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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, I read this as being open to hiring good developers even if they don't know your current platform/language. You can train that, and if you have existing expertise then you can pair them with someone who is experienced to teach them the nuances.

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This is definitely what I was getting at. My admittedly fairly small sample makes me think I'd rather hire someone who appears to be an excellent developer in general and train them on a new language/ framework than someone who appears mediocre but already has experience.

Totally agree. Good programmers have a lot of knowledge that transfers well between different languages and environments in my opinion. Put another way: language syntax is accidental knowledge, but how to program is essential knowledge.

More here: http://henrikwarne.com/2014/12/15/programmer-knowledge/

I think the same applies to junior developers as well. Someone who is eager to learn, and does so on their own time to try and learn new things will give you far better results than someone who only has whatever experience they gained via internships, or as classroom assignments.

The best developers I've ever met all have one thing in common. They've all written stuff outside of school and the workplace. Not that everyone keeps doing so, but they all have at least when starting out.

Your ability to train an employee is going to be hampered by the size of your company. You need someone with both the experience and the time to already be on payroll.

If that's the case, most companies would just give that person the work to do. If they've already got the time and experience, very few managers [in the real world, at least from my experienced] have the foresight to use that person to train another developer. Usually they'd just give that person the work until there's so much work they can't scale and then someone else would be hired to pick up the shortfall... Of course, the first developer is still so snowed under that they have little to no time to mentor the new guy. So they look for someone who may be experienced in the language but only a mediocre developer by definition. In real world terms, it appears to be expected that a senior developer can just be dumped into the empty seat and get on with it - thus, the expectation also appears to be that this senior developer needs to understand the language and pick up the business knowledge quickly enough to be productive without costing more than absolutely necessary.

If one of the intended features of a language is that it can be picked up quickly, that certainly helps. I'd suggest that this is a feature of golang and historically modula-2.

+1.

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