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0 pointsjacquesm9y ago0 comments

I've been coding for 4 decades. There are so many different standard libraries and function calls to remember that only the people that are one-trick ponies (one ecosystem, deep knowledge) are going to be able to do the majority of these without an outside reference.

And those are exactly the people you would not want for a job because they would most likely not have the flexibility to shift away from that ecosystem if there was a need because it would take them forever to get up to speed.

It's much better to know how to use outside references efficiently and to be able to 'swap stacks' in a couple of weeks than it is to be an expert in some language that could very well be obsolete, and that's assuming that there are many jobs left today where deep knowledge of only one ecosystem will get the job done.

The time when you could spend 4 years learning a specific library and language and then make a career out of that is long long gone. What we have today is more akin to enormous libraries sitting on fairly rickety narrow foundations where - if you're lucky - the documentation of that library is relatively good, and the half-life of the whole thing is measured in months, a year at best. Today you work in Python, 3 months from now in Go and a another 6 months after that it will be JavaScript, typescript, clojurescript, coffeescript or <insert your flavor here>.

So, you want to have your problem programmed in Assembler, C, C++, Python, PHP, BASIC (name your dialect), JavaScript, Erlang, Python or I don't care how many other languages that you care to name I'll accept the challenge. But I won't cut off my external memory bank in order to prove that that is something I can do.

(Well, truth be told I probably can do it in a couple of the above but that's mostly because there was a time when the world moved slow enough that you could actually invest a couple of years, but these days it is much better to know how to leverage open source and google than it is to know the gritty little bits of whatever language is in flavor this week.)

Of course, if you are looking for 'javascript programmers' it is fair to ask some questions about javascript. But in my experience it is a lot more efficient to search for programming talent and good debugging and writing skills irrespective of what language they are currently trained in.

Languages are a means to an end, programming is the skill you want, not 'a particular language programmer'.

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4 comments · 3 top-level

pnw_hazor9y ago· 1 in thread

Though the code challenge hazing makes it easier to screen out "old dudes" who are not using the latest and greatest.

jacquesmOP9y ago

Yes, please let's not hire someone with experience. That would really ruin the party. /s

problems9y ago

I completely agree - that's why I encourage only sticking to basic questions and accepting fairly vague answers as long as they're in the right direction. Maybe your python knowledge isn't perfect, but you know how to solve it in another language. I'm good with that. Maybe you don't know the exact name of a data structure in the python standard library, as long as you can describe what you're looking for I'll point you in the right direction.

The people who don't know when to use a hashmap instead of a list of structs are the ones who concern me. So are the ones who just can't get started at all.

Sure, platforms change, languages change, but basic data structures don't, and basic OOP doesn't either. You've probably worked with many of the same data structures on many of those platforms and have a working understanding of OOP that you can describe - maybe not perfectly, but well enough.

tonyedgecombe9y ago

I doubt there are many people with a deep knowledge of just one ecosystem after 4 decades, plenty with a shallow knowledge after that time though.

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