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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

An improved CV, lets be honest most stuff is boring projects that could even be built with 1990's technology, distributed systems is not something that was invented yesterday.

However having in the CV any of those items from left side in the deployment strategy is way cooler than mentioning n-tier architecture, RPC (regardless how they are in the wire), any 1990's programming language, and so forth.

A side effect from how hiring works so badly in our industry, it isn't enough to know how master a knife to be a chef, it must be a specific brand of knife, otherwise the chef is not good enough for the kitchen.

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This is also how you can identify decent places to work at: look for job postings that emphasize you aren't expected to already know the language.

For example, in the recent "who's hiring" thread, I saw at least two places where they did that: Duckduckgo (they mention only algorithms and data structures and say "in case you're curious, we use Perl") and Stream (they offer a 10-week intro course to Go if you're not already familiar with it). If I remember correctly, Jane Street also doesn't require prior OCaml experience.

The place where I work (bevuta IT GmbH) also allowed me to learn Clojure on the job (but it certainly helped that I was already an expert in another Lisp dialect).

These hiring practices are a far cry from those old style job postings like "must have 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails" when the framework was only 5 years old.

To do that you need a mixture of elements: work in a somehow "exotic" language [1] and the company can afford to pay top-talent salary [2]

[1] all those examples check that box, but please let's not start a language war over this statement.

[2] for Jane Street I hear they do, DDG pays pretty well especially because it pay the same rate regardless where you are in the world, so it's a top-talent salary for many places outside SV.

Sounds like the best type of place to work for me. Instead of being a replaceable cog in a meat grinder that doesn't even pay well, working with boring tech, you get to work with talented people in an actually interesting language and get decently paid.

And best of all, you don't feel the need to keep chasing after the latest hype just to keep your CV relevant.

This comment sums up my view as well, but I must confess that I’ve designed architectures more complex than necessary more than once, just to try new things and compare them with what I already knew. I just had to know!

Any minute you spend in a job interview defending your application server + Postgres solution, is a minute that you will lack to talk of follow up questions about the distributed system that interviewer was expecting.

Yes, it’s nonsense, stirring up a turbulent slurry of eventually consistent components for the sake of supporting hundreds of users per second, it’s also the nonsense that you’re expected to say, just do it.

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