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Comment by abtinf | Hacker News Reader

> It was a little painful but everything shipped on time.

Your last sentence would seem to contradict the entire body of your comment. You describe mobile development as a fundamentally different thing, but then your first gig was to work on a large project, the result of which was shipping on time at the cost of a “little” pain.

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That's fair - what I meant by it being a different career isn't that skills aren't transferable at all but that you solve different kinds of problems entirely, as distinct from a difference in stack. And if you hired me then as a mobile developer, I'd have quit, so you don't want to hire non mobile engineers into mobile roles. Language/stack is a red herring here in the sense that Java backend development is a lot closer to Ruby backend development than it is to Android development.

I don’t know Ruby. But I can tell you the difference between having the rails of the compiler and type safe language and having those rails taken away in a language like Javascript and Python caused a lot of heartache early on.

This is fair too but I think most experienced engineers for whom stack is a valid consideration have some experience with at least one dynamically typed language and one statically typed language and can self-select out of roles if they have a strong preference either way. And I don't know anyone for whom this was an actual blocker as opposed to an annoyance (in either direction) that they got used to after a while. On the whole, I think it's less likely for this to be a serious issue than, say, the details wrt how the system is architected and how the organization is run, some of which you won't really get to know until you start.

> And if you hired me then as a mobile developer, I'd have quit, so you don't want to hire non mobile engineers into mobile roles.

That is a great point. I’ve also had the experience of working for a short time on a system, knowing that I would hate for it to become a regular part of my work. So hiring someone with experience is one way to mitigate staff turnover from undesirable tasks.

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