| In my experience the opposite is true. Some people have an easy time programming, and the specifics - libraries, languages, etc - don't matter at all. They'll pick up that new stuff in their sleep. I recently hired a Java guy after talking to him - he had all the right hallmarks so I was pretty sure he would be good. I gave him a task with a piece of software I am intimately familiar with. A good developer would have had to get up to gear for a week (40 hours), then code, test, work around the little kinks (there are many). All in all an optimistic assumption of mine would be that this task would take a brand new guy a month. The dev I hired did it in less than a week! These people are rare. They are the rockstar programmers. And if you find one, you want to hold on to them no matter what. Team players? What if the guy can do twice as much in a week than a "team" of 5 mediocre guys? To get back to your assertion, he then proceeded to learn Android and put a functioning app in the Google play store in less than a week. Granted that's still Java, but the libraries are all different and developing for mobile is also different. If I had an iOS job right now, this guy would get it, despite never having done iOS. He'd learn this in his spare time and then proceed to run circles around people who've been at it for years. That's a rockstar programmer for you. |
Greenfield development is always easier than having to work with 200K LOC codebase that is crappy for all intents and purposes. Let's see how quickly a developer can jump on, wrap his/her around everything, then make significant changes and maybe I'll believe in that nonsense.
Personally I think if a job ad includes the word rockstar, I would expect hot groupies and coke on the job (2 or 3 times a week to allow some time for actual work :)).