask me to sit down and write something in React/Vue.js/whatever on the first interview, I don't think I could without the docs or a tutorial available I've been in the web development doing all "ends" since I-lost-count-how-many years and even with a library which has rather a small API surface like React, I also need to search things every once in a while. If they don't allow you to do that in an interview, they have unrealistic expectations. > I could pick up Django within two weeks if you hired me. I know what it is and what MV(C) is. Isn't that enough? Most of the time, it is enough. There is also an unlikely chance that they have a lot of complexity and need someone who knows the internals and can fix obscure bugs. That probably wouldn't be you for Django/React. I sometimes was that person in the past and it's very stressful so, it's not something a developer would seek to become anyway.
- zarzavat 5y ago
  For an experienced programmer with some frontend experience it only takes a couple of days of studying to learn React well enough to pass an interview. It really isn’t very complicated. Something like CSS would be much harder to fake.
  - 5y ago
bluetomcat 5y ago
Hiring for a particular language/framework/ecosystem combination almost always limits the prospects for the employer. Any seasoned programmer with some C, Python, Java and JavaScript experience can get up to speed with your shiny UI or cloud framework and won't brag about it. The opposite is rarely true. That AWS, Node.js or Blockchain expert can hardly write a Python module in C.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
> He's certainly said enough about programming over the years that he shouldn't need a leetcode grilling. If the purpose of the test were to evaluate the applicant’s technical ability, then this would be true. I’ll lay odds that is not the purpose of the testing, though.
shalmanese 5y ago
If the average tenure is 20 years and person A takes 1 month to become effective and person B takes 6 months, then person B has to be 2.1% more productive to be greater ROI. If the average tenure is 1 year then person B has to be 83% more productive for greater ROI. Increased job liquidity means employers seek increasingly specific fit above all other considerations.
- feoren 5y ago
  There is no programming job in the world that would take me six months full-time to become effective. Maybe a month, if it's an awful setup in an awful, unfamiliar programming language with unhelpful colleagues. It sounds like you're assuming if you hired a React programmer to work on your React app, it would take that programmer 1 month to get up to speed, while it would take a Haskell programmer 6 months. I claim: if your codebase is complex enough and your situation unusual enough that it would take a React programmer 1 month to write productive React code, the Haskell programmer will take 2 weeks. This is because the vast majority of the learning curve is in your domain and setup, not in how React components work. (Assuming for sake of argument they are actually smarter.) People vastly overestimate how long it takes a decent programmer to learn new tech.
  - maerF0x0 5y ago
    in my experience people should be contributing _something_ within a month, hit a reasonable stride by 6 months, and asymptotically approach full speed extending out to 36 months. A lot of the speed a junior, or new person has, is in not considering the things they do not know. If the system is incredibly robust it will just absorb their bad decisions. But in most decisions it means they planted ticking bombs. Often 5 minutes today costs 5 hours in 6+ months time.
    - newaccount74 5y ago
      That's my experience as well. If someone is "productive" at their job in a month, then the job is either trivial, or they have a senior dev holding their hand.
throwaway81523 5y ago
There are certainly Haskell jobs in the Bay area. No idea about Philadelphia. MJD doesn't seem to have embarked on a Haskell job search so far, beyond the blog posting announcing his availability. So my bet is that he gets plenty of takers.
- mdm12 5y ago
  The Philadelphia tech job market exists, but...it's not like New York/Boston/SF. The major players are Comcast(...), Vanguard and a smattering of Big Pharma companies. There is a startup scene (most notable success likely being Gopuff), but not a huge one. Thankfully, the remote situation has improved dramatically, so I agree, they should be ok :)
nhoughto 5y ago
I wonder if it’s a signal of how much their are willing to Invest in people. I’ve been interviewing recently and have seen many companies are explicitly “we don’t care about language exp we will teach you, we want good ppl”.
austincheney 5y ago
Why React at all? Is JavaScript really that horrific or does nobody know what they are doing? I suspect the goal is to widen candidate availability to the maximum, cast the widest net. I find this odd because compensation is now absurd competence, experience, and product quality be damned.
Tade0 5y ago
I'm currently working with a C++ dev who has exactly zero previous experience with the web, but because he essentially finished his part of the system, he picked up web-related tasks. My manager today was wondering if that's particularly efficient, to which I replied "he knows how to program". I mean, the guy has a PhD in physics - I bet that what he's doing now isn't even his final form.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  > My manager today was wondering if that's particularly efficient, to which I replied "he knows how to program". > I mean, the guy has a PhD in physics - I bet that what he's doing now isn't even his final form. I don't doubt that they guy you work with is excellent and is able to seamlessly make this switch, but I have previously worked with someone who was excellent at C++, and had a PhD in something maths related (can't remember what exactly), and completely failed to get anywhere with JavaScript. As in: took 2 weeks to write a script that would take me a couple of hours, and it was still in a pretty bad state at that point. It seems that they hadn't encountered async programming before and really struggled to get their head around it. The silly thing is their program didn't actually require any concurrency so they could just have stuck an `await` on each async function call and treated it like synchronous code, but they were convinced that async-await was too complicated to learn up front so they had a complete mess tracking everything with callbacks.
  - blahgeek 5y ago
    I won’t say someone is good at programming if he/she cannot learn JavaScript in two weeks
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      Perhaps not in a general sense. But that they were certainly good enough at C++ that my employer was quite happy with their performance at those tasks. They just weren't very good at translating that to areas they were less familiar with.
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
pjmlp 5y ago
Fully agree, the only reason I have some stuff on Github it isn't even for the joy of doing FOSS and contributing to a better world, rather to keep HR happy that I am actually proficient on stuff done as hobby coding. However that is something that most families cannot manage, and one cannot be expected to create portfolios on SCM of the year just to prove their skillset.
brenainn 5y ago
My feeling is a lot of that is driven by recruiters. It's probably a lot easier to sift through dozens of resumes by looking for keywords. It's a bit shit though. There's plenty of jobs I'd like to apply for specifically because they advertise that they use technologies I haven't worked with. I could spend the time trying to convince them I can learn quickly and my other skills make me an asset, but I'm afraid of it being a waste to do so if a lack of "X years experience in Y" trips some red flag. As an aside, advertisements for developer positions need some sort of intervention. I'm tired of not knowing who the company is ("Exciting opportunity with growing startup in the whatever space!"). I also see things like "experience with object-oriented programming required". These days that's like saying "we're looking for a driver who has experience with steering wheels" and really puts me off.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  I spent my entire job hunt last year, neglecting to apply for positions that interested me, because whether I thought I was capable or performing or not, I know that my resume, basically just a projection of my past experience, would never get me through the resume screening step. Actually in fact, the first few applications I put in never made it past screening and I couldn’t even be mad. It made perfect sense why on paper I’m not qualified. I could probably find a way to make myself look qualified, but it’s be a lot of work and frankly, I haven’t had the drive or passion for programming required to do that for years. Probably just easier to quit and find some new career at this point.
zerr 5y ago
The prominent example of gatekeeping is game industry.
benreesman 5y ago
We don’t like to talk about this: but modulo all the usual turf wars around libraries and attribution and where the braces go: serious Haskell people skew smart and capable. This comes with downsides around dicking around with trying to jam every part of the computation into the type system (not unlike C++ template meta programming). But net/net, when a GHC contributor rolls up his or her sleeves, they on average have a bigger range than people who argue about ReactJS vs Ember. Source: worked on one of the biggest production Haskell code bases on Earth, was involved in early design discussions on both React and Ember, and wrote big pieces of an ECMA-262 compiler/VM. Haskell people skew smarter than most other languages. Sorry for saying it out loud.
- auslegung 5y ago
  Agreed. I don’t have anything near your experience, but I have done Haskell in production for two years, and other things for longer. And yet I always say I’m not smart enough to use a language like JavaScript, I need a dumb language like Haskell :-)
- alfiedotwtf 5y ago
  > This comes with downsides around dicking around with trying to jam every part of the computation into the type system (not unlike C++ template meta programming). I'm not sure why you say this is dicking around as the payoffs for moving things higher up are usually orders of magnitude better
- uncletaco 5y ago
  Nah this rings true. There's a reason Haskell's killer app is a mobile astrology reader.
- smikhanov 5y ago
  > worked on one of the biggest production > Haskell code bases on Earth Which one was that?
  - he_is_legend 5y ago
    As he also mentioned he was involved in early React, so maybe Facebook? They are known to use it for spam filtering, amongst other things.
hk__2 5y ago
It really depends on the size and resources of your company. I used to work for a large French ecommerce company where most of the stack was in Clojure and most of the people we hired were totally new to this language and/or were Clojure fans but were new to the ecommerce world. It didn’t really matter as long as they were motivated because we had the resources to train them and give them time to learn. I left ~1 year ago to join a very early-stage startup where we’re currently 5, and while I would love to hire people that don’t master at least most of the stack we use, I just can’t because we really don’t have the resources to afford to have someone spending time (their time and also other people time) learning everything. This probably an extreme example but it illustrates the point: even if you’d like to hire people in a broader spectrum, you can’t always afford to. [ I hope that at one point we’ll be able to do it :) ]
ivanhoe 5y ago
Good programmer can switch niches and will still be a good programmer, there's no doubt about it. Problem is that it still takes some time. You can't just pick up a new language (or even just a new framework) and immediately start producing your best code. It takes time to pick up the style and best practices, and to learn all the nuances. Also very importantly to embrace that new mindset, which can be sometimes hard when you've been doing something in a particular way for long time. There's always that warming up period where you instinctively still try to stick to your habits from the previous language, and you end up with Frankenstein looking code for a while.
0xedd 5y ago
Unfortunately, a lot falls on networking (the human kind).
ineedasername 5y ago
Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers? We do hire less specialized programmers, we just don't pay them at the scale that someone with 30 years of experience might expect. If the job really needs someone that knows a specific tech immediately then the expectation is that a candidate has at least pursued a decent amount self-learning, which for someone with 30 years of experience should be easy to do in a couple of weeks. (The author here has done that*) All else being equal we still wouldn't pay them the same as someone with 5-10 in that specific tech though.
slouc 5y ago
I've been in the industry for ten years, and this is the first time I hear about asking for things like "e-commerce experience". My CV consists of telecom, e-commerce, fintech, mobility and music industry. Is it really like that somewhere? In the US, or in particular domains, or in particular technology space? If it matters, I've mostly been working with JVM, but two quite different paradigms - Java (OOP) and Scala (pure FP; I understand everything the haskell guy talks about).
gilbetron 5y ago
I somewhat agree with your point, but the I think software developers underestimate the difficulty in getting someone up to speed when the "tech stack delta" is significant. Every piece of technology you need to learn isn't a linear increase in time, but rather more quadratic. Learning just k8s might take N weeks, and learning Go might take M weeks, but learning k8s and Go at the same time takes more than N+M weeks, and might take something more like N X M weeks (or really 0.1N X 0.1M or something). Learning one tech while also learning another tech makes each more difficult. I push employers to understand this and instead of throwing people into the tech pile, have them hit each tech bit one at a time, but the sink-or-swim belief is strong.
synergy20 5y ago
you have to fit into the company's software ecosystem, if everyone uses php or python there and you do Haskell it does not matter if you're a MIT PhD that happens to be a Haskell core developer that can rewrite chrome in Haskell in a month, it just does not fit. That been said, there are definitely companies need Haskell developers, it just has less positions for a smaller pool of developers.
giancarlostoro 5y ago
Personality in my opinion and humility are the biggest two things when I care about who my team mates are. If you have more than one hot head you are not going to be happy, they will eventually clash and one or both or more will try to leave. Programming can get frustrating and stressful on its own, why add to the fire? People learn to program over time. You want to resolve bugs the sooner the better, if you spend all day arguing or you’re working with one of those “its not my code my code is perfect” types you’re going to have to do more work to get things moving. People who think they know it all can hold you back, some devs are great at some things at the same time some at others. Find a nicely balanced team that can work together.
deltaonefour 5y ago
I've had an interviewer literally stop the interview to give me career advice when I told him I was a generalist. His advice was that whenever he hears about someone who's a full stack generalist he knows they aren't that good. His advice was to specialize and get really really good at something. Keep in mind I'm super senior. Much older than most people in this industry.
NikolaNovak 5y ago
I cannot answer either the more broad or more specific questions in these threads. But my 2 cents as to: "Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers?" In my neck of the woods, we generally hire specifically PeopleSoft Programmers, ideally with Payroll experience. Here's why: 1. First and foremost, developers need to do more than spit out code. They need to thoroughly understand business problems, work with business analysts and product owners to hash out requirements, be able to meaningfully discuss these requirements, create design that they can independently sanity-check meets these requirements, and then work on translating it into code. 2. They need PeopleSoft experience and knowledge - it's a specific ecosystem and language with specific requirements and constraints and capabilities. Programmer needs to fully understand these early on when they discuss requirements and solution with business. 3. Payroll experience helps, again for them to be able to discuss things meaningfully with the business. I know that this ("Dev needs to be able to gather requirements") is self-evidently true across development world, but I want to underline that our developers can meaningfully discuss intricacies of Canadian and Provincial tax code, payroll processes and regulations, time and labour, benefits, pension, and other adjustments with their functional counterparts; while also having meaningful discussions with our DBA & Infra teams on indexes, stats, etc. All in the specific world of PeopleSoft where code resides in database, with specific component processor which offers about 30 different ways to trigger code on a page, while ensuring data integrity etc. With that in mind, historically, it's just as easy and perhaps easier/faster/cheaper, to train a new grad (and we do, a lot!), rather than get somebody experienced in a completely different ecosystem and try to retrain them. Now, PeopleSoft is a very specific (quirky, legacy, idiosyncratic, crazy, etc) ecosystem, but I think using it as an extreme example may show some of the core reasons why even in less extreme environments, requirements are fairly specific. Yes, a good programmer with wide experience has a lot of skills. But by numbers, I think most devs work in business areas with specific set of common industry/sector problems and solutions, which reward specialization.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >In my neck of the woods, we generally hire specifically PeopleSoft Programmers, ideally with Payroll experience. I can see why that works for the employer but as an employee I would be terrified of that becoming a career dead end.

kragen 5y ago

He's easy to work with. I was a technical reviewer on his book, and not only was he extremely good at communication, he gracefully handled stupid bullshit from me that nobody could reasonably be expected to handle. In terms of interpersonal ability, I think he's head and shoulders above the crowd.

mjd 5y ago
I have looked back at Kragen's review comments from 2002 and they were (as I remembered) unusually thoughtful, detailed, and helpful. I sent him a more detailed message about this but I wanted to have it on the record here. Kragen: Thanks for your kind words. I am happy to know that you found me easy to work with.
- kragen 5y ago
  Aw, thanks! I was thinking of the review comments where I was unusually aggressive, detailed, and impatient, and, I should add unreasonably so. I think the fact that to you they only seemed thoughtful, detailed, and helpful speaks volumes about your character.

mcv 5y ago

We tend to get hired for what we've done before, rather than for what we want to do in the future. Although it wasn't always like that for me. For a long time I felt it was totally normal to learn a completely new language for a new job. My first job was Visual C++, my second job was Java and XSLT, my third job was Ruby, my fourth was Groovy with some Java and Ruby. Then after some more Java and Ruby, I ended up in Javascript + Angular, then Typescript + Vue, now Typescript + React. I feel like I'm fairly lucky in that I at least still get to hop frameworks; there are tons of people who've been doing Java+Spring for 20 years now. I wouldn't mind moving to Kotlin or Scala, but that's hard to find. At least for me; most recruiters still look at what I did in the past, and they see a lot of Java, so they assume that's what I do.

claudiawerner 5y ago

I've had a very hard time finding a new job given that my current job doesn't use any kind of "tooling" or outside libraries to get things done, other than rather obscure and domain specific ones (e.g. libgps). Ideally I'd like to pivot to web development given that I have some hobbyist experience with it, but I'm not very good at "specific frameworks". If someone were to ask me to sit down and write something in React/Vue.js/whatever on the first interview, I don't think I could without the docs or a tutorial available. I can write JS just fine, I can't write any specific framework, even though I have the mental model and concepts behind how they work and how to use them. So when I see a job that specifically asks for e.g. React, I just don't apply. Same story with companies that ask for Django rather than the more generic "Python web development experience". I could pick up Django within two weeks if you hired me. I know what it is and what MV(C) is. Isn't that enough?

egeozcan 5y ago
> If someone were to ask me to sit down and write something in React/Vue.js/whatever on the first interview, I don't think I could without the docs or a tutorial available I've been in the web development doing all "ends" since I-lost-count-how-many years and even with a library which has rather a small API surface like React, I also need to search things every once in a while. If they don't allow you to do that in an interview, they have unrealistic expectations. > I could pick up Django within two weeks if you hired me. I know what it is and what MV(C) is. Isn't that enough? Most of the time, it is enough. There is also an unlikely chance that they have a lot of complexity and need someone who knows the internals and can fix obscure bugs. That probably wouldn't be you for Django/React. I sometimes was that person in the past and it's very stressful so, it's not something a developer would seek to become anyway.
zarzavat 5y ago
For an experienced programmer with some frontend experience it only takes a couple of days of studying to learn React well enough to pass an interview. It really isn’t very complicated. Something like CSS would be much harder to fake.
- 5y ago

bluetomcat 5y ago

Hiring for a particular language/framework/ecosystem combination almost always limits the prospects for the employer. Any seasoned programmer with some C, Python, Java and JavaScript experience can get up to speed with your shiny UI or cloud framework and won't brag about it. The opposite is rarely true. That AWS, Node.js or Blockchain expert can hardly write a Python module in C.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

> He's certainly said enough about programming over the years that he shouldn't need a leetcode grilling. If the purpose of the test were to evaluate the applicant’s technical ability, then this would be true. I’ll lay odds that is not the purpose of the testing, though.

shalmanese 5y ago

If the average tenure is 20 years and person A takes 1 month to become effective and person B takes 6 months, then person B has to be 2.1% more productive to be greater ROI. If the average tenure is 1 year then person B has to be 83% more productive for greater ROI. Increased job liquidity means employers seek increasingly specific fit above all other considerations.

feoren 5y ago
There is no programming job in the world that would take me six months full-time to become effective. Maybe a month, if it's an awful setup in an awful, unfamiliar programming language with unhelpful colleagues. It sounds like you're assuming if you hired a React programmer to work on your React app, it would take that programmer 1 month to get up to speed, while it would take a Haskell programmer 6 months. I claim: if your codebase is complex enough and your situation unusual enough that it would take a React programmer 1 month to write productive React code, the Haskell programmer will take 2 weeks. This is because the vast majority of the learning curve is in your domain and setup, not in how React components work. (Assuming for sake of argument they are actually smarter.) People vastly overestimate how long it takes a decent programmer to learn new tech.
- maerF0x0 5y ago
  in my experience people should be contributing _something_ within a month, hit a reasonable stride by 6 months, and asymptotically approach full speed extending out to 36 months. A lot of the speed a junior, or new person has, is in not considering the things they do not know. If the system is incredibly robust it will just absorb their bad decisions. But in most decisions it means they planted ticking bombs. Often 5 minutes today costs 5 hours in 6+ months time.
  - newaccount74 5y ago
    That's my experience as well. If someone is "productive" at their job in a month, then the job is either trivial, or they have a senior dev holding their hand.

throwaway81523 5y ago

There are certainly Haskell jobs in the Bay area. No idea about Philadelphia. MJD doesn't seem to have embarked on a Haskell job search so far, beyond the blog posting announcing his availability. So my bet is that he gets plenty of takers.

mdm12 5y ago
The Philadelphia tech job market exists, but...it's not like New York/Boston/SF. The major players are Comcast(...), Vanguard and a smattering of Big Pharma companies. There is a startup scene (most notable success likely being Gopuff), but not a huge one. Thankfully, the remote situation has improved dramatically, so I agree, they should be ok :)

nhoughto 5y ago

I wonder if it’s a signal of how much their are willing to Invest in people. I’ve been interviewing recently and have seen many companies are explicitly “we don’t care about language exp we will teach you, we want good ppl”.

austincheney 5y ago

Why React at all? Is JavaScript really that horrific or does nobody know what they are doing? I suspect the goal is to widen candidate availability to the maximum, cast the widest net. I find this odd because compensation is now absurd competence, experience, and product quality be damned.

Tade0 5y ago

I'm currently working with a C++ dev who has exactly zero previous experience with the web, but because he essentially finished his part of the system, he picked up web-related tasks. My manager today was wondering if that's particularly efficient, to which I replied "he knows how to program". I mean, the guy has a PhD in physics - I bet that what he's doing now isn't even his final form.

nicoburns 5y ago
> My manager today was wondering if that's particularly efficient, to which I replied "he knows how to program". > I mean, the guy has a PhD in physics - I bet that what he's doing now isn't even his final form. I don't doubt that they guy you work with is excellent and is able to seamlessly make this switch, but I have previously worked with someone who was excellent at C++, and had a PhD in something maths related (can't remember what exactly), and completely failed to get anywhere with JavaScript. As in: took 2 weeks to write a script that would take me a couple of hours, and it was still in a pretty bad state at that point. It seems that they hadn't encountered async programming before and really struggled to get their head around it. The silly thing is their program didn't actually require any concurrency so they could just have stuck an `await` on each async function call and treated it like synchronous code, but they were convinced that async-await was too complicated to learn up front so they had a complete mess tracking everything with callbacks.
- blahgeek 5y ago
  I won’t say someone is good at programming if he/she cannot learn JavaScript in two weeks
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Perhaps not in a general sense. But that they were certainly good enough at C++ that my employer was quite happy with their performance at those tasks. They just weren't very good at translating that to areas they were less familiar with.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago

pjmlp 5y ago

Fully agree, the only reason I have some stuff on Github it isn't even for the joy of doing FOSS and contributing to a better world, rather to keep HR happy that I am actually proficient on stuff done as hobby coding. However that is something that most families cannot manage, and one cannot be expected to create portfolios on SCM of the year just to prove their skillset.

brenainn 5y ago

My feeling is a lot of that is driven by recruiters. It's probably a lot easier to sift through dozens of resumes by looking for keywords. It's a bit shit though. There's plenty of jobs I'd like to apply for specifically because they advertise that they use technologies I haven't worked with. I could spend the time trying to convince them I can learn quickly and my other skills make me an asset, but I'm afraid of it being a waste to do so if a lack of "X years experience in Y" trips some red flag. As an aside, advertisements for developer positions need some sort of intervention. I'm tired of not knowing who the company is ("Exciting opportunity with growing startup in the whatever space!"). I also see things like "experience with object-oriented programming required". These days that's like saying "we're looking for a driver who has experience with steering wheels" and really puts me off.

the_only_law 5y ago
I spent my entire job hunt last year, neglecting to apply for positions that interested me, because whether I thought I was capable or performing or not, I know that my resume, basically just a projection of my past experience, would never get me through the resume screening step. Actually in fact, the first few applications I put in never made it past screening and I couldn’t even be mad. It made perfect sense why on paper I’m not qualified. I could probably find a way to make myself look qualified, but it’s be a lot of work and frankly, I haven’t had the drive or passion for programming required to do that for years. Probably just easier to quit and find some new career at this point.

zerr 5y ago

The prominent example of gatekeeping is game industry.

benreesman 5y ago

We don’t like to talk about this: but modulo all the usual turf wars around libraries and attribution and where the braces go: serious Haskell people skew smart and capable. This comes with downsides around dicking around with trying to jam every part of the computation into the type system (not unlike C++ template meta programming). But net/net, when a GHC contributor rolls up his or her sleeves, they on average have a bigger range than people who argue about ReactJS vs Ember. Source: worked on one of the biggest production Haskell code bases on Earth, was involved in early design discussions on both React and Ember, and wrote big pieces of an ECMA-262 compiler/VM. Haskell people skew smarter than most other languages. Sorry for saying it out loud.

auslegung 5y ago
Agreed. I don’t have anything near your experience, but I have done Haskell in production for two years, and other things for longer. And yet I always say I’m not smart enough to use a language like JavaScript, I need a dumb language like Haskell :-)
alfiedotwtf 5y ago
> This comes with downsides around dicking around with trying to jam every part of the computation into the type system (not unlike C++ template meta programming). I'm not sure why you say this is dicking around as the payoffs for moving things higher up are usually orders of magnitude better
uncletaco 5y ago
Nah this rings true. There's a reason Haskell's killer app is a mobile astrology reader.
smikhanov 5y ago
> worked on one of the biggest production > Haskell code bases on Earth Which one was that?
- he_is_legend 5y ago
  As he also mentioned he was involved in early React, so maybe Facebook? They are known to use it for spam filtering, amongst other things.

hk__2 5y ago

It really depends on the size and resources of your company. I used to work for a large French ecommerce company where most of the stack was in Clojure and most of the people we hired were totally new to this language and/or were Clojure fans but were new to the ecommerce world. It didn’t really matter as long as they were motivated because we had the resources to train them and give them time to learn. I left ~1 year ago to join a very early-stage startup where we’re currently 5, and while I would love to hire people that don’t master at least most of the stack we use, I just can’t because we really don’t have the resources to afford to have someone spending time (their time and also other people time) learning everything. This probably an extreme example but it illustrates the point: even if you’d like to hire people in a broader spectrum, you can’t always afford to. [ I hope that at one point we’ll be able to do it :) ]

ivanhoe 5y ago

Good programmer can switch niches and will still be a good programmer, there's no doubt about it. Problem is that it still takes some time. You can't just pick up a new language (or even just a new framework) and immediately start producing your best code. It takes time to pick up the style and best practices, and to learn all the nuances. Also very importantly to embrace that new mindset, which can be sometimes hard when you've been doing something in a particular way for long time. There's always that warming up period where you instinctively still try to stick to your habits from the previous language, and you end up with Frankenstein looking code for a while.

0xedd 5y ago

Unfortunately, a lot falls on networking (the human kind).

ineedasername 5y ago

Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers? We do hire less specialized programmers, we just don't pay them at the scale that someone with 30 years of experience might expect. If the job really needs someone that knows a specific tech immediately then the expectation is that a candidate has at least pursued a decent amount self-learning, which for someone with 30 years of experience should be easy to do in a couple of weeks. (The author here has done that*) All else being equal we still wouldn't pay them the same as someone with 5-10 in that specific tech though.

slouc 5y ago

I've been in the industry for ten years, and this is the first time I hear about asking for things like "e-commerce experience". My CV consists of telecom, e-commerce, fintech, mobility and music industry. Is it really like that somewhere? In the US, or in particular domains, or in particular technology space? If it matters, I've mostly been working with JVM, but two quite different paradigms - Java (OOP) and Scala (pure FP; I understand everything the haskell guy talks about).

gilbetron 5y ago

I somewhat agree with your point, but the I think software developers underestimate the difficulty in getting someone up to speed when the "tech stack delta" is significant. Every piece of technology you need to learn isn't a linear increase in time, but rather more quadratic. Learning just k8s might take N weeks, and learning Go might take M weeks, but learning k8s and Go at the same time takes more than N+M weeks, and might take something more like N X M weeks (or really 0.1N X 0.1M or something). Learning one tech while also learning another tech makes each more difficult. I push employers to understand this and instead of throwing people into the tech pile, have them hit each tech bit one at a time, but the sink-or-swim belief is strong.

synergy20 5y ago

you have to fit into the company's software ecosystem, if everyone uses php or python there and you do Haskell it does not matter if you're a MIT PhD that happens to be a Haskell core developer that can rewrite chrome in Haskell in a month, it just does not fit. That been said, there are definitely companies need Haskell developers, it just has less positions for a smaller pool of developers.

giancarlostoro 5y ago

Personality in my opinion and humility are the biggest two things when I care about who my team mates are. If you have more than one hot head you are not going to be happy, they will eventually clash and one or both or more will try to leave. Programming can get frustrating and stressful on its own, why add to the fire? People learn to program over time. You want to resolve bugs the sooner the better, if you spend all day arguing or you’re working with one of those “its not my code my code is perfect” types you’re going to have to do more work to get things moving. People who think they know it all can hold you back, some devs are great at some things at the same time some at others. Find a nicely balanced team that can work together.

deltaonefour 5y ago

I've had an interviewer literally stop the interview to give me career advice when I told him I was a generalist. His advice was that whenever he hears about someone who's a full stack generalist he knows they aren't that good. His advice was to specialize and get really really good at something. Keep in mind I'm super senior. Much older than most people in this industry.

NikolaNovak 5y ago

I cannot answer either the more broad or more specific questions in these threads. But my 2 cents as to: "Why do we hire reactjs programmers with e-commerce experience instead of react programmers, e-commerce programmers, or programmers?" In my neck of the woods, we generally hire specifically PeopleSoft Programmers, ideally with Payroll experience. Here's why: 1. First and foremost, developers need to do more than spit out code. They need to thoroughly understand business problems, work with business analysts and product owners to hash out requirements, be able to meaningfully discuss these requirements, create design that they can independently sanity-check meets these requirements, and then work on translating it into code. 2. They need PeopleSoft experience and knowledge - it's a specific ecosystem and language with specific requirements and constraints and capabilities. Programmer needs to fully understand these early on when they discuss requirements and solution with business. 3. Payroll experience helps, again for them to be able to discuss things meaningfully with the business. I know that this ("Dev needs to be able to gather requirements") is self-evidently true across development world, but I want to underline that our developers can meaningfully discuss intricacies of Canadian and Provincial tax code, payroll processes and regulations, time and labour, benefits, pension, and other adjustments with their functional counterparts; while also having meaningful discussions with our DBA & Infra teams on indexes, stats, etc. All in the specific world of PeopleSoft where code resides in database, with specific component processor which offers about 30 different ways to trigger code on a page, while ensuring data integrity etc. With that in mind, historically, it's just as easy and perhaps easier/faster/cheaper, to train a new grad (and we do, a lot!), rather than get somebody experienced in a completely different ecosystem and try to retrain them. Now, PeopleSoft is a very specific (quirky, legacy, idiosyncratic, crazy, etc) ecosystem, but I think using it as an extreme example may show some of the core reasons why even in less extreme environments, requirements are fairly specific. Yes, a good programmer with wide experience has a lot of skills. But by numbers, I think most devs work in business areas with specific set of common industry/sector problems and solutions, which reward specialization.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>In my neck of the woods, we generally hire specifically PeopleSoft Programmers, ideally with Payroll experience. I can see why that works for the employer but as an employee I would be terrified of that becoming a career dead end.