[d2ncal]

How do you probe for these skills? Are there any questions that help you to identify them?

[WrtCdEvrydy]

You can get a feel for it... ask about personal projects, then follow-up on why. The best candidates will cop to "I wanted to check out the new tech (curiosity)", "I wanted to learn the new programming language (learning)".

[mgkimsal]

How do you deal with "I don't want to learn new language X"?

I do investigate some time with new languages/tech to a degree, but to the extent I have time to learn, I tend to want to go deeper in the things I have competence in already. There's generally always more to learn (between the language itself evolving and the ecosystem developing) such that taking time away from those areas to 'explore' some hot new thing tends to not have very useful ROI.

I've done 'learn new language X' for... way too many years already, and prefer to get better at what I know. That doesn't mean I never learn new things or new tech, but it's generally in service of a defined goal as opposed to "oooh that looks neat...".

I've been doing this as a hobby for 40 years, and professionally for around 26. I have the feeling some places would look at 'the old guy' (like me) as 'the stick in the mud who never learns the new tech', yet in some cases I've been 'learning new tech' since before they were born.

Some of the original question was rhetorical - I already know how some places react to the "I don't spend time learning multiple new languages/stacks every few months" line. But... keep it in mind that there may be other ways to measure that curiosity besides just looking at 'time with new language'. ;)

[WrtCdEvrydy]

> I tend to want to go deeper in the things I have competence in already.

That's still learning, the issue is someone who says "Well, I don't have to learn anything new".... "at all".

[enraged_camel]

This comes up a lot on HN and the common objection is that the criteria you listed discriminates against talented people who have families (for example) and therefore no spare time to indulge their curiosities by learning new languages or whatever.

[hodgesrm]

It's perhaps better to say, look for people who like to learn how things work. Good tech people can explain the plumbing.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

Wanting to learn something is fine, being curious about a new technology is fine. It's the people who don't want to learn anything and have no curiosity about new technology. I spent 30 minutes talking to someone about their plan to build a machine learning machine and try to learn some machine learning in python.