Maybe its a good recruiting tool though? If you're not a famous or wealthy company it can be a way to recruit good people if you use leading (not bleeding) edge technology. It didn't attract you but lots of people seem to like shiny things.
this. we are a small team but really wanted a person that we liked to work with (he was a long time friend) but he had some language prefs. Its not without a major cost since generally the rest of us dont touch the software stack as much anymore (we are a hardware startup with a lot of EE/Mech and FW) but right now I'm not sure thats a bad thing as we can focus on our respective parts. Rolling with a modern language and framework set was a small price to pay for a great hire. We did stipulate that the backend framework had to by things we were fluent with though.
Sounds odd to me that you'd accept his actions that feel like a price to pay (which I take as a loss of business value) in order to get a great hire.
But If they are doing things that are destroying value then are they so great? Or maybe they are great but not a good fit for you. I.e. they need a Google not a Crud Inc.
We didn't 'accept his actions' but instead he told us upfront that he was partial to working in certain languages and frameworks. We mulled it over before agreeing and coulnd't be happier. He is great because he is great to work with, highly productive, self motivated, and brilliant. Sure, I could have hired a dev that only did the exact same things as me, but I might be tempted to get into the weeds more than I probably should. You defining 'his actions' as destroying business value is a poor mischaracterization as he has created enormous amounts of business value. Couldn't be happier with our decision on this.
