Hacker News Reader

Comment by vcryan | Hacker News Reader

If you are an experienced programmer, well, and experienced programmer who is actually good at programming, companies won't care if you know language X, because they will expect that you could just pick it up on the job.

PS: I have tons of open Elixir roles at the moment: https://ctd.mbta.com/

View on HN

I’ve never seen that. I normally see they want experience with it, and they usually find someone who has and when they do they are more likely to get the job.

Graduate job aside, I have never been able to get a job using a language I have no commercial experience with. And I tried hard with both Ruby and Haskell.

A Go shop wouldn’t talk to me because of the .NET experience.

So C# it is!

I went from doing around 8 years of C# experience to a job using Clojure and ClojureScript full time while having zero previous experience with Clojure. The one of the internal recruiters at the company reached out because they saw I had a somewhat popular Elixir project on github. I also have experienced what you have with regards to Elixir. I had a recruiter call me asking if I was interested in an Elixir position and while talking with her I mentioned that I have had no professional experience with Elixir and she said that the client was looking for somebody with at least a year of professional experience with Elixir. I didn't push the fact I had an open source project that was being used as I just lost interest in working with the recruiter because of that statement and the fact she seemed to be just reading from a script when talking with me.

From my experience, there are companies that will take in people who they feel are good hires and then will train them in the language that they use but they are few and far between. From what I've seen, those companies typically have their own internal recruiters. The biggest factor that could help and is under your control is to have some sort of project(s) available for people to see in the language(s) that you are targeting.

But none will know that unless your are good at marketing!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com