E.g., a friend of mine took over a team with a couple of strong FP advocates on it. They had written a core tool in very FP-ish JS. They enjoyed the novelty of the greenfield work, but once it was down to just making the changes users needed, they got bored and moved on. The remaining part of the team tried picking it up, but it was too alien, either because of the FPness or just because the code was opaque. Either way, they eventually had to rewrite it.
Or personally, I have made a lot of good money coming in after some would be brain genius, ripping out their supposedly cutting edge work, and replacing it with something boring. I remember one place where a core part of a system was build on the 0.7 version of then-fashionable technology. Except it wasn't even 0.7 as released, but something with custom patches applied. None of the people there could maintain it. Looking at git blame and doing a little web searching, it turned out the developer responsible had then done a self-promoting conference talk about their amazing work, and then quit shortly thereafter. After I removed it and replace it with something much simpler, not only could the people there maintain it, but it worked better than before.
I'm certain you could increase the odds of a good hire in all sorts of other ways by seeking correlational stereotypes, but some of those (age, gender, race) would be seen as... very bad, possibly illegal, and some others (traditional-ness of first name, for example) would possibly also work but would be highly questionable. Heck, I bet you could find a correlation with whether or not the person used an AOL email address or not. What makes filtering by this stereotype correlation superior, ethically, to those other stereotype correlations? If "interest in new tech" is an immutable attribute of the person's personality (which it almost entirely likely is), then in both cases you're filtering based on immutable attributes, so they should be considered ethically equivalent on paper, where you have a lot of false negatives, but your "good hire" rate goes up.
> One kind of bad hire is the technology-lover who values their own preferences over the needs of the business.
So basically you want to hire non-technology-lovers who simply "GSD" and don't care about things like long term maintainability or test coverage (or test runtime, or code quality, or...) because at the end of the day that's just added fees you can charge to the client when you have to revisit the codebase in the future. I see.
No, you have it exactly wrong. What you describe are good development practices that provide actual long term business value. What you want to avoid is someone saying "yeah I'm excited to use the nested lambdas and variants and callbacks and asynchronous systems" because this shows they just want to play with toys, not solve problems the business has like too many bugs, or slow runtime, or missing features. Engineering is about solving problems, and technologies are tools to solve them.
How does that sentence show that, exactly? All it shows is that they're interested in new technologies. That says nothing about whether or not they are interested in "[solving] problems the business has like too many bugs, or slow runtime, or missing features". Those two are not mutually exclusive; one can certainly care about both.
Taking it a step further, who gets excited about "[solving] problems the business has like too many bugs, or slow runtime, or missing features". That certainly sounds like what someone would say to please their interviewer more than anything.
Also, being interested in those 2 things is not mutually-exclusive. I LIKE that this is a tangible business result of a fundamental language design decision.
That is pretty far from what I said. Try again?
> One kind of bad hire is the technology-lover who values their own preferences over the needs of the business.
OK. This is not a mutually-exclusive relationship. One can prioritize both of these; the best team player will prioritize the needs of the business (and the team) more, however. This to me seems like you're really addressing the problem of "vanity/primadonna devs" who are not team players, and not just devs who really like certain technologies which will possibly blind them.
I also think experience tempers this quite a bit. I've certainly had dev experiences where I became enamored with an idea or trendy tech, felt I absolutely had to implement it, and then ended up regretting it later. I think this happens a lot with younger devs and that's OK because that's how you learn. (Make sure they get assigned the mess cleanup when it doesn't work out though. LOL)
Sounds like they hired people unqualified to take over product maintenance.
If your engineers can’t wrap their head around ”FP-ish” JavaScript, they’re not exactly batting .300.
I don't think it's unreasonable for average Javascript programmers to look at that and say, "WTF", the same way that they'd look at code from somebody who wrote C in Javascript.
