Ask HN: Does stack matter for hiring?

1 points by rfrey ↗ HN
Context: I'm in the initial stages of starting a company. I'm not from the valley, but am starting in SF for Reasons. There is funding available to hire when we need it and make payroll for a year or so.

I need to choose a stack and get started. I know node and am fast in it, however I'm in love with Clojure and Datomic.

After I list pros and cons, chide myself for self-indulgence, chide myself for complacency, re-list the pros and cons, etc., it's a dead heat. The one factor I can't decide on is hiring implications.

So the question: For people steeped in the Valley environment, is the tech stack a salient factor in how people choose where to work? It seems to me that:

1) There is a large pool of node.js folks around, so hiring will be easier; but

2) It will be hard to attract good candidates, whereas being a Clojure shop might enable us to attract better candidates than we'd otherwise be able to.

I'm not proposing to get engineers on the cheap just because of the shop language; I'm just aware that as a new company we have little to offer candidates that isn't being offered by eight thousand other startups.

Is my point (2) reasonable, or am I just rationalizing the choice I'd prefer to make for selfish reasons?

(afterword: I'm very aware that the success or failure of a company has little to do with the implementation technology. Yet a stack must be chosen, and the question above is beyond my experience.)

1 comment

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Why not use multiple stacks with a micro-services architecture?