| HN Mirror

I am an engineer, and a mathematician, but more importantly I am a generalist. I have worked from hardware, to firmware and operating systems, up to compilers, programming languages and formal systems.

I like to work on interesting and difficult problems that force myself to gain expertise into new niches. The way I approach the solution matters -- I will never use Java for example -- but it's the problem that matters more, not the technology. If someone is looking for "golang programmers", they don't tell me anything about their problem and the chance of being an interesting and difficult problem is very low.

Furthermore, if they think they need Go programmers specifically, they are very deeply mistaken as an organization, which again is a red flag. For a generalist job, general experience matters much more than Go experience. I will happily hire someone who never worked in Go before for a Go position if I feel they have the actual important skills and experience that matter. Sometimes you need to hire specialists, e.g. someone with experience in the Go runtime for some very specific job. That is rare, but even then, the relevant experience is the experience with the Go runtime, not Go experience in general.

But even worse than that, advertising like that tells me that the job ad is not written by a Go expert. It's either written by a corporate HR drone, in which case I don't want to work there anyway, or it's written by someone who doesn't really understand the Go ecosystem very well, in which case I also don't want to work there. I will only work with organizations that have expertise in the technology they are using and where said experts write the job descriptions, because they are the only ones that understand what and who is actually needed, and why.

And to add another point, I don't believe in specific titles and rigid hierarchies, but in my experience, it's a huge red flag for an organization to use the terms "developer" or "programmer" in their job titles, instead of "engineer". Not that there's anything wrong with these terms, I personally like programmer, and most organizations that hire "engineers" don't do any engineering, but for whatever reason, the former organizations are worse than the latter.