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Comment by dgabriel | Hacker News Reader

For some companies the standards are not entirely meaningful. Must have 3.9 GPA from an Ivy League school, know [obscure library] in detail, have experience in Scala and Lua and OCaml and Julia, as well as a deep passion for cricket. Then, once this person is found, they put them to work building a Rails CRUD app... There is some hyperbole here, but not too much.

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I think I lost one job because I used emacs and they used vi.

I'm not wholly disappointed, because 1) I finally got around to using vi, spending a solid week using it and only it, as my homework[1] for the company, and 2) you don't want to work someone that only hires clones of themselves.

[1] They didn't assign it to me, but I'm always looking for something interesting to do, and since I was serious about wanting to work for them I did it to ease my eventual on-boarding.

A company-specified text editor is a indicator of an unbearable degree of micromanagement.

Be happy you don't work there.

They did a lot of pair-coding, so I'd see a common development environment as acceptable.

Sounds like one of those 'boutique' consulting agencies that likes to build 100% mandatory pairing into their costs when billing clients for their sake.

Are you sure you didn't get the job because you used emacs? I can't see why that's a reason for not hiring you. As markrages says, if this is true, it's some inconceivable degree of micromanagement.

This comment is the vulgar truth.

The industry wants hordes of people who color by number with the newest frameworks, not hackers.

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