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Comment by VonLipwig | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a non-article really. One paragraph on bad hires. It doesn't say why PHP stopped being the problem. It doesn't really say why existing programmers couldn't transition to another language. It doesn't say what Rose would do differently a second time around.

On the surface it looks like a lack of strategy lead to the company hiring too many PHP developers. Of course, it could also be the developers were CHEAP and couldn't transition to another language. It could also be a lack of leadership didn't realise programmers could transition between languages or individuals were not reassigned to focus on another language so little got done.

With so little content all you have is speculation so who knows what was going on.

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On the surface it looks like a lack of strategy lead to the company hiring too many PHP developers.

Bingo. It's the only logical explanation. I've yet to meet a decent PHP Developer who isn't willing or capable to turn their hand to a new technology. There must be more to it than Rose simply not exploring the idea of adding to the teams existing set of skills by letting those Dev's try new things.

I've actually met quite a few developers who aren't willing to try new technologies, and those who identified themselves as "PHP developers" were very overrepresented in the set.

We tend to severely underestimate the number of people who just want to do their job with the skills they already have with little desire to try new solutions to problems they already know how to solve. There are a surprising number of developers like this that leave the office at quitting time and not pick up a computer again until the next morning.

I agree that there are many developers like that, who don't jump at picking up new technologies, but I don't think those are the type of developers a startup like Digg would hire or attract.

More often, I think companies struggle to pick up a new technology than developers. When developers pick up something new, they usually dabble and start small, but Digg wasn't in the place where it could dabble and start small. When a company needs to pick up a new technology, they aren't doing it to dabble so much as fill a solid need.

They needed expertise in other places, so they needed to hire people with those skills already rather than wait for existing devs to get them and stumble along the way.

I think if you looked at the resumes of the developers involved, it would be obvious that Kevin is making shit up.

I almost accepted a job offer from Digg when they were at their peak. Kevin seems to be using "PHP" as though it is some kind of derogatory term for developers. I don't think that's very fair. My opinion is that Digg went off course with their major update fiasco which changed the nature of the site. It had nothing to do with the programming language. I have my own opinions about what made Digg great, and subsequently what made it not-so-great after that update, but I really don't think it had anything to do with PHP.

php developer is an oxymoron

I agree. I was hoping for a little more content from Mr. Rose himself— especially what he plans on doing in the future for Digg and how he decided to deal with the problems that arose.

Kevin isn't associated with Digg anymore. He's been working on Milk, and Oink in particular.

Whoops! I totally forgot he left. Thanks for correcting me.

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