[jordigh]

At my current job, we used to advertise that we wanted someone with deep knowledge of Python, who had written their own Python metaclasses. How many of you know off the top of your head exactly what a metaclass is and why you would want to write one? While we did have one hand-rolled metaclass in our own codebase, it was just there, written long ago, worked fine, and didn't need any modification. None of us actually working at the job have to think about metaclasses on our day-to-day tasks.

By putting that very specific bit of Python arcana in our job ad, we were just scaring away lots of potential candidates who could have done the job just fine. They stopped mentioning metaclasses in the ad and we've gotten some really good new hires since who are very competent, and best of all, are very nice people.

[tbh]

Yep, agreed! Thanks for sharing that, nice point. Most of the work we do as developers isn't the sort of John Carmack's Magic Numbers sort of wizardry, so looking for more of the same sort of dev skill can be counterproductive as you've found.

Nice people are where it's at. After all, we've gotta work together, and someone will always be able to learn the tech...

[hinkley]

When someone asks me in a job conversation if I have some arcane bit of knowledge, I'm going to say yes if I know it, but I'm going to start worrying that they will expect me to use this sort of arcane knowledge on a regular basis.

And then I start wondering what else is wrong with them...