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Comment by jghn | Hacker News Reader

It's the first thing some hiring managers look at.

Speaking for myself as a hiring manager I'm not looking for specific tech stacks. I'm looking for general patterns. Someone who has spent their entire career doing front end work is unlikely to be a great fit for embedded development and vice versa, but I don't care so much about the specific technologies they used in the process.

My experience has been that concepts and fundamentals trump specific tech stacks. However I also take a longer range view of things. I care far less about relative productivity of two candidates a month from now than I do a year from now.

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Until your customer needs a feature a month from now and not a year from now or you only have a six month runway....

The percentage of hires for companies in that situation is going to be extremely small, yet the "hire for tech stack" motif is cargo culted throughout the industry.

Why else would most companies have open reqs if they don’t see a need for man power soon unless you are one of the four or five big tech companies that are trying to accumulate smart people (tm)?

Because they project for incoming needs. Hiring for today’s needs is a fools errand, it can take a good amount of time to identify a quality candidate. If I need something filled right ie or the company goes under it is already too late.

Doesn’t brooks say that adding manpower to an already late project makes the project later?

who said the project was late? You get a new customer or want to get to market with a new feature fast you still need new people.

On the other hand, you have a few “full stack developers” on hand and you need someone to concentrate on one part of the stack so your current developers can concentrate on other parts.

I’ve found it remarkably easy to hire a front end developer who knows the stack we want to use, who doesn’t know anything about the business besides - here is what we want from the website, give us some mockups and we come up with the APIs you need.

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