[michaelochurch]

I don't buy the claim that older developers "forget" languages. Instead, our standard for what it is to "know" a language goes up and the number of languages we claim to know remains constant.

I've known some engineers to argue that the number of languages on a CV is negatively correlated to the quality of the candidate.

[Silhouette]

I've been reviewing CVs recently, and there is a striking negative correlation between a candidate's amount of experience and the number of specific languages or tools they choose to highlight.

It's also quite striking how the younger and less experienced candidates often have a first page that is pure keyword stuffing now, while older and more experienced ones tend not to. My suspicion is that the younger candidates expect to have to get past a computer and then HR before encountering anyone who knows what they're talking about technically, while stronger candidates tend to start from the technically competent end via a contact in their network and only expect to deal with HR right at the end of the process to dot i's and cross t's.

[jared314]

> My suspicion is that the younger candidates expect to have to get past a computer and then HR before encountering anyone who knows what they're talking about technically

As someone who is currently reworking their resume, I can say your suspicion is correct. If I don't know someone in or around a company I am interested in, or I don't have a target company, I expect to be treated like a random person off the street. That means submitting my resume to some email / web form; then having it parsed and stored in their applicant tracking system until HR does a search using the job description keywords. Only after a sufficiently high percentage keyword match would I expect someone from HR to begin their process with some kind of form letter email.

It's like what happened with automated phone systems and ATMs. I no longer expect a person to answer.

[MetaCosm]

> I've known some engineers to argue that the number of languages on a CV is negatively correlated to the quality of the candidate.

The song sung by old engineers who refuse to learn new technology, so they try to make knowing few a positive (it isn't). The classic "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

I don't think the core of a good developer has changed much since the early 90s. You still want people whose skill-set is T-shaped... You want them to go deep on at least a few domains, but you want them to have broad experience in lots of them. The broad experience makes for developers who are better than the sum of their parts, can adopt solutions from other domains and can communicate better.

I generally won't consider too seriously a "senior" engineer who has only a single "class" of knowledge. I realize that sometimes they have limited control over this (the jobs they happen to get, yada), but I just want the best developers... and in my experience they find a way to follow Norvig's advice and at least toy with some of the major flavors: DBC, functional, class, syntax, declarative, concurrent, parallel...

[Silhouette]

I don't think the core of a good developer has changed much since the early 90s. You still want people whose skill-set is T-shaped... You want them to go deep on at least a few domains, but you want them to have broad experience in lots of them.

I think Michael's point was that a senior developer might have a very different idea of what constitutes "deep" to a junior developer.

By the standards of a 20 year industry veteran, a six month project they worked on three years ago using language X might not even make X worth mentioning unless it was specifically asked for, next to the half-dozen languages they already show where they have 5+ years of experience including shipping multiple projects in each one.

By the standards of a junior 2 years out of school, a six month project working in language X last year might make it one of their top two languages and get presented as "expert-level" understanding. These are the people who tend to list fifteen programming languages, because they used each of those languages for about five minutes on a toy project during their CS course.