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What if its for a blub job, say, maintaining 20-year-old billing systems? There's no value proposition in doing a rewrite, and the Haskell guy would get bored
by fizx 18y ago
What if its for a blub job, say, maintaining 20-year-old billing systems? There's no value proposition in doing a rewrite, and the Haskell guy would get bored silly, while the blub guy would be content, and plug away, doing solid work for years. He makes a career out of it. And he was cheap. Everyone wins. It happens all the time. It's perfectly reasonable to hire a blub programmer. Whether it's reasonable to be a blub programmer is a different story. :)
- nradov 18y agoIf someone is going to work for you for years then it's still silly to hire based on knowledge of a particular programming language. In your example I would focus my recruiting efforts on more fundamental skills and experience such as accounting, maintenance, troubleshooting, configuration management, and OO analysis. If I found a candidate with those abilities but no Java experience I would be happy to train her on Java (or whatever).