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If you chose an esoteric language to solve your core business, never let existing programmers to leave your company no matter what: higher wages, unlimited paid
by ezoe 4y ago
If you chose an esoteric language to solve your core business, never let existing programmers to leave your company no matter what: higher wages, unlimited paid leave, anything.
Because once the original programmers leave the company, nobody can maintain that massive technical debt. In fact, even the original programmers could not maintain the code. That's why they leave. They run away before their bad job became apparent. That is, they quickly wrote a barely working code without considering the long-term sustainability, get paid, and run away... to be hired by another victim. Because it's written in an esoteric language, you can't easily notice how bad it was written.
Then your company will be filled with decent but low-motivated programmers who does the barely minimum job to keep the code running. Their motivations are low because it's a complete mess of a technical debt. Nobody understand how the code works and worse. Debugging feature is limited because it's an esoteric language. It's running on a decade old software stack because upgrading any OS or software break the code.
It's a dead end. No way to solve the root of the problem. It kept running until your business became too obsolete to earn money or epic fail happens.
- closeparen 4y agoMy experience in hypergrowth-to-IPO world is everything gets rewritten a little while after its original authors move on, no matter the language. My experience is also that picking up a working familiarity with esoteric languages, while more demanding than shitting out boilerplate-heavy code in non-expressive languages, is considerably less demanding than leaning to pass LeetCode interviews. Plenty of people seem willing to do the latter!
- ezoe 4y agoWell, people who can write in less popular languages are definitely above average programmers. But I think it just mean they can write code in their own instead of copy&pasting from the random web sites. Being a less popular languages means you can't find convenient example codes from the Internet. Still, being able to write code in their own doesn't mean they can write a good code. I witnessed a complex recursive code with a bug on edge case in a functional language. It could be easily and cleanly written by using common practice of that language and its standard library, like foldl. Also, code lives longer than you expected.