Signaling in tech is some fucked up shit (2016)

I suspect it's because the mothership goes out of its way to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and confusion--open offices, stack ranking, endless meetings, etc...

It is easier to assert your dominance over them when they are at each others' throats.

Their websites sound like they are the pinnacle of the industry, but on phone/email they sound like a bunch of HS dropouts :(

My personal experience has been that the label "web developer" is typically used by less experienced people if only because after a little while in the industry, even if your focus is primarily web-related, you start to develop skills that are more widely applicable and don't want to be "pigeonholed". It doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty of the problem set, the quality of the ecosystem, or any other specific value judgment.

It's the difference between a package delivery service characterizing their employees as "box movers" v. "logistics coordinators".

If I randomly select a programmer from all the programmers who write Clojure, working or not, interviewing or not, they are likely to be a “better” programmer than if I randomly select a programmer from all the programmers who write JavaScript, working or not, interviewing or not.

But of course, that’s not what happens when I interview. I meet one person in the morning with three years experience working on projects of types A, B, and C. In the afternoon I meet another with four years of experience working on projects of types B, C, and D.

If one has Clojure and the other JavaScript, I’m much more likely to be delighted to discuss Clojure than JavaScript, but as far as HIRE/NO HIRE is concened, the thing that matters to me are projects Of type A, B, C, or D, and the candidate’s role/contribution.

If the JavaScript programmer’s experience is solid, I do not want a recruiter in-house or otherwise trying to save me an interview and filtering them out.

The bottom line is, there are like 100x as many JS folks as CJ folks. So let’s say there are 100 great CJ people out of 1,000 CJ people. 10% ham!

But that means there are 100,000 JS people. If even 1% of them are great, that means that there are 1,000 great JS people out there, and I do not want to pass on meeting any of them just because there are also 99,000 not-so-great JS people out there.

In my imaginary distribution, a random CJ person is 10x more likely to be good. But there are 10x as many good JS people as CJ people, and my experience is that THEIR experience is a far better signal than their programming language.

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p.s. I am competing with people who only want to hire programmers with shiny signals like ClojureScript or the ability to quote “JavaScript Allongé.” Good! Let them ignore the 1,000 good JS people, easier for me to interview them and make a successful offer.

Now that I think about it, please ignore what I just said. Only interview people who build systems out of Lisp, Prolog, and Maleboge.

And CSS is harder than programming!