http://stochasticgeometry.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/tips-for-hiring-new-engineers/

I’ve been a developer in software companies for a dozen years now, and have interviewed more than a hundred candidates in the last five years. I can’t imagine hiring a candidate who was mediocre in other ways (negative personality, unenthusiastic, poor design skills, not bright enough — choose one) but who had an excellent command of the language. I don’t mean “in comparison with an otherwise enthusiastic candidate who didn’t know language X” — we’d rather leave the position empty.

Candidates at my employer pass through 6-7 group and one-on-one interviews. Only two of those are language-specific — one in Java, one in SQL. Both I (the SQL interviewer) and the Java interviewer have recommended we hire candidates who only scored 1 or 2 out of 5 on knowledge of the respective languages. The only way we’d nix a candidate who was strong on the non-language interviews is if they knew neither Java, nor SQL, nor web programming. A particular language is simply the easiest thing about software development to learn.

Of course it’s useful to have a language guru around, if your team is big enough. But you probably only need one.

Typos are bad enough. Typos that change the meaning of an entire paragraph are terrible.

It’s worth noting that that language is a minor aspect of programming. A good programmer can pick up languages relatively easily. Better to try to measure whether programmers are good at programming, than the number of languages programmers “know”.

It’s also worth nothing that projects often dictate choice of language. If you are starting a software project from scratch, a blank screen, with a target language in mind, you will want to find a programmer with a particular specialty in that language. (Though you might ask yourself why you have gone as far as specifying a language before consulting a professional.) If you have a corpus of code you are modifying or extending, a specialist will be less critical, as your programmer will have plenty of examples to look at and learn from.

This blog entry from Amazon team leader Steve Yegge distills the technical interview nicely.

And mine is no podunk library. 17 branches, 30+ servers, 850+ workstations.

It is, in my opinion, WAY better to hire someone with insatiable curiosity and the ability and desire to learn, rather than try to find someone who already knows your technologies. ‘Cause even if they claim to know them, they probably don’t know them the way you use them in your environment.

I will learn a new programming language if there’s an existing project I need to work on. Python is the language I cut my teeth on, and if I have to code something from scratch it’s still what I use, but when I started as a DSpace monkey, I perforce learned JSP and (some) Java, and now that Manakin’s out of the gates, I’ve been reacquainting myself with XSLT. I can sorta read PHP owing to monkeying around with Open Journal Systems.

Oh, and SQL. I can’t think of many programmer-types who don’t need at least a LITTLE SQL.

I don’t know where your fellow student read that more than one or two languages is unrealistic, but it doesn’t square with anything I’ve heard from my programmer friends, never mind my own experience. I’d mark that down as “bogus” and move on.