Ask HN: Experienced devs getting a new job using a new language? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Experienced devs getting a new job using a new language?

2 pointsdadoge2 comments

I'm sure many of us have a fear of using the same stack for years and years and becoming obsolete.

For those of you that have been in tech for 10+ years, how was it like to stay at a company for many years and get a job in a new company that uses a different language? (e.g. switching Java to Go, switching C++ to Java, etc).

What was it like both in terms of interviewing and once on the job? How painful/pleasant was it to spend a long time in one language and have to start again in a new one with a bunch of 25 yr olds?

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A few years ago, I took a job temporarily running a struggling engineering team at a startup. Since it was a startup with client deadlines, I had to work on code. It was a totally new language and new stack.

As someone who had been coding professionally for 10 years, I was far more productive than everyone else on the team (measured by how buggy my code was and how well I turned specs into code). The next-most-experienced coder had about 4 years of experience in a large enterprise environment, which required a lot of coaching and re-learning.

My point is that you can Google your way through the specifics of a lot of languages, but your most valuable experience and skills will work across stacks.

This is actually the reason I never make prior experience with a language, stack, or framework part of a full-time job description. For temporary contract work, I'll be hyper-specific, but if someone is part of the company long-term, I just need to know that they have all the skills that are related to working on a team, understanding tradeoffs, etc.

I'm 4 months into a new job.

I was a C# dev. Now I am a Java dev.

The hardest part isn't the language. Once you know a couple, picking up a language is easy.

The hardest part is learning new frameworks and new tool chains.

Interviewing wasn't difficult. Any company worth a damn won't ask you language-specific questions.

Working with a new team is pretty nice. It's humbling being the new guy. It feels nice knowing that there's a whole new mountain of information to learn, and knowing that I've conquered previous mountains makes this one feel surmountable.

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