[RussianCow]

> The consequence is their hiring pool is also that much smaller.

In the current market, unless you're a big company that gets flooded with applications on a daily basis, why would you ever reduce your hiring pool arbitrarily? If you're a 13-person startup with good funding, you want all the candidates you can possibly get. Excluding potentially great engineers because they've never worked with Deno doesn't make any sense.

[mattwad]

Especially if you're a product-focused startup, the last thing you may actually need is an enthusiast for a language. 90% of the time you want people that just want to use the right tool for the job.

[threatofrain]

We're contending with the reasoning behind an observation, but the observation is already useable to the author of the post — if true. Is the author of the post seeing improvements in candidate quality because Deno is actually a proxy for burning the midnight oil? Who knows. If we generalize to Java vs Go will the observation hold? Who knows.

But as chrisco255 pointed out, neither usage of Deno nor applying a weight to some observation will reduce your hiring pool.

I would also say that a technological perspective of "right tool for the right job" is somewhat independent to the expensiveness of your hiring pipeline. Sometimes Erlang is the right tool for the right job, but that undoubtedly changes the experience of hiring.

[cercatrova]

It does make sense, because you filter out the non enthusiasts, a proxy for great programmers. When Rust was still nascent, the people interested in it were likely to be of a higher quality bar than any regular old Javascript dev. That's not to say that JS is bad necessarily, just that enthusiasts correlate to great programming skills.

[chrisco255]

My goodness, if you're excluding any hire because they've never worked with (insert new hotness here) you are simply making a big mistake in hiring, in general.

Deno is still JS based at the end of the day and attempts to conform to web standards in its design. I don't know why in this particular case it would limit your pool.

I could see how Golang vs Deno (JS) would impact your hiring pool dramatically though.

[threatofrain]

As chrisco255 pointed out downthread, I made a mistake in saying that Deno would reduce your hiring pool. That Deno is a signal in hiring does not mean you've lost out on Node talent, it just means that you've found a net gain in hiring by weighing Deno more strongly (assuming the blog post is correct).

However, Java vs Go would probably make a big difference in terms of hiring pool size.