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My company is in the process of switching from niche language to Python.
The problem is that niche language was a good proxy for "people who have been in the industry / have a lot of domain knowledge / etc".
So our hit rate with the Python dev interviews is like 1/10th of what we had with "niche language" so yes mainstream devs are easier to find, but they are 10x as hard to filter. Further the original excuse was that niche language devs were expensive, but by the time we find a python dev who actually has any domain knowledge & experience, we are paying the same.
Would it be feasible to lower the hiring bar and set things up so that your company can use some of those plentiful, less experienced, less expensive developers to do some of the straightforward gruntwork that comes with any project? I suppose that's harder to do with Python than it would be with a statically typed mainstream language like Go or Java, since a static type system provides another way of guarding against mistakes. But maybe Python with enforced type annotations as part of the CI process would be good enough.
steveBK123|3 years ago
So our hit rate with the Python dev interviews is like 1/10th of what we had with "niche language" so yes mainstream devs are easier to find, but they are 10x as hard to filter. Further the original excuse was that niche language devs were expensive, but by the time we find a python dev who actually has any domain knowledge & experience, we are paying the same.
mwcampbell|3 years ago