

Ask HN: Polyglot Workplace Success Stories? - carrja99

I've been a firm believer in choosing the right tool for the job. I've always believed a company shouldn't just bill themselves as a "Java Shop", ".Net Shop", or a "Ruby Shop" but rather focus on delivering results and using whichever language or frameworks work best.<p>I'm sure a lot of other companies do this... what are some success stories?
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Jacquass12321
I currently work for a polyglot shop so I guess I can chime in. We employ
about ~90 engineers now and have been in business for around 25 years now, so
I consider that successful.

The discussion of focusing our scope and becoming more of a single stack shop
has certainly come up, and some engineers are in favor of it because it
certainly has benefits. Company wide practices can easily apply to all
projects, engineering resources are far easier to exchange when everyone uses
the same skill set, and knowledge gains are applicable to all projects.

It's a lot harder for my custom tools I write for managing a
Perl/WinForms/.NetMVC website to provide benefits for the guys downstairs
working on embedded systems in c++.

Personally I prefer the variety of a polyglot shop but I can see where the
appeal is to streamline company wide and specialize.

Our spread of technologies is mostly due to self motivated engineers learning
new technologies and working on gaining experience to the point where we feel
comfortable charging a client to develop a solution using that technology. For
example, 4 years ago we'd done no mobile development. Around that time a few
engineers dove into personal projects in Android and IPhone development and
we've since released several products for both platforms. This was completely
facilitated by employee efforts and interests. If no one wants to work on your
technology stack we probably won't offer a solution and will just help you
find another company.

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1123581321
We consider ourselves polyglot. However, we found that demand for our Rails
consulting pulled far ahead of the rest. By fulfilling that demand we gained a
lot more experience doing Rails which not only improved our work but increased
the number of applications in which we could do a superior job using Rails.
This has probably happened to many companies that appear dedicated to one
technology.

