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Comment by awb | Hacker News Reader

As a developer, Go seemed so promising 5-10 years ago. But as a recruiter, I never saw any kind of stable movement towards Go adoption among startups.

Hard to tell why that was because functionally and programmatically it’s a really clean, efficient language and tooling stack.

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I would think otherwise, actually. Go seems to be the most popular choice at startups—anecdotally, of course. I have no data to back this, just what I’ve seen.

While I was interviewing a few months ago, there were plenty of startups looking for Go developers. Plus, startups reaching out to me about Go jobs.

Semi-counterpoint: I tried interviewing for Go jobs and asked the inconvenient questions early.

TL;DR: 11 out of the 12 preliminary interviews were about companies seeking maintainers of "legacy" Go code after important contributors left.

Like with you, not an actual representative sample but quite telling at least from where I am standing.

This implies that Go developers move onto something else? That's what I understand from your comment

I'm not implying anything except that maybe greenfield Go projects are not the majority. And even that's under question since I didn't look very far.

I recently spent about 3 weeks looking for new Go positions, just by advertising open for work on LinkedIn.

There are plenty of companies interested, many of them startups. I don't think anyone with a strong Go background looking for a job right now would have any trouble at all.

What is your process for this? Do you have a lot of Go related content in your LI profile or just have your title as Go developer? Any chance I could email you a few questions?

I actually don't. I haven't checked in a while, but just looked and my position is just listed as Principal Software Eng. I have no posts, nor any job details. In Skills section I have Linux, Go, Golang, among a few other things, with endorsements.

I think recruiters are perhaps able to scrape skills for keywords? I don't want my identity tied to HN, but if you drop me your email(or add it to your profile) i'll make a throwaway to reach out if you want.

Anecdotally I just switched from one job using Go to another and saw lots of job openings for companies using Golang. Python definitely has its staying power in the marketplace and Rust seems like it might be on a greater upward trajectory now but is starting from a smaller usage base. Ruby seemed the big loser with companies switching from Ruby to Go and Elixir.

As a recruiter, which languages seemed the most valuable to startups?

I get constant requests for Node & React (web) and Python (AI / ML) developers.

I do a little recruiting in the mobile space too and there’s a small need for React Native but a huge need for native mobile devs.

The reason why you are not getting any requests for Go is because you are not asked to find people for backend.

what do you mean by this?

No, I am. Companies just seem to want their web app backend built on a JS stack, and ask for Node devs.

Maybe Go is more systems/ops heavy, of which I’m not recruiting actively for.

thanks for the reply. and what stack, tools do companies ask for ML/AI recruiting?

Python / Tensorflow / PyTorch mostly. And then other specifics depending on the AI/ML discipline or problem space.

Different set of companies, because I get spammed for .NET, Java and C++ backend positions almost every day, and zero node stuff.

Hmm. Don't know why but it could be due to popularity of Node in general. Going with something that is popular is often the best way to ensure you'll always have candidates to hire.

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