"How many people do you know who are fluent in Delphi?" reads like, "I know I'm a 4 at best, but I'm holding out for my perfect 10. Willing to compromise a bit, but definitely no lower than a 9."
If is-already-fluent-in-unsexy-niche is a hiring requirement, then your hiring is totally broken. (To be honest, it's broken even when you broaden it outside "unsexy niche"...)
> finding people for these types of job is probably not easy[...] not as easy as finding a Python developer
You already questioned 'my six months to be effective' blurb, like, its not a hiring issue, its that people see 'Delphi' and worry about their next job, the one after your company.
I dont think python or C# are especially hard to hire for.
I feel like you came to this conversation with a preconceived notion here. Look - not everyone can match the SV pay scale, I'm not on one, there are no stock options floating around here.
> You already questioned 'my six months to be effective' blurb, like, its not a hiring issue, its that people see 'Delphi' and worry about their next job, the one after your company.
I have no idea what this is trying to say here. Yes, I called out the months-to-productivity quip.
> I feel like you came to this conversation with a preconceived notion here.
Right—the one that I said I had: that people who say it's "impossible" to hire developers to work with <X> are the equivalent of other industries' folks who the same thing e.g. about not being able to hire retail workers. When you prod a bit, it turns out it has nothing to do with <X> or workers, but instead pathological hiring behavior and expectations on the part of the companies themselves (with a common one being the "4 who expects to date a 10" effect).
There are just not many developers who have any experience with Delphi, and often if they do, it's not recent (as in living) experience. It's a whole lot easier to find C# people, who have been writing C# every day for the last X years.
I don't understand why this conceptually is so hard to understand - I know some very obsolete, and arcane shit, some of it, I'm the only person I know who has even a modicum of familiarity with it, as these technologies were no longer in common use by the late 90's (and I suspect most of the other people who still know it, are either, about to retire, retired, or dead). If you put out a req with that experience as a requirement, you're not gonna find people for it, no matter the money offered, or the hiring process.
I've not seen anything that'd lead me to think anyone is expecting 10's here, I think even finding 4's with Delphi experience - just based on the responses to this post, is very very hard.
> I don't understand why this conceptually is so hard to understand
I understand it fully:
> If you put out a req with that experience as a requirement, you're not gonna find people for it
You're making _my_ point, dude. That's a stupid req.
You said it yourself that the N-months-to-productivity problem (which is par for the course anywhere) is not actually a consequence of language but rather of domain familiarity or business processes or whatever. Again: not a surprise. So whether/if it takes two to ten months to see productivity from your hires no matter which language you're working in, then it's silly to lament the difficulty of being able to hire developers who can write Delphi on day one. You don't even need that!
> then it's silly to lament the difficulty of being able to hire developers who can write Delphi on day one. You don't even need that!
This much is true. However this is also not the reason why we find it difficult to hire. We don't require someone who can write Delphi from day one. We require someone who is willing to write Delphi from day one.
Obviously past Delphi experience will make that much more likely. But we've tried listing "C#/C++/Java or similar" in the suggested experience part, and most of the people with such backgrounds are not willing to learn Delphi it turns out.
> This much is true. However this is also not the reason why we find it difficult to hire.
Cool. Would have been nice then to not have brought it up ad nauseam as if it was relevant, rather than a massive distraction masquerading as a mic drop-worthy argument ender.
I thought the whole appeal of Delphi was how easy it was though. In terms of the base language, Pascal is pretty easy to pick up. Any dev worth hiring would come up to speed pretty quick.
Yeah if you've been exposed to C, C#, Java, Go or similar you should pick it up quite quickly. Unlike C++ the syntax is fairly strict so you get fairly sensible errors most of the time, or a least in a relevant location.
Would they relocate to fill a job in a small company that mostly use Delphi?
We're talking about a programming language mostly targetting software for small businesses. A language that has basically no future.
Nothing's impossible, but I'm ready to believe that finding people for these types of job is probably not easy.
Not impossible, just not as easy as finding a Python developer.