Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

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It's an interesting debate. The flip side of this coin is getting hires who are more interested in the language or approach than the problem space and tend to either burn out, actively dislike the work at hand, or create problems that don't exist in order to use the language to solve them.

With that said, Rust was a good language for this in my experience. Like any "interesting" thing, there was a moderate bit of language-nerd side quest thrown in, but overall, a good selection metric. I do think it's one of the best Rewrite it in X languages available today due to the availability of good developers with Rewrite in Rust project experience.

The Haskell commentary is curious to me. I've used Haskell professionally but never tried to hire for it. With that said, the other FP-heavy languages that were popular ~2010-2015 were absolutely horrible for this in my experience. I generally subscribe to a vague notion that "skill in a more esoteric programming language will usually indicate a combination of ability to learn/plasticity and interest in the trade," however, using this concept, I had really bad experiences hiring both Scala and Clojure engineers; there was _way_ too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work. YMMV :)

If you're doing something forgettable, what makes you think the workaday Java or Python programmer would find it innately motivating?

Alternately, if you have the sort of work or culture that taps into people's intrinsic motivation, why would that work worse with Haskell or Clojure programmers than anybody else?

People are interested in different things along different dimensions. The way somebody is motivated by what they're doing and the way somebody is motivated by how they're doing it really don't seem all that correlated to me.

Clojure engineers not interested in doing work? That's surprising

When people say things like:

> there was way too much academic interest in language concepts and way too little practical interest in doing work.

They are communicating something real, but perhaps misattributing the root cause.

The purely abstract ‘ideal’ form of software development is unconstrained by business requirements. In this abstraction, perfect software would be created to purely express an idea. Academia allows for this, and to a lesser extent some open source projects.

In the real world, the creation of software must always be subordinate to the goals of the business. The goals are the purpose, and the software is the means.

Languages that are academically interesting, unsurprisingly, attract a greater preponderance of academically minded individuals. Of these, only a percentage have the desire or ability to let go of the pure abstract, and instead focus on the business domain. So it inevitably creates a management challenge; not an insurmountable one, but a challenge.

Hence the simplified ‘these people won’t do the work!’.

Yes, exactly this. I don’t feel that I misattributed anything, but if I had to expound on the idea this is exactly how I would explain it.

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