Comment by orclev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orclev | Hacker News Reader

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Ramp up time shouldn't be the only consideration, in any moderately sized project ramp up time will be dwarfed by other concerns like ease of development. In general, ramp up time is one of the weakest arguments in favor of anything you can make and should only be taken into consideration after all other concerns have been shown to be moot. Likewise the argument about "finding devs". Any competent developer should be able to come up to speed with most anything mainstream relatively quickly, and in the case of junior devs they're often far more willing to invest in learning whatever niche technology you've selected. The quality of developers you hire should be a much larger concern, not the quantity.

As one data point, a number of years back when we needed to hire some frontend developers we actually advertised for Java developers because when we looked for JS devs the quality of candidates we got was abysmal. For another data point, when one company I worked for needed to hire Flex developers (this was a number of years ago) they once again advertised for Java developers, and when I responded asked if I was familiar with and/or willing to learn Flex, which I was. It took me about a month to fully come up to speed with Flex, and I was productive in it within a week.

Is that still true to this day? JS has exploded in popularity and utility in the last few years. Even Stanford and other high quality CS schools are teaching JS now.

Yes, it's in many ways exactly that popularity that's the problem. The ratio of good to mediocre programmers hasn't really changed any, but now there's a whole lot more JS devs out there, so finding the good ones is an exercise in wading through a sea of mediocrity. For better of worse, the Java developer ecosystem does a better job of filtering out the mediocre devs, and generally once you reach a certain level of experience picking up something like JS becomes a trivial exercise. We tend to favor candidates that have experience in multiple languages because it's a strong signal that they're a quality developer, and you tend to find more of that in your backend developer pool, where the frontend developer pool tends to have a lot of experience with a ton of frameworks, but they're all almost exclusively pure javascript focused.

The problem I tend to see there though is back end developers often lack good UI skills.

It's a fair point, but by the same token it's usually easier to teach a backend dev good UI design principles, than it is to teach a mediocre frontend dev good programming principles. There's also the fact that for a lot of the kinds of work we're hiring for, there's a creative team producing design documents that the developers are working against, so they don't actually need good UI skills generally (although it certainly can help, particularly when the designers produce things that don't actually work in practice).

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