6 ms·

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing

by ced 13y ago

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening-- that's starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

cbsmith 13y ago
That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself. I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).
- rurounijones 13y ago
  I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy. e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".
  - cbsmith 13y ago
    > I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it. > Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs? I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you. As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)
    - rurounijones 13y ago
      Ah I considered the second bit in the historical context. The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.
      - cbsmith 13y ago
        > The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry. Consider yourself surprised then. ;-) Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages. There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_. I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.
- marssaxman 13y ago
  Google still does primarily use C++.
  - cbsmith 13y ago
    Google is so huge now, I'm not sure if that is really something that you can state unequivocally. The search engine and a lot of the plumbing that everything is built on top of is written primarily in C++, but there is a TON of both Java and Python code there (and that's not counting things like Go and specialized languages like the infamous Sawzall). Back in the day (particularly before they started doing ads), almost everything was C++.
    - tonyedgecombe 13y ago
      Not only that but the scale of Google drives decisions that may not make sense for the rest of us.
      - pjmlp 13y ago
        If you ever worked in the enterprise environment of Fortune 500 companies, they are actually quite understandable.
    - acchow 13y ago
      Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. In general, for production it is disallowed (with exception of YouTube). They learned with YouTube that Python doesn't scale well to hundreds or thousands of developers. Even Mondrian, the code review system started by Guido and written in python, was replaced by something more scalable.
      - cbsmith 13y ago
        > Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. Also YouTube (you may have heard of it). > with exception of YouTube Oh, you have. ;-) You didn't mention java though... there's a TON of stuff in Java at Google.
ianstallings 13y ago
Of course he would be worried, because at the time there was a total of 17 Lisp hackers in the world to go around ;)

by ced 13y ago

cbsmith 13y ago

That's using language choice as a proxy for developer talent. It's a proxy, not a real metric of the language itself. I'd note that pg ultimately sold to Yahoo, who a) wrote a fair bit of C in house themselves and b) were severely trounced by a competitor that initially was primarily using C++ (Google).

rurounijones 13y ago
I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. More of a "Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs" proxy. e.g. You run a skyscraper building company. If you see job ads for competitors with things like "must have excellent woodworking knowledge" you are probably less worried than those with "must have excellent metallurgy knowledge".
- cbsmith 13y ago
  > I don't see it as a talent filter proxy. That's fine. I was characterizing how pg was using it. > Does this company understand what it is getting into and therefore what it needs? I think it is actually a much poorer proxy for that. Maybe if they are a small company or don't have any engineers, that would make sense. As a company gets larger, job descriptions start to represent very small, specific parts of what a company does, and the internal context of the company often outweighs the importance of the external context that is visible to you. As an example, when Facebook was still up and coming and had real competition, Facebook were the ones hiring C programmers, not their competitors... ;-)
  - rurounijones 13y ago
    Ah I considered the second bit in the historical context. The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry.
    - cbsmith 13y ago
      > The poly-lingual software related company seems to be a more modern trend IMO. At the time PG is referring to I would have been very surprised to see that going on in the web industry. Consider yourself surprised then. ;-) Actually back in those days a lot of the web industry was just doing integration with existing systems, which means the tech stacks were as varied as those existing systems. Even when not, it was the wild west. You tended to have a lot of experimentation, false starts, and general insanity. Heck Apple had a really good run with a server-side Objective-C development framework! Impressive systems were built fairly easily with Perl (and later PHP), Smalltalk, C++, VBScript, Python, LISP, and then there was AOLServer stuff (TCL!), and that's ignoring some of the proprietary language developed specifically for the web... At any given company you'd probably find somewhere between 2 to 5 of those. Sure there might be a dominant language, but there'd be specific needs for people with skills in any of those languages. There was one sign you could rely on to know a company was not on top of their tech stack: the gratuitous licensing of proprietary Java application servers. Open source, and in some cases even proprietary, servlet engines made a lot of sense for some places, and Java application servers could often make sense for enterprise solutions that needed to be dragged kicking and screaming into the web world, but all too often you'd see these companies paying tens of thousands in licensing fees for technical capabilities that not only were not of use for them, but _would actively hamper their efforts_. I actually was a Java consultant at Sun during some of that era, and I often would arrive at client sites and feel an overwhelming need to smash my head against the wall until I forgot what I'd seen.
marssaxman 13y ago
Google still does primarily use C++.
- cbsmith 13y ago
  Google is so huge now, I'm not sure if that is really something that you can state unequivocally. The search engine and a lot of the plumbing that everything is built on top of is written primarily in C++, but there is a TON of both Java and Python code there (and that's not counting things like Go and specialized languages like the infamous Sawzall). Back in the day (particularly before they started doing ads), almost everything was C++.
  - tonyedgecombe 13y ago
    Not only that but the scale of Google drives decisions that may not make sense for the rest of us.
    - pjmlp 13y ago
      If you ever worked in the enterprise environment of Fortune 500 companies, they are actually quite understandable.
  - acchow 13y ago
    Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. In general, for production it is disallowed (with exception of YouTube). They learned with YouTube that Python doesn't scale well to hundreds or thousands of developers. Even Mondrian, the code review system started by Guido and written in python, was replaced by something more scalable.
    - cbsmith 13y ago
      > Only tools, one-offs, and small internal products at Google can use Python. Also YouTube (you may have heard of it). > with exception of YouTube Oh, you have. ;-) You didn't mention java though... there's a TON of stuff in Java at Google.

ianstallings 13y ago

Of course he would be worried, because at the time there was a total of 17 Lisp hackers in the world to go around ;)