Comment by suralind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by suralind | Hacker News Reader

I can’t see how it would possibly work in Polish market. Polish job IT market (at least for Go developers) is very specific. There’s very few companies actually building their own products and plenty of software houses/hiring agencies looking to hire cheaply. I’ve been doing Go for long enough that what I ask for is on the higher end, so much so that I probably refuse ~95% offers because they are significantly below my expectations. Importantly, I’m no public figure nor I’m 10x developer, I’m just a regular guy who chose Go very early in my career, just before it really took off.

Now, imagine that I don’t ask for a number nor share my expectations. With 3-4 rounds of interviews, even if we assume 1/10 is in my range, I’d have to SUCCESSFULLY do maybe 30-40 interviews on average to find a job that matches my expectations. Another thing is that benefits in Poland are pretty standard almost nearly everywhere: private medical care, gym card, 20 vacation days, 10 sick days… unless you’re willing to work in the big few companies that just have unlimited money.

(If someone in Poland has different experience, please share - would love to hear more.)

I'm kind of curious why language specializations matter much to all but the most hardcore of hardcore performance firms. People have demonstrated now that you can pick up even Rust with an LLM and be productive with it in a few days if you know what you are doing: https://github.com/humanlayer/advanced-context-engineering-f...

I just like my stack, which includes Go. That stack is of course ever changing, but why would I make a drastic change if I’m already both happy and somewhat good?

I’ve been recruiting people and had exposure to small sample of generalists as an interviewer, but also in a team. Not too long ago, I’ve been briefly exposed to „staff” level Go developers who, I kid you not, would not follow ANY known and widely accepted as best practice Go convention (that I could identify). Obviously these were Java, C#, Python developers bringing habits from their last language to that project and boy was it bad. I suppose that was an extreme end of the spectrum (they were also incredibly toxic), but not once before were I in a team where new code was that bad. Of course, best practices are there to serve you and not the other way around, but each time I’d ask, they couldn’t explain why in a coherent way.

I suppose once you know programming it’s kinda easy to change the syntax, but imo code is just significantly better if people know what they are doing.

Being productive isn't the same as being an expert

100% agree! But how many organizations actually need an expert vs someone productive? Goes back to the "only the most hardcore performance-based orgs" point as an example

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