| On the contrary, I think language expertise is underrated and I want new hires to start doing things immediately with minimal support. Also, people with mastery in one language often prioritize figuring out how to do the same things in other languages if they switch. Anyone can start coding in a different language, but it just takes that much more time in implementation and code reviews when they lack knowledge of: - Standard libraries - Builds - Debugging - Etiquette - Performance gotchas BUT - if you're going to ask for language expertise you better evaluate it in the interview, because years of experience is a garbage metric. Put someone in front of their IDE and watch them build and debug exercises. i.e. how do people troubleshoot issues with dependencies, tracing, optimizations, etc. I wish more places would have -relevant- interview sessions about "OK, how much do you know about the tools you use?" Obviously if you're a applying for a position where perf expertise isn't important, it's not fair to ask you about GC internals. Some people really struggle when it comes to tools or languages outside of their expertise. While I personally don't love working with these types, that doesn't mean they don't have value. You can be a die-hard JVM guru who refuses to work full-time in any other non-Java language because you're productive as hell and don't want to spend months re-learning how to do everything again. Honestly, I'd much rather work with a team of these types than a team of people owning 5 microservices written in 7 different languages... (P.S. I love Java for all the hate it gets here.) |