looking for Lisp Hackers

During the years we worked on Viaweb I read a lot of job descriptions. A new competitor seemed to emerge out of the woodwork every month or so. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had a live online demo, was look at their job listings. After a couple years of this I could tell which companies to worry about and which not to. The more of an IT flavor the job descriptions had, the less dangerous the company was. The safest kind were the ones that wanted Oracle experience. You never had to worry about those. You were also safe if they said they wanted C++ or Java developers. If they wanted Perl or Python programmers, that would be a bit frightening— that’s starting to sound like a company where the technical side, at least, is run by real hackers. If I had ever seen a job posting looking for Lisp hackers, I would have been really worried.

(Paul Graham, Beating the Averages, 2001)

This was 2001, and still today, twelve years later, “Oracle experience” seems to be valued broadly, appearing in over 2.5% of job postings indexed on indeed.com, although in steady decline since mid-2011.

And this makes me think that all these companies still seeking
big-brand buzzword compliance today are stuck in another era, besides being often held hostages by the pricing whims of said big brands.

It made me quite sad when i learnt, at a previous $job, that the IT department’s budget had to be adjusted recently, halting some plans to develop new services for students, because of the impact of Oracle’s pricing rises on available money. Obviously Oracle’s executives’ fat pockets need to be filled somehow, and it’s Oracle’s business to set their pricing, but wasting money this way can indeed be avoided, by stopping useless spending in proprietary products which are designed to solve a cash problem (that of the companies’ executives) rather than a technical problem (which is, in the case of databases, solved rather excellently by PostgreSQL and even Oracle’s own MySQL in the relational field and by MongoDB and countless other projects in the NoSQL field).