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Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

Knowing a language or toolchain isn't all you need to be a good developer. Knowledge of how to build maintainable, secure, reliable, scalable and usable systems is something that you get with years of experience (and frequently comes from making mistakes).

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True, but companies don't care about those things, really, even in the supposedly developer-centric Bay Area. Just browse through any jobs thread or board, even (especially) the "Who's Hiring" HN thread. You're going to see a lot of "We're looking for an X developer" or "we're looking for a developer with Y years of experience in Stack X." Employers, even supposedly knowledgeable tech centric ones, routinely think the learning curve for a new stack or language is so great that they just can't risk even screening someone without specific experience.

It's because most of the who's hiring on HN posts are small 2-3 people startups that desperately need a new programmer.. yesterday. They're not a team that can afford to bring someone up to speed, even if that person is amazing in programming other things. Which is really unfortunate.

It isn't just the new startups. Hiring managers believe that the best indication you know how to do what they need done is to have done it before. And their vision of "done it before" is unfortunately very narrow.

It's unfortunate and also a terrible business model. In those cases it's clear the business isn't mature or ready enough to actually hire human beings, in my opinion. Not that I'd agree with their conclusion about who they need to hire anyway. There isn't an experienced developer out there who can't pick up the frameworks and languages (exceptions exist of course, e.g. for quirky languages like brainfuck or paradigm shifts like procedural to functional) these CRUD-by-other-names shops use within a week, and if their business is that close to failure without developer help they can't afford to be picky.

And most employers don't care about those stated value adds. It is what it is.

A company that's a startup building an MVP for a consumer app might not care if its software ever works reliably, or will be maintainable in five years. But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.

> But if you're a bank, or a big on-line retailer, or a company that sells enterprise software - a business where you or your customers push billions of dollars of business through a software system - you definitely do care.

Funny, those companies have the least reliable, performant, and maintainable code.

Probably because they outsource everything to Indian company full of fresh from school developers.

They outsource to IBM, IBM outsources to India.

citation needed

Experience. The worst horrors I've seen have been in the finance sector. I'm currently working on one where the developers don't know transactions exist. And millions of dollars of transactions daily are coordinated by users emailing inline csv files.

I'll add an experience with a bank that could only accept ACH batches via ActiveX control in Internet Explorer.

Oh, and a brokerage that actively prevented password managers from pasting passwords into the login form.

Visa

Okay where's your citation of a startup that is all about engineering excellence and not about shipping product?

Cruise

They care, they just don't know they care, until they do.

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