The article isn’t really very persuasive about this though. Having worked with OCaml at Jane Street is not, I think most of us would agree, going to be, going to be a serious barrier to getting hired to work with another language somewhere else.
> For Jane Street’s technical rank-and-file, particularly the many hired straight out of university, non-compete agreements may be surplus to requirements. A scan of jobs listed by Millennium, a rival fund that has recently clashed with Jane Street in court, shows the strength of the latter’s position in the job market. Millennium wants engineers experienced in c++, Go, Java and Python, languages that are commonly used across finance and tech. OCaml developers, it seems, are Jane Street’s to keep.
If someone worked with OCaml at Jane Street I would just take this as a signal that they are smart enough to quickly learn Go, Python, whatever they need, and will probably be more successful after 6 months than a “Python developer” would be.
I've experienced this while leaving a different company that used a rare language.
It's a tough situation being experienced in <peculiar language for Company A> when you need to ace technical interviews in <mainstream language for Company B>.
Once you have a few years of promotions, it gets even tougher when you need to compete with <mainstream language> senior+ software engineer candidates at the destination company. Maybe <flashy brand name> was enough to land the interview, but experience mismatches and limitations can remain apparent in the interview itself.
> Having worked with OCaml at Jane Street is not, I think most of us would agree, going to be, going to be a serious barrier to getting hired to work with another language somewhere else.
The retention factor is *not* that other companies wouldn't want to hire them, but rather that these employees are likely to dislike being forced to use something other than OCaml.
Sure you would, but would Millennium or other high-caliber firms? It seems they want engineers with C++ experience and that's not exactly 'easy' to pick up 'quickly'.
