Comment by 9rx
2 days ago
To be fair, years ago Rails was what all the "bootcamp" programmer mills were pushing. Only you have the full context, but absent of that it is likely that Rails was truly found to be associated with poor applicants. Not because of anything about Rails itself, but because of those "bootcamps" not developing quality people. The culling has to occur at some point. If you throw some great developers out with the bathwater, so be it. There isn't enough time in the day to worry about them.
Admittedly, Ruby on Rails makes me think "bootcamp" like you said, and I barely even know what it is.
But shouldn't the check just be that the candidate has used more than one different stack? It's pretty hard for anyone with real experience to stick to one, and even if they do, that's not a good sign either. Or are you saying those bootcamp people end up learning another stack but still not being very good?
> But shouldn't the check just be that the candidate has used more than one different stack?
If you had another filtering mechanism, perhaps you could do that. But what other arbitrary, legally acceptable, filter are you going to use to further narrow the search? Can't realistically throw out all the resumes with female-sounding names, for example. What is going to keep you out of trouble is quite limited.
Why not throw out all the "Rails" resumes? If you had all the time in the world you would interview every last person, of course, but in the real world, with real world constraints, you have to pick a few to interview and live with your choice.
To use the internet's favourite analogy: It's like buying a car. Most people would never find it reasonable to test-drive every single one of them. It is just too time consuming to do that. So, instead, one normally looks at signals to try and distill the choice down to a few cars to test drive. You very well might miss out on what is actually your perfect car by doing that, but if you find one that is good enough, who cares?