

Ask HN: How important is having experience in specific technologies? - Floog

During my job search I&#x27;m finding plenty of companies that I&#x27;d love to work for, but the skills they are looking for specifically are not ones I have.<p>For example, I have personal project experience in PHP with the Laravel framework and AngularJS on the front-end. But a job I&#x27;m looking at is asking for EmberJS front-end with Ruby on Rails back-end experience.<p>Is it worth my time to apply for this position? Or should I acquire experience in new technologies?
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mak4athp
You generally need to bring an applicable skill to the table immediately on
hire. With the exception of a few stable mid-sized companies that really love
generalists and cultivating long-term employees, and fresh-grad hiring, most
places can't take the time to ramp you up on a new skill AND their codebase
before getting value back out of you.

But it also depends on the distance between skills (frameworks < platforms <
languages), whether you know the industry or applicable business logic
already, the breadth of your resume as a whole (a proven generalist vs a
transitioning specialist).

But most importantly -- you can't really know from the outside -- don't be
afraid to burden them with your resume. Worst case, they'll throw it out
immediately and forget they ever saw it. Best case, they'll be in a pinch or
spot a detail in your resume that you didn't even know they were looking for.

~~~
learc83
>You generally need to bring an applicable skill to the table immediately on
hire.

I don't really understand this mentality unless you're talking about the first
5 employees or so.

If I find someone who is otherwise great, but has experience in PHP, and my
team uses Ruby, I'd rather hire that person now and spend a few weeks getting
them up to speed. The alternative is to spend even more time waiting for the
perfect candidate to come along who can hit the ground running.

You touched on my next point a bit when you said a proven generalist. I think
that if you have a strong grasp of CS fundamentals, and 5 or 10 years of
experience, you should be able to pick up enough of almost any imperative
language to be productive within a few weeks.

I don't often use Python, but I do have years of experience with C, Ruby,
Java, C# and others. The first time I needed to use Python I was able to pick
up enough to get by in a weekend. The first time I used haskell, now that was
a bit different.

I'll leave this here.
[http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa650...](http://www.jasonbock.net/jb/News/Item/7c334037d1a9437d9fa6506e2f35eaac)

~~~
mak4athp
I personally agree with you, I just find that you/we are in the minority as
hiring managers.

When you hire a PHP person to join your Ruby team, you're making a bet that
they're able to ramp up on the new environment as readily as you and I might.
I've seen great engineers fail to make leaps exactly like that one. The
weirdest things can hang some up, and it can take quite a while to recognize
and address the issue. It _can_ cost quite a lot more than holding out for the
right candidate. Sensibly or not, that's a risk that a lot of employers aren't
willing to accept (or maybe aren't able to).

What mitigates the risk for these employers is if the candidate has other
ready skills or has a track record of picking up plethora of skills like "C,
Ruby, Java, C# and others" as you describe. I tried to express that in my
original comment, but maybe didn't do so as clearly as I'd hoped.

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davismwfl
A lot of companies are starting to hire for capability instead of experience
in just the specific tech. But I can't imagine if you have no experience in
their stack that there would be much interest from a company. Unless you have
significant domain experience or the stack is very similar to what you have
been working in.

So to answer your question, I don't think going after a RoR position would be
worth your while given what you have said. But Angular vs Ember seems
reasonable. e.g. framework switches aren't as critical to me as would be you
having no experience in the core development language, depending on the
situation of course.

~~~
Floog
I'm curious what about RoR vs Laravel makes it not worthwhile, while Angular
vs Ember is?

~~~
davismwfl
Actually fair point. In my mind I was thinking Ruby vs PHP more than RoR vs
Laravel, as really those are just frameworks. I am glad you said something.

I saw a couple of other comments point out that the more experience you have
the less this is an issue and I think that is also valid. I would just think
if all your time has been in PHP, making the jump to Ruby might be tough, but
making the jump to PHP with different frameworks is not nearly as hard. But
again, it depends on the other skills and experience you bring to the table as
to whether an employer would bet on you to make the leap from one core
language to another.

* EDIT: Fixed spelling

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auganov
The more senior you go the less it matters. At senior positions your
architectural understanding matters more. If it's a junior position then all
depends on their willingness to train you. Basically if they want someone to
crank out code tomorrow, they probably won't hire you. If they just happen to
use ROR and want you to architect the cloud backend of their technology then
they shouldn't care so much.

But all in all it never hurts to try! :-)

