[roland35]

I agree to an extent. A good software engineer should understand the fundamentals and be able to adapt to most environments. Unless... your team is doing something very unusual.

I like to think of it as a professional sports team (let's say basketball). If you have a chance to sign a skilled player who is an all-star, 7 feet tall, and can hit 3 pointers you sign him and it will probably work out!

[gpjanik]

In a football team, if you sign a fantastic player and you place them in a position where they can't thrive, they will leave after a counterproductive year. There are plenty of historical examples of it... Just imagine Neymar playing as a center back ;)

The same happens if you hire a C developer for a Node.js gig, game developer for writing a mobile app, or someone who's been building React design systems all their life to help you with your deep learning stack.

This whole article is assuming that smart people can and want to learn anything, which can be true, but for most of cases, it isn't.

[roland35]

Yeah good point! Some sports teams are more specialized than others! I love the analogy because you're absolutely correct. Some software teams are much more specialized and closer to football than basketball.

You can also see it in basketball where even though the positions are less specialized than football, you sometimes have a coach who demands things run a certain system (Phil Jackson's triangle offense is a good example). Sometimes a great player just can't be effective in that system.

But take a coach who is more flexible, and they could make it work.

But which is better?? It's hard to say since there are great arguments on both sides. I think it basically comes down to having the right coach with the right team at the right time.

[anonymoushn]

I would probably hire game developers for basically any role. The nature of the industry causes a large portion game devs to be deeply familiar with many more broadly applicable areas of specialization than is normal, able to produce several times more working code per unit time than web companies will expect from anyone without "staff" or "fellow" in their title, dramatically less likely to ship things that make the user wait half a second constantly or have other forms of nightmarish UX, and used to working inhumane hours for vastly below market compensation. Wow.

[q-big]

> This whole article is assuming that smart people can and want to learn anything, which can be true, but for most of cases, it isn't.

I consider it as quite plausible that smart people can and want to learn anything. The problem rather is that this does not imply that these people will like or prefer this newly learnt approach.