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When you talk to a manager, you should lead that you are interested in building great products. Even if my company is using functional technologies, I want peop

When you talk to a manager, you should lead that you are interested in building great products. Even if my company is using functional technologies, I want people who are professionally interested in learning business domains. It's great that you're interested in functional programming, but my fear is that I will hire someone who puts great effort into changing the culture to use avant-garde tech in a place that doesn't provide return on investment. (Or worse, drags us into a culture of malcontent!) That isn't to say Erlang, but I've also seen an organization that struggled to hire because it couldn't find enough Clojure expertise and saw good developers onboard slowly because they had to learn domain, language, and paradigm in a practical environment. There is a secondary worry in hiring people who present as tech-forward: if we need to make pragmatic decisions that mean using industry standard technology, will they leave out of frustration? If we need to make a decision to leave some technical debt there for business reasons and address it later, will this cause difficulties with the developer? ____ (That said, I know a fair number of good developers who have struggled to find work in this environment. It has nothing to do with Elixir.)

TexanFeller 4y ago
> I want people who are professionally interested in learning business domains You can want in one hand, as the saying goes. If you select for people that care about business domains you're more likely selecting people good at feigning interest in your business(aka liars, or otherwise honest people who need to eat). Even if you get what you want you won't do well in the long run. I rarely see people who aren't passionate about technology avoid making a mess of it.
- ebiester 4y ago
  I have genuine interest in both. I build things because it's awesome to make someone's day better. It's a demotivator for me to put out software that doesn't work well. Technology is a means to that goal. Because I'm wired that way, it's a lot easier to find people who are also wired that way. But I can say that there are absolutely places for people who are wired to be passionate for technology for its own sake. (Some of Fintech and adtech is a good place, for example.) And if you feel you need to lie to work in a place with a product driven culture, then great. But don't be disappointed when the job is listening to calls with users and your conversations are around "which of these approaches will make the user's life better?" and there are technology radars that are justified by users' needs.

TexanFeller 4y ago

> I want people who are professionally interested in learning business domains You can want in one hand, as the saying goes. If you select for people that care about business domains you're more likely selecting people good at feigning interest in your business(aka liars, or otherwise honest people who need to eat). Even if you get what you want you won't do well in the long run. I rarely see people who aren't passionate about technology avoid making a mess of it.

ebiester 4y ago
I have genuine interest in both. I build things because it's awesome to make someone's day better. It's a demotivator for me to put out software that doesn't work well. Technology is a means to that goal. Because I'm wired that way, it's a lot easier to find people who are also wired that way. But I can say that there are absolutely places for people who are wired to be passionate for technology for its own sake. (Some of Fintech and adtech is a good place, for example.) And if you feel you need to lie to work in a place with a product driven culture, then great. But don't be disappointed when the job is listening to calls with users and your conversations are around "which of these approaches will make the user's life better?" and there are technology radars that are justified by users' needs.