|
Maybe those talking about how languages don't matter are the bad devs, whose ~0 experience in one language is equivalent to ~0 experience in any other language they wrote "hello world" with. Once I had an interview with a guy who claimed to be fluent in several languages, so as a warm-up question I asked: "tell me any difference between Java and PHP", choosing two languages he claimed to have most experience with. After five minutes of silence, I gave him a fizz-buzz-like test, just to be sure I am not mistaking something else for utter lack of programming knowledge; and he failed at that, too. But until the technical part of the interview, he made a really good impression; good fashion sense, great verbal skills, interesting CV. I think this guy would easily agree with any manager that the importance of a specific programming language is overrated. Ironically, a similar attitude might also come from the opposite side of the expertise spectrum, where the person would roughly mean "PHP is Turing-complete, Java is Turing-complete, Haskell is Turing-complete, Lisp is Turing-complete; what you can do in one of them, you can do in any of them". Like, sure, given enough time and an infinite Turing-machine tape, of course you can. But if someone has dozen years of experience using language X -- not just the language itself, but the entire ecosystem, like knowing the best practices, good libraries, good build tools, et cetera -- how much time would it take them to acquire equivalent knowledge of language Y and its ecosystem? Especially considering that the typical employer will spend $0 for training and requires full productivity from Day 1. > It's not like applicants are being super truthful on their resumes. Relevant: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/ Horrible developers are overrepresented at job interviews, because the decent ones usually get the job and the horrible ones have to try again, and again, and again. If you invite only those with good resumes (makes sense, why would you invite those with bad ones?), you mostly get an intersection between people who suck at programming and have great resumes. That means: liars. |
When I took the training class, I assumed it was all about not asking questions we could be sued for, but that probably took up about 5 minutes of the class. Instead, the instructor created exactly the scenario you described. Someone who sounded really, really great and who you'd like to work with, until you thought about what you heard and realized he hadn't told you anything at all.
Good con artists are really good. Even if the average interviewee isn't trying to pull a con, digging into their real experience isn't something we're all good at. Training helps.