Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

> if they don't put a fashionable JavaScript framework into job description, they will not be able to hire front-end programmers.

This is exactly why we are vague with tech stack in our job reqs. Why would you want talent that is laser-focused on specific keywords? What is the average lifetime of a JS/CSS framework? The game isn't to come in knowing this crap. It's to grasp fundamentals such that you can quickly learn the next ones.

I much prefer to hire less "skilled" employees who are more interested in the problem domain or product than they are any specific tooling. Goal-oriented developers can be taught to do anything in my experience.

View on HN

> I much prefer to hire less "skilled" employees who are more interested in the problem domain or product than they are any specific tooling. Goal-oriented developers can be taught to do anything in my experience.

A million times this. When I've hired, the specific languages/platforms/whatever the applicant has is of tertiary importance at best. What counts is the ability to engage in problem-solving, how well they will fit into the team, and how readily they can learn.

Everything else can be trained.

I agree, but here's the catch: if you're looking for this kind of employee, you won't be hiring "less skilled" people, you'll be hiring "more skilled, more expensive".

What people mean by "I will not be able to hire front-end programmers" is actually "I won't be able to hire cheap devs".

I wish it was that easy... this doesn't account for the dynamics of the job market, the particular niche of Web programming and the perverse incentives created by head-hunters.

Much in the same way how programmers (and many others) are scared of "gaps" in their resumes (and will thus accept a job even if their finances would otherwise allow them to extend the job search further, creating more leverage on the employers), Web-programmers, specifically, will be vary today of putting, say, Mootools on their resume (because, oh the horror, I think it's like a decade old tech!). In the very same way programmers, especially in popular fields, like the Web, are compelled to follow group trends more than in less popular ones (eg. HPC).

Specifically, in the case of Web programmers, this has an additional side of creating a lot of bloat for no reason other than following fashion. Similar dynamics exist (or used to?) in the world of Java, where you have to (had to?) know about EE and Spring (which are huge and bloated frameworks, most probably don't need to use to get the work done, but were made a staple of Java programming due to fashion).

Kotlin has also suffered from this. It gained its credibility due to Google annointing it as the primary language for Android development but, being so close to Java, aspired to replace Java on the server. Sadly, Kotlin's main framework - Ktor - is a joke. The default, Gradle-based Ktor project within IntelliJ doesn't even work and the docs are useless. So Kotlin's server-side aspirations shifted to Spring Boot where it is supposed to be a first-class citizen. In practice there are numerous gotchas for the unwary and if you fled to Kotlin in reaction against Java's archaic practices such as escaping regex metacharacters you'll be disappointed to discover that Spring Boot validation relies on Java-based annotations which means you have to use Java regex patterns. So much for being a first class citizen.

It shows the sad state of professional consideration in this thread, that I had to scroll down so far to see someone mention job-prospect aspect of tech-stack choices.

> Why would you want talent that is laser-focused on specific keywords?

I think it's a bit different: the head-hunter agencies screen for these keywords, so programmers are incentivized to put those keywords into their resumes. Since programming jobs are seen as short-term investments anyways, programmers are looking at the jobs as the stepping stones to their later jobs, and so they feel pressured to look for a job where they can learn / hone the skill that they believe will be valuable in the job after this, and so on.

I forgot the name of the statistician who claimed that no matter the performance metric, if it is made known to the (human) subjects being so measured will quickly become irrelevant since the measured will learn to game the system. This is the result of applying a metric that grades on the number of years of experience with technology X, where the subjects are trying to optimize for their years of experience with technology X instead of a more complex and open-ended metric of being more knowledgeable or more talented or more dedicated etc. which aren't immediately and objectively measurable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com