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Yes, no, perhaps ...
It largely depends on the person. I used to work with a developer who could switch (self-taught) to almost any language and be quite proficient and knowledgable within weeks. I have also worked with people who could not program their way out of a wet paper bag. So you need to look much more closely at the person, and their skill and ability, not just what they have worked on in the past. Face to face interviews can usually weed out the ones who think they can blag it*.
*Although TBH, that's what I got away with for much of my career.
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This is true.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Biggest concern: Java has memory management. C and C++ do not, you do that on your own. If the Java developer has never had to be concerned with memory management they will create a program that will leak memory and program will run for some time then it will fail, especially in embedded world. I came from assembly, C / C++. Then I learned Java and thought, wow that is nice, memory is managed for me. Going from Java to system level programming language like C will be a big learning curve.
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Most likely NO!
And not because of not be able to program, but because he will soon be fed up with how hard some things must be done with c++.
For example, we had to do a C++ embedded project after more than 10 years of C#/.NET; after a thorough analyses of the c++ project and how it was supposed to be implemented, I ended up implementing first a full garbage collector.
Even the most careful programmer that comes from a garbage collected environment, that never in his life used a delete obj; statement will forget to free the memory even months after the start with c++.
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Fresh out of college is tough. His/her depth is probably not nearly what they believe it to be.
If they really want to learn C/C++ and you have a run at them about embedded. Then maybe.
You could make it happen. But this would be a heavily mentored situation.
I would make them read a boat load of code, learn to build and test the systems you are working on.
They would have to read the libraries you leverage, and build a spreadsheet of .o file sizes, and impact on the executable sizes.
Then, they would be on small bug fix tasks (identify, verify, repair, review). The review is a review of their entire thought process, and a code review. Preferably DAILY of all code they propose to change. Until they are writing better code. Then they can start with small changes/enhancements, but I would review EVERY line of code for many many weeks.
If they are off by 10 degrees and you are not reviewing. In 9 months, they are going to be breaking everything. If you can keep them to 1 degree off, and constantly monitor, you should both be happy.
The great part of this, is that SOMETIMES when you go through this with management, they realize why it costs more to hire the people with the right skills up front.
But I don't mind investing in good people. Doing this has led to near lifetime relationships with these guys for me. They appreciate getting up to speed at an accelerated rate.
HTH
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It's not just about language - does the candidate have an appropriate knowledge of and inclination towards low-level programming, as you're likely to see in small embedded systems? Bits, bytes, addresses, malloc and free... Realising there's no garbage collector to handle memory for them - maybe no heap allocation at all! Tight timing requirements, low latency responses... All of that is kind of non-Java... Just saying...
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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I'm inclined to also say no, but really what that means in this case is that their resume would not be at the top of the stack.
If they've only ever done Java, then I would expect a serious deficiency in their knowledge of memory management/garbage collection, since they're used to having that handled by the VM. Java also doesn't have pointers, so expect that to be another pain point.
That said, my company does hire a lot of kids fresh out of school. We start them with a 3 month paid internship (roughly $10/hour). If they're able to get up to speed in that time (and we have enough work), we offer them a full position. So far it's worked out pretty well. Out of 20-25 interns over that last 4 years there's only been one that we had to let go due to incompetence. The rest we either hired, or they got positions at other companies in our industry.
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If it's a guy straight out of college, then he probably can't write in C++ OR Java, but just thinks very highly of himself. It's not like he's disabled or anything. If you have time to train him up, Java isn't unrecoverably dissimilar to C++. But it will be slow going for about two years until he has basic mastery of C++. He could be productive sooner if the project is not too demanding. (Without meaning to be insulting, if EEs do the coding now, it's probably not too demanding). But he won't be able to just sit down and start cranking out code the first day. You said you were agile, and hinted that to you agile means cronically in a rush. Retreading an enterprise java guy doesn't seem like what you want to do in a rush.
The mindset for embedded C++ is all about optimization and performance, templates and inlining and profiling. The mindset for enterprise Java is all about memorizing design patterns and writing elaborate factory methods. Learning the difference in syntax is easy. Unlearning the enterprise mindset and acquiring the embedded mindset is probably harder.
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(Without meaning to be insulting, if EEs do the coding now, it's probably not too demanding).
Oh, hell, maybe soapbox? 
Without taking offense, I understand exactly where you are coming from. I work with the one CS guy in our group. He's amazing. He can couple systems together so fast. 
I like the other idea of bringing people in as interns, I'd pay them a bit more though. The issue is that you have to have the manpower of being able to support said interns. That part is a management decision. Right now, I'm dealing with code written by said whiz kid that has no real mapping to the problem domain. So, sometimes a CS can cause issues
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Microsoft missed the shift to mobile because it was focused on the PC, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in an interview with ZDNet.
Is this also called a blunder?
A small mistake here is that this is possibly "Insider News" stuff 
modified 15-Jul-15 6:19am.
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objection
item -> object
atom -> ion
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well done, you are up tomorrow.
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Damn. There goes my evening... figuring out a clue for tomorrow 
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Think about this:
- Cows
- The Constitution
- The Ten Commandments
COWS
Is it just me, or does anyone else find it amazing that during the mad cow epidemic our government could track a single cow, born in Canada almost three years earlier, right to the stall where she slept in the state of Washington? And, they tracked her calves to their stalls. But they are unable to locate 11 million illegal aliens wandering around our country. Maybe we should give each of them a cow.
THE CONSTITUTION
They keep talking about drafting a Constitution for Iraq ....why don't we just give them ours?
It was written by a lot of really smart guys, it has worked for over 200 years, and we're not using it anymore.
THE 10 COMMANDMENTS
The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments posted in a courthouse is this -- you cannot post:
'Thou Shalt Not Steal'
'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,' and
'Thou Shall Not Lie'
in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.
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Well, the cows don't generally try to avoid controls, nor they are backed by organized crime  poor things ar moostly harmless :P
Geek code v 3.12 {
GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- r++>+++ y+++*
Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
}
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1) Illegal immigrants don't have ear tags.
2) There are already enough guns in Iraq - they don't need a set of rules which says "more is a good idea"
3) The first commandment was the real sticking point: Money is the first, last and only with that bunch. By the time they got to the fifth, it was clear it wasn't going to work, since most of 'em had sold their parents down the river years before...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: There are already enough guns in Iraq - they don't need a set of rules which says "more is a good idea"
Please, do tell... where in the US constitution does it say more guns is a good idea?
If it's not broken, fix it until it is
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Doesn't it say that you even have the right to arm bears?
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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It's taken me years of careful pruning of my Facebook to stop getting this sort of shite turning up on there.
Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them.
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That's the best thing to do on Facebook
How do you know so much about swallows? Well, you have to know these things when you're a king, you know.
modified 31-Aug-21 21:01pm.
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The best thing to do on Facebook is to not do Facebook.
You missed that boat - I'd suggest stealing a new identity.
| "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein | | "As far as we know, our computer has never had an undetected error." - Weisert | | "If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010 |
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Yeah, but he did it very carefully, so as no one has actually realized that he unfriended them yet.
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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