Kotlin in workplace
interviewed recently at a company for an Android dev position, during the interview the hiring manager said he likes the team to use the latest tech, except Kotlin because he thinks it needs another year or so to mature. After I started I did a proof of concept on a redesigned screen and all the devs were quite excited but not the manager, I am kind of worried it might lead to a series conversation. What is the best strategy to handle a conversation like that? I hope for this Kotlin piece to go into production and also to allow the team to slowly move over to Kotlin but don't want to have a fight with the manager. I also think it's not his place to control the tech, am I wrong?
We've recently introduced Kotlin as well into an otherwise Java Android project. If you want a lot of headaches, do the same. There are a lot of build tool, gradle, testing, and instrumentation issues with it at this point. I'm with your manager on this one. I would say it's still a year or so before being fully mature. At this point we're all beta testers
You need to weigh the pros and cons in an objective way and decide whether to make a case for it based on that
Agree. Try a pilot of writing Kotlin only for your tests initially and see how it goes. Then if that goes well try writing a small new feature and see how it goes
We switched 4 months ago and haven't looked back. No reason not to use Kotlin for Android now. If you're still writing Java for Android, you're wasting your life. Me and my team will be here running circles around our deadlines in the meantime 😎
3 years later, and I’m curious what happened here. Did you get the job? Have you come to love kotlin?
Kotlin has a lot of potential and is now officially backed by Google. Managers are hesitant of new technologies because of possible hard ships down the road because of it (like the breaking changes made in swift language). Engineers just need to have the guts to tell the manager they want to learn and use the new technology. It's in your best interest to stay up to date, and if you already know java, your market value isn't going up by using it for the next x years. Managers will probably always say let's wait a year before making such a big change. in a year they'll say the same thing. they don't want to waste deliverable time on devs learning new things. not in a lot of companies anyway. As long as all/most devs are on board, I'd say go for it. Android studio has a built in language conversion feature anways. it's not as big of a change as the manager (non technical?) probably thinks. the big con of switching to Kotlin is losing all the java engineers ability to review code and make a easier switch to doing mobile.