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Comment by santialbo | Hacker News Reader

I´ve recently been in charge of hiring a lot of people and have probably done +100 interviews in the last year.

I generally don´t mind the stack/language candidates have been using but I always value very highly that they have used different stacks and languages during their whole carrer. When I interview 5+ years .NET developers who haven't used another language, not even in their spare time, the result is usually a rejection. Since the time I can spend on interviews is limited I need to discard candidates based on signals, even if that means discarding good candidates.

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> not even in their spare time

It might be worth bearing in mind that there are people who do not have free time to spend on further learning outside of work. Parents, those caring for elderly or disabled family, new grads who might have a CS degree but had to work to fund their education so didn't learn much outside of the degree, etc. Not only might this approach exclude these groups, there are often close ties between under-represented groups in tech and these sorts of experiences.

I've been at the other end of that scale. I've had a fair few candidates that have used 10 different stacks, but wasn't truly good at any of them. On the other hand, I've had candidates with 10 years of C#, but used it in different settings, web, backend, actor based system, ect, and they blew the socks of most other candidates. What I look for, is that they show versatility and depth. The combination is really important.

I usually sift through candidates based on CV, and then a first interview where I try to asset how good the candidate is at his/hers prefered stack. Then I throw them in the deep end of the pool to see how they cope in the unknown. That can be having a pure C# OOP guy write some SML, or Java/VB/C++ guy write Haskell. I've also tasked a guy that worked with OCaml to write some workflow component in JS.

"Then I throw them in the deep end of the pool to see how they cope in the unknown." That's a good sign that the tech interview process is very broken.

> That's a good sign that the tech interview process is very broken

That could be the case, or maybe at that stage we're past a verbal phone screening, 1. interview, and they've been selected for the last round of interviews. They know before hand what the nature of the interview will be, including the "deep end of the pool" question. It is far and away the best way I've found to see how well they can adapt to new things, which is important to us.

Do people interviewing for orthopedic surgeon positions often get randomly asked about the latest antipsychotics in job interviews?

did you miss this part?

> see how well they can adapt to new things, which is important to us

Why not ask them to build an anti-gravity device as well while you're at it?

I just ask interviewers what the point of these questions is now.

If you can't give someone an interview with relevant questions, how can you justify not hiring the candidate? AFAIK at least in the UK candidates have a legal right to know why they weren't selected to make sure it wasn't based on prejudices, etc. So if your response is "you didn't do something that we both knew from your CV you never claimed to do", that sounds immediately unfair.

At that stage we're past a verbal phone screening, 1. interview, and they've been selected for the last round of interviews and they know before hand what the nature of the interview will be, including the "deep end of the pool" question. It is far and away the best way I've found to see how well they can adapt to new things, which is important to us.

But of course, you assume it's not relevant, and that I'm asking them to do the impossible.

In the UK (IIRC IANAL, etc) the interview must be about assessing a candidate's suitability for a job and unsuitability for performing the work is the only justifiable reason for not offering someone a job, as opposed to, e.g. gender, disability, age, attractiveness, etc.

So I'm wondering how you'd justify not taking someone on by assessing them on a task that:

1) you know they can't do and, 2) if you've already vetted their CV, presumably those skills aren't required for the performance of the job in the first place.

It seems irrelevant whether they know you'll ask this kind of question, since they can't prepare for it, and flagging up something that is potentially unreasonable doesn't make it acceptable.

So, how do you objectively assess that person X did something that wasn't required for the job better than person Y, and justify to person Y why that matters?

My developers frequently need to jump into a completely unknown stack. And even if they didn't, I still expect the senior developers to reason and make decisions about things out of their comfort zone. I'm not asking them to rewrite WordPress in Elixir, or implement vEB trees in C - I'm giving them simple tasks where they are given a codebase to work with, and the task assumes zero knowledge about it, and they have time to prepare.

"When I interview 5+ years .NET developers who haven't used another language, not even in their spare time, the result is usually a rejection"

But surely not, when you want to hire a .NET developer?!?

I'm saying that they usually end up in a rejection, not that I reject them because of that. Rejections happen because other factors.

Well, if you are applying that filter at the resume scan then you could be missing 'the best' as I would expect people to edit their resume for length (to one page) and to focus more on skills related to the position.

That's something I know and it's a decision I make due to not being able to interview everyone. If I can interview 5 people I won't pick 5 random cvs. I'll pick those that, in my opinion, are more likely to be a good fit.

If you don't mind me asking, how long have you been recruiting for and what size/type of companies are you recruiting for? Top tier, Fortune 500 or just mere funded startups?

Context is everything.

Also, I find people abuse the word signal. How are you generating your signal? And is it just within your domain of companies you recruit for or across the whole industry?

Small consulting company (~30 developers).

I only interview for developer positions.

For me a signal is something (good or bad) that hints about a the developer skills and curiosity. They can be as simple as knowing about their preferred programming environment: if you claim you are a 5+ year senior .NET programmer and you haven't even heard about .NET Core to me, that is a bad signal.

This.

It's all about using the right tool for the job, and if you only have a hammer, you start treating everything as a nail.

I've used Java, .NET, PHP, Node, Ruby, Python and more in my career - each one for different uses and where there was a good fit.

It is also finding a balance of course. All these technologies you mention are good for most webdevelopment projects. No point in writing everything in a different language

True but it does show exploration and curiosity to at least try another language or two. If you’ve been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years without even trying something else I’d treat it as a red flag too.

Level of interest is the #1 quality in the great programmers I’ve been around. If you aren’t exploring even a little that’s a concern.

How silly. Level of interest [in doing unpaid work] doesn't mean a damn thing as far as skill level and work ethic are concerned. Some of the best programmers I've ever met were the 9-5 types and the absolute worst of the worst programmer I've even known spent all his free time writing code.

Once you get past 30 it's difficult to spend all your free time doing unpaid work even if you wanted to.

If you’re past 30 you’ve probably been programming for at least 8 years. If you’ve never touched another language...yes...that is a concern.

Concern for who?

How old are you? I'm closer to 40 than I am 30 and I don't put projects I worked on when I was 22 on my resume. If I can't remember the details, it's not going on my resume. If I can't give good/interesting answers when asked about that project, its not going on my resume. I don't want to fill my resume with a lot of irrelevant crap since I have real experience to put on my resume.

I've worked with many languages both professionally and casually, probably over a dozen over the years. I only put the ones I have mastered on my resume.

If I were conducting an interview for a mid-level position (and I do) and I asked a candidate about their experience in Rust, which is on their resume, and it's anything but over a year of professional or semi-professional development, then I'm going to assume the rest of their resume is just as bogus. A weekend hack-a-thon doesn't "count" as "experience."

As someone who actually has a say in hiring decisions, I'm not going to think highly of a candidate with over 5 years of experience who puts code they only spent the better part of a weekend on on their resume. That means they don't understand what experience actually is.

I'm 37.

> I've worked with many languages both professionally and (very) casually, probably over a dozen. I only put the ones I have mastered on my resume.

And that is excellent and I would consider that perfectly normal and rational behavior. You have more than one. You took the time to explore. It's a field of constant problem solving and lack of exploration of solutions is something that sticks out as a giant red flag because of that.

More experience is definitely better. If I were hiring for a particular language I'd certainly want more than a weekend's experience, but some experience is still better than no experience.

At my last job we interviewed a guy who was about 5 years out of college and had been working in a .NET shop the entire time. He was applying for a ruby position and his only experience was spending a couple of weeks in his spare time building a Rails site. From that minimal experience, we were able to get him to explain why he decided to pursue it, what he liked about it, what problems he was trying to solve, what weaknesses he was trying to overcome that he was seeing in .NET, etc.

Despite the lack of language experience, we hired him based on the "geek gene" that clearly showed problem solving skills and desire to learn. The guy was absolutely rock solid and became one of our most valuable team members within about 2 months time. I believe he's the CTO of a funded startup now if I remember correctly.

If he'd had only Rails and I'd asked him about what weaknesses he saw with the stack...my very next question would have been what he tried to do to overcome those weaknesses. Maybe he answers about what other things he tried within the stack, caching techniques, using jRuby, refactoring in certain ways, etc and as long as that could be articulated it would generally be okay. In general though, seeing how other languages handle the same problem is going to be perfectly normal part of the process...which should lead to having more than one language on the resume.

>If you’ve been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years without even trying something else I’d treat it as a red flag too.

But if I put other languages on my resume outside of .NET, I might look unfocused or "not specialized". Plus, some people treat resume skills as an expert matter, so if I'm only doing hobby stuff, the conversation might not be that interesting (hobby projects usually never pay technical debt so I can just write whatever I want).

So in one corner, we have you, that thinks different languages on a resume are good for showing curiosity and breadth. You don't have as much of a focus on depth (or, you want us to be deep on a few and broad at the rest, which requires a ton of time)

In another corner, we have hiring managers that can ask difficult questions of whatever's on your resume. Or who will think your .NET experience is lower than it should be because you spent time on other languages.

So I, as an individual, get both of those and basically have to flip a coin to figure out which people I want to side with. But since I can't know what kind of resume-parsing person you are before talking to you, I still have to waste my time applying to everyone vs. knowing that ahead of time.

The same is true for technical interviews. Some are Algs/DS, others are CRUD examples, others are some hard problem someone solved last week, some are knowledge quizzes.

There's a huge amount of breadth in the interviewing world and it makes it a whole skill you have to waste time on.

I’ve never even heard of an interviewer knocking someone for having more than one language on their resume.

I’m not saying you need 10 or all the trendiest things. You need at least 2.

Programming is a job of constant problem solving. If you’ve done the job close to 10 years and never seen a problem with the language that you are using...that actually tells me more about you than any other question I can answer. It tells me that you are married to one stack, you’re invested in it, you’re probably going to be highly resistant to solutions that don’t fit in that box. And it tells me that because languages are all about trade offs because there isn’t a perfect language out there. It tells me that you have your hammer.

People are strongly confusing my comment with “know all the cool tech trends and program in your spare time constantly”.

I did not say that. I said use ONE additional language if you’ve been working for more than 5 years. ONE. It’s a very low bar and if that is shocking, silly or offensive it is probably worth it to take a hard look at why. You could meet that criteria in a single weekend if you wanted to.

This isn’t directed at you but the comments I’ve seen so far.

>You could meet that criteria in a single weekend if you wanted to.

But that's the issue: one person will like that I spent a weekend on that, someone else will start asking technical questions when it was really just a hobby project. I don't want to answer questions on that because I'm not likely to give good/correct/interesting answers. It's only served me well in the first case when they didn't ask any questions and chose to instead focus on my strengths. It's on my resume, so it's fair game to them.

>If you’ve done the job close to 10 years and never seen a problem with the language that you are using

Only having professional experience with %LANGUAGE% does not mean you've never seen a problem with %LANGUAGE%. Why on Earth would you assume that? If you're doing paid work you get minimal input on what technology stacks the projects you are working on use and 99.9% of the time that decision has already been made before your arrival. In fact, they could be looking for a new job because they want to change stacks, I know a few people who changed jobs just for that reason.

Someone's single weekend "Hello World" project is completely irrelevant when I'm looking to hire a developer with 10 years experience.

>It tells me that you are married to one stack, you’re invested in it, you’re probably going to be highly resistant to solutions that don’t fit in that box.

Absolute nonsense.

> Why on Earth would you assume that?

Because you've been in the field for 10 years and never once looked for a solution to that problem. It's a giant red flag.

> Absolute nonsense.

Explain why please. That's basic human behavior.

If you are doing paid work you work with the tools you are told to work with. You don't get to go off on your own and do what you want.

That, however, doesn't preclude you from understanding the flaws of your tools. In fact, I'd expect someone to be an expert in knowing the limitations of a language they have worked with for so long. That doesn't even mean you like your tools or you'd prefer to use them over other tools if given the choice.

Your jumping to completely unwarranted conclusions and it makes it sound like you have very little real world professional experience interviewing and hiring.

I said I'd treat it as a red flag. You're assuming it's a rejection checkbox. The interview will still determine everything.

The process I've been using to evaluate hires for the last decade or so has yielded excellent results.

> You could meet that criteria in a single weekend if you wanted to.

So, basically, it's just a absurd arbitrary criterion? I don't think there's anybody on the planet who could claim proficiency in a new language in a single weekend's exposure. Most won't even remember anything it about a week later with that little exposure. Logically, your requirement is meaningless.

Addressed here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15593500

Making the assumption we're talking about good programmers here:

If you've been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years, you're just now starting to become an expert at those languages and their environments. That 5+ years experience could just as easily display dedication and care about their craft; a commitment to understanding the ins and outs of their tools.

For example, who would you rather have write your payment gateway code: someone who sticks to a project for years and handles the nitty-gritty details, or someone who finishes the blue sky MVP and moves on to the next project every year?

I'd go so far to say that if a candidate has 5 languages on their resume for 5 years of work, they've raised a red flag. Why haven't they stuck with any of them?

> if a candidate has 5 languages on their resume for 5 years of work, they've raised a red flag. Why haven't they stuck with any of them?

I'm a contractor - I use whatever language the client is going to pay me to use. In the past that's been C, Ruby, Tcl, Perl, Python, a tiny snippet of Java, etc.

I'm replying to myself here because it's interesting how different of a reaction this comment is getting than it did 2 years ago when the same thing phrased slightly differently was the most popular comment on the Interviewing Software Engineers article.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9739163

I was about to say that too. I've also used many languages (PHP, Java, C#, JavaScript, C, C++, Scala, Haskell), and even though one language might have been especially good for the task at hand, it would not have been so much harder to do it in one of the other languages. I feel like a statement like "use the right tool for the job" is pretty meaningless.

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