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Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

I think companies are way too worried about hiring developers based on their specific technology they’ve previously worked with.

Unless maybe you are doing something radically different, like web development to graphics drivers or something.

Development skills are typically very transferable between languages, libraries, etc. And I think it’s healthy for developers to branch out and try new tech stacks from time to time.

I’d be more worried about a developer who doesn’t have the versatility to pick up something new. Because they probably also haven’t invested the time and effort to really understand what they’ve worked on in the past.

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Your example of web devs writing drivers is why I posed the question, as go is very much not a widely used web dev language, and the devs who know go may not at all understand the common web development patterns and practices.

Rather than the specific language, I’m more thinking of the domain, meaning ‘web devs who know go’ being a smaller cohort than ‘webdevs who know react’.

Go is a pretty popular language for web servers, so while "react devs who know go" might be small, "go devs who know react" might have large overlap.

I think it’s better to have somebody who has a deep understanding of all layers of the application rather than only one part.

If a developer is already an expert in the back end using Go, then great. Maybe they’ll bring a different perspective when they work on the front end. And they will probably enjoy a new challenge.

Web development is not so hard that a good developer can’t learn the basics in a couple months, especially with some mentoring.

I wouldn't say that web dev is "hard" as in any part would need a very deep knowledge, but it sure as hell very wide.

There are so many things and concepts, multiple must-know languages, browser quirks, some networking knowledge, CORS, etc. If you do use an "industry-strength" backend framework then the complexity surely drops, e.g. it will handle injections and stuff, but not having heard at least a bit about what your framework does for you, and reinventing the wheel can go really bad really fast.

If you’re trying to build a team from scratch, you probably want to hire devs with relevant experience.

But I think it’s a sign of an unhealthy or immature team if it is unable to onboard and train new developers.

You are right that a new developer could easily make a lot of mistakes, but it is the responsibility of the senior developers on the team to give feedback and review the code of less experienced members.

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