How crucial is technical fit in hiring engineers?

Whether you were on the hiring or candidate side, I'm curious to hear your thoughts/experiences.

Let's say the company uses Node, Angular, and MongoDB:

Candidate #1: Above average Senior-level Engineer with matching background in Node, Angular, MongoDB.

Candidate #1: Excellent Senior-level Engineer, but background is mainly in Ruby, React, and Postgres.

And please contribute any other of the countless permutations! Would it be a different situation for Python-to-Java (or vice versa)?

Thanks!

2 comments

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RNeff 6y ago ↗

Several of my jobs in the past were programming proprietary languages and systems. No one outside the company had experience. Look for CS background, wide experience, quick learner, and team player attitude without arrogance. The differences in programming language details is trivial. What you will be using in the future is not what you are using now.

gshdg 6y ago ↗

Are the concepts pretty directly transferable and the engineers senior? Specific technologies don’t matter all that much.

Junior engineer? Might take a bit longer to ramp up.

Switching between firmware development and web apps? That’s going to be tough (in either direction).