

Ask HN: What platform would you pick to optimize for hiring top talent later on? - mmastrac

I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, but it's an interesting exercise. In the past I've built projects on technology stacks that have turned out to be difficult to find people skilled in later on. Looking it at it from the other end, if you know you'll need to scale the team up, what platforms (if any) would make this easy?
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bartonfink
If you really want top talent, platform's less of an issue than problem. As
long as you choose a platform that is appropriate to the problem you're trying
to solve (e.g. you probably shouldn't write web-apps in C or weather
simulation code in pure Ruby), I think most of the people you'd consider 'top'
talent would recognize that the platform is secondary.

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michael_fine
This also relates to what PG said,

"When you decide what infrastructure to use for a project, you're not just
making a technical decision. You're also making a social decision, and this
may be the more important of the two. For example, if your company wants to
write some software, it might seem a prudent choice to write it in Java. But
when you choose a language, you're also choosing a community. The programmers
you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones
you could get to work on a project written in Python. "

That may be why the OP is having trouble finding talent, because talent
doesn't like the stacks he used.

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christianbryant
I don't know that it's fair to compare communities based upon intelligence.
Though not a Java programmer myself, I work with J2EE programmers and they're
as mixed a bag as the Python hackers in the sysadmin group.

While I would choose LAMP over J2EE any day where the choice is available, it
would be due to the community strictly from a technology forecast POV. The
issues with Java as a community stem from any combination of things, from a
slow evolution of the language and JDK, to Oracle's handling of the community
and assets. OpenJDK is making that a little less worrisome, but as far as
infrastructure goes, I would say LAMP (P: Perl/Python/PHP) offers the more
reasons to choose it.

