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Finally, the hiring process, as employed by most IT companies, are not exactly encouraging programmers to self-improve. Probably the best insight from the arti

Finally, the hiring process, as employed by most IT companies, are not exactly encouraging programmers to self-improve. Probably the best insight from the article. It's saying what we already know, but it's comforting to see another person think that most programming job ads are completely bogus. A given language can be picked up fairly quickly compared to the amount of time required to get really good at programming itself. I am actually more intimidated by the ads that don't enumerate a bunch of techonologies; this means that they are probably going to be asking for a lot of sheer badassery on your part.

dcminter 18y ago
This is an argument that I often hear and which I think is pretty much completely bogus. Learning the syntax of a language can be achieved fairly quickly for most languages. Learning the implications of that syntax takes a lot longer (C++ is a good example here, otherwise "Effective C++" and "More Effective C++" would have been unnecessary). Learning the libraries and tools associated with a language can be an effectively unlimited task. So I don't agree. It's better to hire a good programmer than a mediocre one, sure, but given two programmers of somewhat comparable quality the one with more experience often proves to be considerably more valuable than the other. This is doubly true if one of them has experience in the specific tools that you will be using on the project. The closer fitting user will have been through a lot of the debugging/learning/understanding processes that the other has still to encounter. Even the finest programmer has to learn to work with the occasional WTFs of libraries.