Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Those requirements you listed don’t seem demanding at all, assuming you’re not expecting everyone to be expert-level in all of those topics (e.g. being both an AWS and GCP expert, or even an expert at either of their job isn’t devops)

If a company’s requirements are so strict that they can’t get anyone hired, they either need to loosen the requirements or raise the compensation.

Loosening requirements can open the company up to a wider range of candidates, but it also opens them up to more bad hires. If the company isn’t good at PIPing people out or the managers don’t have the stomach for letting people go, this is disastrous. Your good employees will resent it and leave.

> We currently are hiring "Go senior software engineers" (that's the actual job title in Linkedin), but I couldn't care less if you know Go or not when you come to work with me. I want to know if you are good at solving problems

It’s possible to hire good engineers who don’t already know your programming language, but it will add significant ramp-up time. Even the best engineers don’t pick up a new language and associated libraries, idioms, practices, and quirks overnight.

You can open hiring requirements to people who don’t already know the language, but practically speaking you’re subtracting 6-12 months of productivity once you account for ramp-up time and mentoring requirements from the team. You may not mind, but the company probably isn’t interested in paying $200K or more in combined salary, benefits, and ancillaries when they could pick a little more picky and hire someone who already knows Go.

I don’t think loosening requirements necessarily leads to bad hires. If anything, it may lead to access to better hires. Think about an old tech stack that’s kind of boring. Likely no good engineer is sitting around actively learning Java 6 on nights and weekends, at least not with the intent to seek a Java 6 position. If you limit yourself to people who actively work in your anachronistic tech stack, you may be limiting yourself to only the people you don’t want to hire.

There’s no way 6-12 months just to get up to speed in go. If you’ve been working in a relatively similar domain (ie webdev) and have access to teammates with experience in go (to review code and expedite your learning) it shouldn’t take more than a month or so to be a net even at least and growing rapidly. And even then, an experienced devs other contributions outside of code should more than make up for some slow coding.

A month is enough for a technology or two. But we are talking about developers that are supposed to use like twenty different technologies at the same time, and maybe need to learn five or seven of them.

And often the reason a company wants one person to use twenty different technologies is that they can hire as few people as possible. Which means, there often isn't a more experienced colleague at the workplace to learn from. And no, the company is not going to pay you a training either.

Go is one of the better languages for upskilling on the job.

Realistically learning syntax of most languages doesn't take too long. If the new hire has a good grasp of all the Concepts/Techniques from comparable languages, that would not take too long either, and then you're left with learning environmental aspects only such as libraries and toolchain.

I've personally picked up a new language in a job many times with learning time of a month or two to be pretty much as effective as the majority of the team.

This only works for some people, but what worked for me is while starting reading the language reference and one good up to date book on getting started in the language, both cover to cover.

Pairing is very effective here as well in picking up the nuances of how to use the toolchain efficiently, but youtubes can help if pairing isn't available.

That said I wouldn't take Python only developers and try to get them to learn C++ or Haskell on the job!

As a senior programmer I wouldn't like to lose that money either, just because you happen to choose a stack that is different from mine. You see, I have my Java(or whatever) stack which still makes me moolah.

A smart person with experience in C++, Java or anything similar could be pushing Go commits in a week. They’d effectively be fluent after a month of immersion.

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