ihadaquestion

Java is a tad boring to program in, but other than that there's not too much to complain about. I'm personally going to stick to what I think is its best part, the JVM, and use Clojure to abstract myself from all the lower level necessities.

At this point for me Clojure is simply more fun to write in, although it remains to be seen if it gets ever accepted into the "industry best practices" mainstream that will make your boss sleep well at night, just like Java has for the past decade. Some of the old school LISPers (I'm talking people 70 and older who taught the language before I was even born) I know claim that they haven't gotten bored yet, so there's hope.

It's a good point. The only case I can think of where you wouldn't want that is if you don't even know if you'll have enough runway in 9 months, but that's probably not quite hiring stage.

People will occasionally hint at this. The impression I got is that startups often interview for high technical skills and hope that the brief interaction during the meetings gave them sufficient insight into the person's personality and culture fits.

Supposedly, it often happens that a few months down the line you realize that a lot of expectations and quirks weren't properly discussed and you get into sticky situations.

I want to make sure I got you correctly. Are you saying that the technical (co-)founder of the startup you're interviewing for on average doesn't know how to spot a good programmer?

I can tell you from personal experience that very large companies, especially the ones that are no longer perceived as hot as they once were, have a rather low bar of entry. I can see however why a small business would want to be very cautious though. Say you're a 9 person business, the 10th guy you hire is going to determine 10% of the company's success. You want to make sure you don't screw up on that. It's a fine balance, right?

Is your opinion that startups these days are on the excessively cautious end? Would hiring more openly for a trial position and firing fast be a better approach?

What is your typical customer, if you don't mind me asking? Can smaller startups afford your services?

Also, do you consider culture fit at all? I read somewhere that because recruiters make their money on volume, their interest in small companies is rather limited. Basically, it doesn't make business sense for them to spend hours to get to know a small company's culture inside-out and then send them one-two candidates. You could be funneling dozens of developers to very large clients with very generic culture requirements in that time frame.

I hear that many small companies cannot afford to use recruiting services because of their prohibitive costs. What about that case?