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ndriscollyesterday at 2:39 PM1 replyview on HN

Every job I've has has used different languages so I don't really understand the need to find a dev for a specific language. I went from network firmware in C to banking application servers in Scala and it took like 2 weeks to ramp up. Not a big deal. Now I write lower level networking stuff again in Go, which seems like its just worse than e.g. C-with-templates (and occasional classes) style C++ so I don't really understand why people like it.

I think it used to be common to just look for smart people and assume they can run with whatever stack. Wasn't that the point of abstract algorithm questions etc. (basically an IQ test)?


Replies

logicchainsyesterday at 4:48 PM

>I think it used to be common to just look for smart people and assume they can run with whatever stack. Wasn't that the point of abstract algorithm questions etc. (basically an IQ test)?

Lots of companies where software isn't the focus see it as a cost center, so they'd prefer to hire lower-IQ specialists instead of higher-IQ generalists, because the latter are more expensive/have more options.