My point is that most of the runtime errors that the OP had to suffer through would have been caught at compile time with a statically typed language (STL). No

My point is that most of the runtime errors that the OP had to suffer through would have been caught at compile time with a statically typed language (STL). No interviewer will ever ding you for writing code that doesn't quite compile yet, because it's just part of the process of writing code in an STL. However, with a DTL, every time you run your program and it crashes, the interviewer mentally takes away points. Which is not really fair since it's how DTL's work, but it's a reality: a runtime crash is much more damning than a program that doesn't compile. Stepping back, I think the simple fact that the company this person went to interview with recently switched from Ruby to Clojure would have already been a huge red flag to me.