> a good programmer can be coding in something new within a week or maybe two and after a couple of months should be completely fluent.
It's a risky choice.
The project we were working on had very, very heavy emphasis on idiomatic Java. In this situation a good manager would need to recognize the deficit in the prospective lead and only ever accept the candidate if they have a rock-solid track record of success, if the team is proficient enough with the language that they can fill in the architect's gaps, and most importantly, if the team is on board.
Unless you have a very mature team that has bought into the leadership of this individual, deficit in language skills might be perceived as a deficit in overall skill, and the team will have difficulty accepting the new leadership.
[Edit: My very, very strong preference is to never hire leads. Hire team members, pay them what they're worth with frequent raises for good performance, and let the team decide who does what.]
Agreed. Learning a language is one thing. Learning its libraries is another; a stack a third; its idioms a fourth; its broad patterns a fifth. The J2EE part of my resume is an alphabet soup of supporting technologies. Rails is almost as bad, just with double entendres instead of acronyms. If you're learning the basics as you go, how are you going to make strategic, architect-level decisions? Did this potential hire ever encounter MVC in her work with Matlab/R?
I've never understood why the common line is that any good hacker can pick up a new language and be just as effective as someone who has used it for year in a short time.
I've been thrown into overdue projects in languages I hadn't used before, and have been able to start fixing bugs almost immediately... but "tweaking existing code" is a far cry from implementing new functionality, which in turn is far below making architectural decisions.
Languages exist in ecosystems that develop over years; knowing those ecosystems in depth takes a lot of time.
> a good programmer can be coding in something new within a week or maybe two and after a couple of months should be completely fluent.
It's a risky choice.
The project we were working on had very, very heavy emphasis on idiomatic Java. In this situation a good manager would need to recognize the deficit in the prospective lead and only ever accept the candidate if they have a rock-solid track record of success, if the team is proficient enough with the language that they can fill in the architect's gaps, and most importantly, if the team is on board.
Unless you have a very mature team that has bought into the leadership of this individual, deficit in language skills might be perceived as a deficit in overall skill, and the team will have difficulty accepting the new leadership.
[Edit: My very, very strong preference is to never hire leads. Hire team members, pay them what they're worth with frequent raises for good performance, and let the team decide who does what.]