> Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language,
Correct, I wonder why people both technical and non-technical focus on this aspect a lot. ( my guess is that they are incompetent themselves).
Agreed, if you want someone for two or three months you probably want someone who knows the language and it's ecosystem pretty well. Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.
> Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.
I'm not sure this is true in finance. Speed matters. A lot. It's called high frequency trading for a reason. These firms will spend a million bucks just to make their fiber optic cables 1 foot shorter.
Just the kind of short-sighted idiocy that keeps good people out of the industry. How long does it take to get that network upgrade installed? It doesn't happen overnight. It takes me a week to get decent at a new language, a month to get good. That's, what, $10-20k on "training" assuming an output of zero in that first month? That's peanuts.
It really makes me wonder. I see so many job ads where specific-language mastery is a top-line requirement. And I know people who know that this is not justified, but keep doing it...
Correct, I wonder why people both technical and non-technical focus on this aspect a lot. ( my guess is that they are incompetent themselves).
Agreed, if you want someone for two or three months you probably want someone who knows the language and it's ecosystem pretty well. Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.