11–20 of 32 posts
It's a wisely chosen stack, indeed.
That side of the business was a java shop, and had just got 70% through a very long and expensive migration from some old CRM, payment and auth system, to a new CRM payment and auth system. (something like 70 people for four years, lots of design by the CV, Cassandra, and other silly design choices.)
Two devs knew how to use Elixir, they bust out a service, everyone says "Ooo well done" flung it over the fence and leave. Noone else can really support it because they are almost all junior java devs. The other departments can't support it because A) everything was custom, B) only one other person in the entire company (300 devs) knew elixir. Total defecation show.
So when you see people do something because another company said so, politely tell them to reconsider.
to translate into a different context:
Project is to build a grain silo. four teams: One team makes the walls, one the roof, one the vent system and finally the floor.
Roof team decide to use wood, because they've not tried that before, and it looks good. They are all metal workers. They quickly realise the mig welders do not perform as well as they do on steel.
Wall team are using corigated galvanised steel and bolts. Start building the walls, are blocked by both the roof team re-skilling and the floor team.
Vent team decide to use the same, but don't want to use imperial bolts.
Floor team have decided after an away day, that they don't like the current range of ground anchors, so they have decided to spend six months designing a new fixture out of carbon fibre.
To tie it back to the article.
There is no possible way to prove the argument with one company, you need a double blind.
Yeah this is an interesting phenomenon. It's counter intuitive but it does make sense, if you think about it. I remember listening to a podcast (changelog I think) with the creator of Elm and he was asked about this - is it a concern if you build your frontend on Elm that you just won't be able to find anyone to hire? His response was that on the contrary, people who use Elm tend to be enthusiasts by nature and job p…
Turns out it has nothing to do with being non-typical and everything to do with Elixir.
This is more of an ad for their company than an article on hiring for unconventional tech stacks.
> However, it turns out that there are a lot of developers that really love Elixir! Turns out it has nothing to do with being non-typical and everything to do with Elixir. This is more of an ad for their company than an article on hiring for unconventional tech stacks.
With Elixir, you get all escapees from the Ruby on Rails community. They will work for food to avoid maintaining those horrible RoR 1.x and 2.x web applications that they produced in their earlier years. It's a wisely chosen stack, indeed.
Yeah this is an interesting phenomenon. It's counter intuitive but it does make sense, if you think about it. I remember listening to a podcast (changelog I think) with the creator of Elm and he was asked about this - is it a concern if you build your frontend on Elm that you just won't be able to find anyone to hire? His response was that on the contrary, people who use Elm tend to be enthusiasts by nature and job p…
See also: Paul Graham’s essay “The Python Paradox.” http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
Maybe I’m reading this wrong but, how do you know? The whole process looks like a test with no control experiment (i.e. a set of interviews with a more popular stack). Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite sure Carlos is an amazing engineer, but I don’t think your stack has much to do with it
It also tests for in the worst case the ability to convert Google'ed questions from one language to another. Or a more likely case of writing new code.
I was at the FT when they "adopted" Elixir. (There is nothing wrong with Elixir, it actually look quite fun. All of the following is process, buisness and design failures) That side of the business was a java shop, and had just got 70% through a very long and expensive migration from some old CRM, payment and auth system, to a new CRM payment and auth system. (something like 70 people for four years, lots of design b…
There is literally NO reason (other than time, mentoring and desire) that the jr. Java developers couldn't pick up Elixir in a short amount of time and be fully productive.
Yeah this is an interesting phenomenon. It's counter intuitive but it does make sense, if you think about it. I remember listening to a podcast (changelog I think) with the creator of Elm and he was asked about this - is it a concern if you build your frontend on Elm that you just won't be able to find anyone to hire? His response was that on the contrary, people who use Elm tend to be enthusiasts by nature and job p…