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Comment by amortize | Hacker News Reader

> A growing Clojure shop in Seattle seems to be having success with this, onboarding the language is a small fraction of overall onboarding.

I can attest to this fact, as part of a unicorn upstart with dev offices in Sao Paulo and Berlin. Clojure onboarding has never been a major roadblock for new engineers. And we never hire asking for "X years of lang experience". Almost everyone in the (~300 strong) engineering team started with zero-to-little Clojure background.

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What do you look for? I mean the "X years of experience" is a shorthand proxy for "can get stuff done in the language we use". So I imagine you must have some other way of getting an idea of how a candidate can get things done. Would love to hear more about it.

What we have found is that it is enough to verify 'can get stuff done', and leave out 'in the language we use'. So, much of the interview turns out to be a process of validating two things: 1. can do what is claimed in the language of choice. 2. gauge enthusiasm and interest to pick up our language.

FWIW, that's been our experience as well (both at a largeish publicly traded company and now at a small private consultancy). Go get work sample tests :)

(It's fine if your work sample test really just focuses on one language! But then make it part of the rubric if that's the answer you want, and tell the applicant about that rubric.)

Thanks!

I can see 1. being pretty easy to suss out (paid take home coding assignment is how I'd do it).

How do you assess 2.?

Mostly in our conversations, in an informal way. I would say the assumption we make is that developers with a penchant for any form of functional prog and/or Lisps, and with an acute focus on testing have an easy time grasping Clojure. And we bias our rubric towards this.

Also, we encourage our candidates to choose Clojure for their take-home assignment, even if they do not have any prior taste of it. This, for those of them who choose that option, gives an idea of if they would enjoy working in it. Our rubric however does not have a bias against developers who do not choose Clojure for their assignments, and we make this explicit to the candidates as well.

I guess the difference here is if they have to learn Clojure just to contribute to a single project, then they may be put behind some other things they want to learn and contribute to first.

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