What do you think about applying (or hiring) applicants who have experience but not in the specific stack of the job? I’ve found jobs in fields I’m passionate about, but I don’t always have matching experience in the stack. Does YOE matter more than stack or is stack experience quintessential?
Ex: 5yrs experience in C++ but the job asks for 5yrs experience and Node.js
I hire developers with mismatched experience all the time - with a couple of guiding principles:
- I strongly prefer candidates who have experience in at least two languages. If they’ve learned two, I can pay them learn the one I need.
- As you mentioned, total years of experience counts more than most other factors. I can’t hire a junior who knows 4 languages when the role I need as an experienced lead.
- But I’ll take a risk on a promising junior when I need a senior (guess how many senior devs are actively looking for work on an average day… I’m not a choosy beggar.)
- For senior and above, I’m looking for evidence of experience with the underlying principles for the roles I need filled (back-end, front-end, security, identity, DevOps, test frameworks, etc.)
Oh and, please do apply. If you make a good impression and aren’t the team member I need next, I might know someone who does. You want to always be networking.
And any manager who makes you feel bad for applying for a mismatched job is an asshole and trust me, that person’s peers (like me) are aware of it and it is limiting their career progress. I just don’t like them enough to even tell them so.
Edit: Answering a question below, my team is fully remote, though we have do have limitations around country citizenship for certain roles.
how do you feel about hiring remote?
Technically I hire in-person and remote, but my team is currently fully remote, and I anticipate all future hires being fully remote.
I can’t imagine new hires on my team wanting to drive into an office, just to spend the day on the phone and Slack and GitHub with the rest of the team.
I would get an in-office space, for a hire who really wanted one, but it’ll be extra work for me, because our logistics folks don’t expect my team to need offices or desks in our buildings anymore.
That said, I don’t currently have any vacant positions. Thank you for asking!
Edit: Seeing this conversation is in a developer hub, I’ll take your question as permission to message you for a quick chat when I do have positions open!
It depends entirely on the team and their comfort level with it. I’ve been very successful at landing a job in a new tech stack by first doing a few side projects in it. I’ve changed tech stacks three times.
However, since most developers very rarely change tech stacks, some will be deeply suspicious and want ample confirmation that you are planning to stick with it. They can be extremely uncomfortable when an applicant knows more languages than them. You also cannot say anything bad about their language or they will immediately disqualify you. You basically need to prove to them that you have seen the light of how great the new stack is and how you can’t wait to work in it. They will feel like you are praising them and take it as flattery. If you say anything bad about the new stack, they will take it as an insult and get angry.
Silly I know, but it is what it is.
So even if just for a weekend, I’d learn as much about node.js as possible. Maybe make an express server with some endpoints that connect to a database like sqlite or something.
Once you have experience in a variety of languages and frameworks, and you’re used to switching to the right tool for the job, picking up something new takes a couple weeks. Everything has it’s quirks and right way of doing things, but spaghetti code and bad patterns will always stand out.
If the engineer only has experience in one language, I’d be concerned about hiring them outside of a Jr position at all. But after they have experience in 4+ languages, asking them to learn a new one should be like asking a painter to use a new color. I would expect a good sr engineer to have used many languages over the years to satisfy different requirements.
And thanks to all the new LLMs, picking up a new language has never been easier. You don’t need to go through all the tutorials anymore. You can just ask ChatGPT to give you examples of all types of loops in Python to get a feel for them.
So if I’m interviewing somebody, I care less if they’re an exaxt match on exactly what we think we need and more if they’re capable of learning.
