Is that the highest order bit when you're hiring someone though? For almost all roles, I don't think it is.

No but for a popular job listing in a well known company with hundreds of applicants, there are going to be dozens of people who have similar experience as you, plus have the exact qualification that they are asking for, putting you at an automatic disadvantage.

Weird example since letting you take an interview in a different language than they use is very common

I don’t agree because not all interviews work that way, especially for teams that write cpp and c — they don’t let candidates interview in JS for instance.

I had a high level eng join a domain specific team I was on and he didn’t do well because he didn’t know the domain very well. He had general skills around leadership and communication that someone of his level should have, and it kept him afloat, but for a high level technical IC you need to be at worst fluent in the domain and at best a technical leader in the group.

At lower levels of IC generalist is fine, the blast radius of your technical decisions is smaller so it’s less risky to learn on the job.

But yeah, not knowing the domain you’re going to join, whether it’s a type of work or a programming language, you won’t be as effective.

> I don’t agree because not all interviews work that way, especially for teams that write cpp and c — they don’t let candidates interview in JS for instance.

I think this is a bit of a special case since these languages are largely restricted to specialized domains these days. I don't think many people are deciding between building a Web app with Python or C.