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Comment by mastry | Hacker News Reader

I have no answer to your question, but I can at least offer some sympathy and confirmation. I've been looking for a remote position for months and have been eliminated from consideration many times because I didn't have "X" months experience with specific technology "Y" - which could be easily learned by _any_ experienced developer. It's baffling ... and deflating.

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You can look at this another way — a poorly managed company self selected themselves out from your consideration. Would you really want to work at such a company? Better that the company failed-fast and saved everyone the trouble of you having to endure a rigid environment.

To defend some of this:

1) Why pay someone to learn? In both terms of money and other devs time being sunk into helping you learn.

2) If you do know "tool X" and its a primary tool then its a lot easier to quickly evaluate whether or not standards will align.

Personally I don't mind hiring Jr Developers that cost less, are mold-able, and are willing to put in extra effort. Could any experienced dev lean it? Sure... but its more costly and often ends up in a "I have now studied X for Y weeks, we do X wrong I refuse to do X your way."

I have had great success hiring junior developers and molding them as described above. This turns the interview process into learning about the person and their goals and what drives them instead of what do you already know. Because let’s be honest, most development work can be learned fairly quickly for 95% of the work out there that needs to be done. For the other 5%, hirer a senior person who has that specific experience. Not necessarily experience in that tech, just experience solving the need you have. Performance, scaling, complex math, etc.

Do you work with such an extremely static stack that it requires no further learning?

I would say that one of the most important qualities a developer can have is the ability to learn.

Perhaps, you expect all the learning to be done outside of work?

I lead product and engineering orgs in startups, so yes I make sure our -core- tools remain static as possible.

I never claimed learning is not important, if anything I supported that in my comment in hiring eager jr's.

My point being is if I am hiring someone "experienced" I need someone who can mentor others, own projects, and help drive our current products forward. If that person will need to come in and learn the job... I might as well hire a JR and train them up instead or hold our the X months the "experienced" person will need to learn to bypass that whole ordeal.

I hear you. There are so many kinds of senior developers. Wrote a blog post about it:

http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812

Did you get explicit feedback stating those reasons?

Usually when a job candidate is not selected they aren't given any information about why.

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