[atirip]

We always look for “rough diamonds”. It is a creative process, lots of tea leaves reading, but will yield excellent results if you have the ability to read these tea leaves. I am not sure we ever hired “the best on paper” candidate. But we have had great success with people who had no knowledge of out stack, down to the programming language.

[BackBlast]

I've always thought that there is undue emphasis on the tech stack and the language. I've always felt that filtering for raw engineering ability, thinking prowess, and attitude would get you farther in the long run.

[nnevod]

While I tend to agree, there's obviously jobs where familiarity with stack, tools and best practices is more important than engineering ability. They may not be interesting, but they do seem to comprise the majority of openly availible jobs.

My current job has minimum emphasis on language (C#, targeting original Framework 2.0, no new features) and zero tech stack. On the one hand it is interesting - not enterprise stuff - and puts the brain to real use often, on the other, I think it doesn't provide anything market worthy to my CV. As most of my collegaues work for over 7 years there, it really seems to be so.

[sneak]

What do you mean specifically by reading tea leaves? What things do you seek out and what things are disqualifiers?

How do you know that your style of tea leaf reading is effective?

ngl, the way you describe it makes it sound super cargo-culty, but if there is something more to it I'd love to hear it.