> We are going to need to hire programmers in the future. Are there people with Clojure skills (or those that we can cross-train) around? In our geographic region? At the price point we can afford?
I think this common perspective is a little misguided. Programmers retrain fairly easily, inexpensive recent graduates doubly so. With JVM languages, it's particularly true, because the overall environment is so large compared to the language, and all that comes over for free.
I don't really understand the business world's preoccupation with 5 years of experience. My experience has been that some programmers "get it" right out of school, others never get it, some continue to improve into their 60s and beyond. Experience levels correlate strongly with desired starting salary, but not with skill or ability to learn.
> In 5 years from now is it likely that this is going to be a marginalized technology that we have trouble finding skills for?
Lisp was a highly marginalized technology for a few decades there. No doubt you could scour résumés at Monster.com all day and not find anyone who had bothered to put it down. But nobody who actually tried to hire Common Lisp programmers had much difficulty finding them or paying them, because of the prestige. Very few languages seem to enter an actively-hated state (Cobol and Mumps being obvious exceptions); the rest enter disuse and we programmers get all misty-eyed for them.
In short, this is one of those "obvious" business fears that turns out to be completely irrational.
On the flip side, where I work, we use Java 6, JSF 2 and Hibernate: industry standard stuff. Nevertheless, we've been able to fill only one of three open positions in the last three years, after multiple month searches. The size of the labor pool is usually not the limiting factor: in our case, we are in the middle of nowhere and offer below industry standard compensation (though it's very high for the region). Where you are, what you pay, what the benefits are like, what you work on; these kinds of things are going to have a much more dramatic effect on your ability to find developers than simply choosing an off-beat language. Plenty of recent graduates would rather work for less money on interesting problems with desirable tools.
Comments
> We are going to need to hire programmers in the future. Are there people with Clojure skills (or those that we can cross-train) around? In our geographic region? At the price point we can afford?
I think this common perspective is a little misguided. Programmers retrain fairly easily, inexpensive recent graduates doubly so. With JVM languages, it's particularly true, because the overall environment is so large compared to the language, and all that comes over for free.
I don't really understand the business world's preoccupation with 5 years of experience. My experience has been that some programmers "get it" right out of school, others never get it, some continue to improve into their 60s and beyond. Experience levels correlate strongly with desired starting salary, but not with skill or ability to learn.
> In 5 years from now is it likely that this is going to be a marginalized technology that we have trouble finding skills for?
Lisp was a highly marginalized technology for a few decades there. No doubt you could scour résumés at Monster.com all day and not find anyone who had bothered to put it down. But nobody who actually tried to hire Common Lisp programmers had much difficulty finding them or paying them, because of the prestige. Very few languages seem to enter an actively-hated state (Cobol and Mumps being obvious exceptions); the rest enter disuse and we programmers get all misty-eyed for them.
In short, this is one of those "obvious" business fears that turns out to be completely irrational.
On the flip side, where I work, we use Java 6, JSF 2 and Hibernate: industry standard stuff. Nevertheless, we've been able to fill only one of three open positions in the last three years, after multiple month searches. The size of the labor pool is usually not the limiting factor: in our case, we are in the middle of nowhere and offer below industry standard compensation (though it's very high for the region). Where you are, what you pay, what the benefits are like, what you work on; these kinds of things are going to have a much more dramatic effect on your ability to find developers than simply choosing an off-beat language. Plenty of recent graduates would rather work for less money on interesting problems with desirable tools.