This is really the heart of it:
> Don't get me wrong - to an extent, some languages (especially more niche ones) drive hiring and what kind of employee you get
In my experience, the community around a given language is going to significantly influence the sort of typical applicant you get for a job working in that language. Those profile vary a surprising amount, especially for, as you say, niche languages, but also for "beginner" languages.
I have seen businesses significantly harmed because they hired what I would term language specific technicians instead of engineers. That's a failure of leader, certainly, but that failure is a lot more likely for certain languages.
> they hired what I would term language specific technicians instead of engineers.
I have seen this too, and I really like the way you phrased it - I think I'll use that in the future!
I do think it's an easier trap to fall into with some languages, but I still don't think the language really drives it.
I worked on a large-scale Rust project that could probably have been a Go project a while ago and while Language Technicians were a big hiring hazard, after we got one or two we both learned how to manage them and stopped hiring that type of employee (since they weren't what our project needed) and things evened out and were successful in Rust.
> I do think it's an easier trap to fall into with some languages, but I still don't think the language really drives it.
Yeah, in the end poor hiring practices drive it. The language you choose just makes the probability of that failure possibility higher or lower.
> I worked on a large-scale Rust project that could probably have been a Go project a while ago and while Language Technicians were a big hiring hazard, after we got one or two we both learned how to manage them and stopped hiring that type of employee (since they weren't what our project needed) and things evened out and were successful in Rust.
That tracks with my experience, for sure. Once you learn to spot it, you can mitigate it.
Can you give us a bit more details? I'm intrigued by what was spotted and how did it obstruct the company's mission.
How is a language technician in Rust even born? I imagine C, Java, Python technicians come from school or other educational materials, but there’s no significant number of people with Rust as a first language, right? Were they just Rust fanatics unwilling to consider other languages?
I'm not even sure "fanatic" was the right word, as most of them actually had a pretty measured take on the state of Rust and were not the sort of aggressive evangelists that people sometimes associate with the language. They were just way more interested in exploring/iterating on/consuming the programming language itself, rather than using it to actually solve business problems. I suppose depending on the connotation of the word "technician" we might be discussing separate people, although it's almost a horseshoe effect where they both loop around into not moving a project forward.