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The case for language agnostic hiring

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Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#101

Post by marcosdumay »

nonasktell wrote: post #19
schroeding wrote: post #8

Elixir, Haskell et al. require concepts that are not required at all in e.g. Java. The functional programming module at my university had the highest failure rate after the math and statistics classes. Even something like C can require new concepts. I was a tutor for a university C programming course and students that had no problems with Java struggled hard with direct memory manipulation, pointer arithmetic etc., b…

If you only know java are you even a real (professional) dev? I'd expect any dev wanting a job using a language he doesn't know to have some understanding all of the concepts you're talking about. It's not language specific, it's just the basics of programming.

> If you only know java are you even a real (professional) dev?

Hum... Do you write programs in exchange for money?

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#102

Post by anonymoushn »

indymike wrote: post #92
irrational wrote: post #90

> Languages are ephemeral. They come and go. Is this really true? Maybe over the course of centuries, but in my lifetime I seriously doubt the major languages like C, Java, JavaScript, etc. are going to go away.

I've never seen a job ad that was just about the language. Usually there's a language a domain (i.e. AI, video, telecom), and several frameworks or applications. The language is the easy part. Frameworks and applications can be huge learning curves. Domain knowledge is really the hardest. Taking someone who's been doing database CRUD apps with Rails and React and expecting them to pick up writing video codecs in C++…

I have recently found that video codecs (and other forms of modern compression) are indeed difficult to casually pick up in one's spare time, but if a company is willing to dedicate even a modest amount of an existing team member's time to training new hires I would expect this to go fine.

The weird thing is that almost no company does this (or, within each company, almost no team does this, and individual team leads or engineers may rebel by doing this and then be punished when perf comes around)

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#103

Post by julik »

cardanome wrote: post #75
julik wrote: post #35

>You might be looking for a specialist but you don’t want to attract people who are only interested in particular languages. Because that person’s narrow focus will hinder their growth. Exactly what I have been witness to was this taken to the test. Result: * You hire devs who do not like (or worse: hate) working in the language of the shop. They scold at the application they have to maintain and run, they do not con…

That is exactly the point the article is making though: Do not hire devs that are only happy working in a specific language. I would add that it cuts both ways: Having developers that are too married to the current tech stack can also cause problems. Sometimes things do need to be rewritten. Sometimes adopting a new tech into the stack can be the right choice and offer competitive advantages. Devs with different back…

What I am getting at is if you don't hire devs _specifically_ who are happy working in your stack you are setting your team up for trouble. What was "I am more familiar with X" during an interview might as well turn into "We should rewrite in X" on the job, and I do feel like this situation should be explicitly filtered against in the hiring pipeline.

But then again, I am biased by having experienced the negatives of the situation.

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#104

Post by PeterisP »

goatlover wrote: post #81
sarchertech wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you need to understand what Python is doing under the hood, you’ll have to have some understanding of pointers. Not having a decent mental model of what’s happening a few levels below severely limits the kinda of problems you can solve.

What sort of problems would you need to be doing in Python that aren't already done by libraries like NumPy which would require that sort of mental model?

The only thing that comes to mind would be memory leaks in long running applications caused by your data structures having some link to a link to a link that prevents temporary data from being garbagecollected.

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#105

Post by marcosdumay »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #49
mguerville wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My former CEO invested significantly in training (I personally received well over $250k worth, including leadership lessons from 2 weeks reliving D Day with military men, rowing with National champion coaches at Yale, etc.) and used to say people challenged him with « what of you spend all this money to train them and they leave? », to which he replied « what if we don’t train and develop them and they stay, isn’t th…

Have you tried Googling that phrase? Seems like lots of people are your former CEO.

A CEO repeating a well known phrase isn't really out of the ordinary.

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#106

Post by marcosdumay »

gpjanik wrote: post #52
oytis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a C developer and would probably be able to do that, but definitely not something I enjoy (so you won't be able to hire me :) )

I don't doubt C programmers' ability to understand or use webpack (it's tedious, annoying, and often hard to debug, but not conceptually difficult - definitely easier than day-to-day problems solved by C programmers), the question is this the best use of their time & the most cost efficient way to do it (and IMHO the answer for both is that it's clearly not). It looks like we directionally agree.

> it's tedious, annoying, and often hard to debug, but not conceptually difficult

Just to check again, that line is about webpack, right? Not C programs?

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#107

Post by jstanley »

_tardigrade wrote: post #44
imgabe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A working dev should be well beyond the understanding of a third-year CS student. This is not "advanced" from the perspective of someone in practice, it is the requirement to get in to the practice. (I know people get programming jobs without CS degrees, but if you can do that, you can teach yourself how pointers work)

I don't have CS degree but I do have 7 years commercial experience with Python/Django Rest Framework and I have no idea how pointers work.

I expect you're much closer to understanding pointers than you think. If you know the difference between a deep copy and a shallow copy then you understand the principle.

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#108

Post by celdon25 »

cardanome wrote: post #76
q-big wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’d rather hire someone who knows four languages that we don’t use, over someone who knows only one language that happens to be the one we use. The more programming languages one knows well, the more opinionated one typically becomes because one has seen a lot of different approaches to programming. The strong opinions that the respective programmer has are not necessarily identical to the company's desired approac…

Yeah, but at a certain point of that journey people start getting less opinionated and more pragmatic again. At least that is how it worked for me. Though yeah I only list languages that are relevant to the specific job when I apply. Sometimes one exotic conversation starter though that hasn't yet worked out. Kind of ironic that I have too hide some of my programming knowledge because a broad understanding of many la…

Agreed though personally for me I didn’t see great results until close to 8 languages used professionally. Once I knew about 5 of them I had a much easier time landing jobs despite being bad at whiteboarding.

edit: what I mean to really say here is that pragmatism, like any learning, doesn't just happen automatically. You can have a lot of languages under your belt but still only believe in one. You won't necessarily have it with more languages, but you're unlikely to have it if you know just one.

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#109

Post by naet »

_tardigrade wrote: post #44
imgabe wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A working dev should be well beyond the understanding of a third-year CS student. This is not "advanced" from the perspective of someone in practice, it is the requirement to get in to the practice. (I know people get programming jobs without CS degrees, but if you can do that, you can teach yourself how pointers work)

I don't have CS degree but I do have 7 years commercial experience with Python/Django Rest Framework and I have no idea how pointers work.

I am in a similar situation having a lot of working experience but only in a specific domain (web), and no formal CS education.

I only used pointers in one specific context, while working for about 3 months on a Go codebase. I was able to get my code working without too much trouble, but pointers were a source of some headscratching for me out of ignorance and tbh I didn't work there long enough to fully learn or internalize it... I vaguely remember adding a * or & here or there to make things work.

I've been interested in some kind of class or learning reference for some of the more "CS" topics that I don't use but would still be nice to learn. I started an OSSU course or two but haven't made much progress since I get bored when they go over some fundamentals that I already feel confident on.

Re: The case for language agnostic hiring

#110

Post by nkantar »

While the sentiment of the piece—versatility > specialization—can certainly make sense, I can’t help but feel like it’s just a rant idealizing the type of person who invests significantly more than their workday into their craft, which I haven’t at all found to be much of a predictor of ability or even attitude. I know some great software engineers who do a ton of programming outside of work, and I know some great ones who do none.

> I don't want the GUI guys. I don't want the database guys. I don't want the middleware guys.

I don’t want a team of just a "guys", regardless of its and their abilities. Huge omission in a piece ultimately purporting to promote diversity (of thought).

> language specialist AKA snob

Those are two different things. I consider myself a Python specialist because I greatly enjoy working with the Python ecosystem (which is significantly broader than just the language itself) and thus prefer it whenever it’s a reasonable choice, but have also used other ecosystems and continue to do so, partly to learn.

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