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You can look for someone who works with non-trendy technologies.

This is actually a big reason why non-trendy technologies persist - indeed, why they often thrive in the larger marketplace precisely at the moment that they become least sexy and fall off the geek radar. Non-trendiness is a market signal of its own. There's a lot less noise in the backwaters, and those products which survive to become boring have demonstrated staying power. People obviously aren't using them for fun, or because they're easy to promote on popular blogs, or because VCs can impress each other by dropping their names. They must have survived for another reason. Perhaps they are... pragmatic, useful, or cost-effective?

This strategy must be used in moderation, of course. The final stage of nontrendiness is obsolescence and death; You don't want to hire those who are expert only in obsolete things. (Oh, my IE6-CSS-hacking skills will soon have no market value. Thank goodness!)



There is a fine line. Sometimes people work with non trendy tech because they have no interest in developing their skillset.


Don't sell yourself short. My father bought an IBM-PC and built a record-keeping database application for a niche market that did very well for him from the mid-80s well into the 21st century. It was written in almost-pure PC-COBOL (some ASM), which was already the butt of jokes before the PC era even began.




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