[cik]

We've descended into this clickbait driven world of absolutes, when the reality are shades of grey.

Language agnostic folks are great (awesome) for being able to contribute in multiple places. There's a cost to pay, but one that's well worth it IMHO, in many cases. To be honest, this is my preference, as someone who hires a lot of these folks. It also changes the approach to team building - for the better, in my opinion.

But there are also many cases where this doesn't work. Not infrequently, you're looking for someone who has in depth experience in X domain, or Y ecosystem. This too has its place - and is driven by real business need.

But I won't pretend that someone with zero experience doing natural language development (yup, still a thing) can be effective. Some back end people will never grok front-end, and vice versa.

So, hiring is grey - intentionally, because it's situational.

[nilsbunger]

The article’s argument is to be language-agnostic, not domain-agnostic.

For example, for a Django web app, would you hire someone who

* doesn’t know python but has done full stack web development in another framework (eg rails, express, .NET, etc)

Or

* knows python really well but has never built a web app

I’d rather hire the web developer in that case. A new language isn’t too hard to pick up compared to learning all about how web apps are constructed.

In your example, NLP is a domain, like web programming. Domain expertise takes much longer to develop than picking up another language in the same domain.