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Comment by dcolkitt | Hacker News Reader

Because selecting candidates based on tech stack is almost universally the sign of incompetent tech management. Anybody who understands software, knows that intelligence and master of fundamentals trumps tech stack experience without exception. Linus Torvalds would unquestionably become a better Ruby on Rails developer within four weeks than 90% of people with 10 YoE in it.

Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"

One of the strongest signals of how good an engineering organization or a tech team is how few specific technologies they list in their job ads.

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I've been hired as both a Ruby on Rails and Go developer without prior experience, and managed just fine in both case. Of course there's a bit of ramp-up time, but it's not that bad.

I'm not even an exceptionally talented programmer: just a competent one. Of course there are real differences between languages that matter, but at the end of the day ifs are ifs, ints are ints, functions are functions, etc.

Relevant old joke: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/4k994j/if_...

That said: there are some reasonable scenarios when you want to hire someone with prior experience; for example as a first or second hire it's probably a good idea in most cases, or if you really need someone who can hit the ground running.

I absolutely agree with your take.

Case in point: a Stripe job listing I picked at random

https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/backend-api-engineer-core-mo...

No single language is named! And this specific sentence is a really great sign (unsurprisingly)

“Languages can be learned: we care much more about your general engineering skill than knowledge of a particular language or framework.”

On the other hand, it would be nice to know the core languages in play. I have no interest in working in Java anymore, I avoid job listings for companies that would expect me to write Java. I don't want to have to go through recruiter screens etc before I can ask someone who will know what language I would be spending the next year of my life working with

That’s a fair point.

I think that in the specific case of Stripe, they specifically mostly use Ruby (from answers I found online). I may be wrong, but I assume that not mentioning Ruby is a way to attract Python/Go/C/etc. developers that might otherwise think that since they don’t code in Ruby, they shouldn’t apply.

Your main point (re: Java) remains of course.

Not to pick on Stripe, but why not say this explicitly?

"We mainly use [language X], but you don't need experience in [language X] for us to consider your application" - this is a totally normal thing I've seen in many job postings.

I agree.

Stripe is sometimes more explicit about it:

https://stripe.com/jobs/listing/infrastructure-engineer-ruby...

"Our most popular language in the company today is Ruby, and we are building a new Ruby services practice in support of this."

... but that job is also an openly Ruby-centric job.

Our solution to this is that we are clear that we're looking for Haskell programmers (as in that is what they should expect to do) but we have very modest requirements in terms of prior knowledge. I made sure to relay to HR that almost nothing is required in terms of prior knowledge (language-wise) and that we should expect to teach Haskell to people instead.

They are massively profitable too. I'm not implying a correlation here but.....

> Good organizations hire talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE fundamentals. Bad organizations think "oh we use Java, better hire Java programmers". Really bad organizations think "oh we use JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ, better hire people with experience in JUnit, Spring Boot and IntelliJ"

You can't just go around telling people that: you are going to make hiring harder once everyone figures it out!

When you get a referral for a 10x and you're meeting at Blue Bottle you need an ice breaker; clueless community-college tier HR asking for versions of frameworks makes for an excellent one!

> You can't just go around telling people that

It doesn't matter :-) such organizations aren't good at finding out if someone is "talented and bright people with mastery of CS and SWE" in any case

This makes a lot of sense. If a person has good fundamentals and understanding of engineering and CS, then they should be able to master any tech stack. I think in software development, we are in a weird position. In other engineering fields, it is expected to have a base line knowledge and the ability to learn into new processes. Most software companies seem to not want hire engineers who can do that.

I got turned down once by somebody in hr because I didn’t write I had experience with .net but rather wrote c# on the paper.

This is so true.

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