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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

A handful of the team are more familiar with Illumos and the next hundred people they hire after that will be more familiar with Linux.

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To be clear, we at the time had already hired people with deep familiarity with Linux at the time this decision was made. In particular, Laura Abbott, as one example.

It is true that the number of developers that know Linux is larger than the ones that know illumos. But this is also true of the number of developers who know C as the ones who know Rust. Just like some folks need to be onboarded to Rust, some will need to be onboarded to illumos. That is of course part of the tradeoff.

If your hiring decisions are always based on what people are currently familiar with, you'll always be stuck in the past. You may not even be able to use present day tooling and systems because they could be too new to hire people for.

You're much better off hiring people who are capable of learning, and then giving them the opportunities to learn and advance their knowledge and skills.

Everyone is capable of learning. I can hire someone who is capable of learning Japanese. They can then try to teach the rest of the team Japanese. Does that mean it's a good idea to switch all our internal docs to Japanese? Maybe if I was building a startup in Japan. Similarly, writing internal docs in English for a startup in Japan would be of equal difficulty and value. Hooray, we're learning! And struggling more than needed to build a product.

You're better off hiring experienced people who are highly productive. If they're highly productive with one stack, it makes no sense to change their stack so they're no longer productive, or hiring people who aren't familiar with it and waiting for them to become productive.

There's nothing wrong with using old, well established things. They're quite often better than new things. As long as they're still supported, just use whatever builds a working product. It's the end product that matters.

> Everyone is capable of learning. I can hire someone who is capable of learning Japanese. They can then try to teach the rest of the team Japanese. Does that mean it's a good idea to switch all our internal docs to Japanese?

The difference between Japanese and English is much, much bigger than the difference between one Unix OS and one Unix-like OS. This is a remarkably disingenuous argument. If you really don't understand the difference in scope, there's no point in discussing anything with you because you've managed to disprove your opening sentence with yourself as the counterexample.

You're welcome to see it that way if you want. But if you think you can get to know a completely new kernel, OS, etc in a short amount of time, backwards and forwards, you're equally as disingenuous. You can get by editing a few lines in a pinch, but you could equally just learn a few Japanese phrases. Proper understanding requires a deep knowledge that comes from practice and experience with subtle complexity and context.

(Japanese isn't so radically different from English, it mostly just has more words for more contexts. In many ways it's simpler than English. It would be harder to go from Java to Haskell, with their many different language paradigms)

A lot of people out there claim to know Linux, yet few can prove it. OTOH, if they gain a cult following with lots of people using their stack, those people might become more familiar with their stack than most Linux people are with theirs. They could grow a captive base of prospective hires.

That's not the big concern though. The big concern is whether vendor integration and certification becomes a stumbling block. You can hire any monkey to write good-enough code, but that doesn't give you millions in return. Partnerships with vendors and compliance certifications can give you hundreds of millions. The harder that is, the farther the money is. A totally custom, foreign stack can make it harder, or not; it depends how they allocate their human capital and business strategy, whether they can convince vendors to partner, and clients to buy in. Anything very different is a risk that's hard to ignore.

As someone that knows UNIX since 1993, starting with Xenix, many that are familiar with Linux, are actually familiar with a specific Linux distribution, as the Linux wars took over UNIX wars.

That being the case, knowing yet another UNIX cousin isn't that big deal.

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