Why You Need To Hire Great Developers • Hacker News Board

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#31

Post by mbailey » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 5:00 AM UTC

thornelius wrote: post #11

mbailey wrote: post #2

My company is making a business of identifying great developers (gild.com). It is a notoriously difficult task, even with the wealth of information developers tend to make public about themselves.

i find it ironic that your sign up page, for gild.com, doesn't work...

Not sure why hubspot is having issues, I'll have to talk to the marketing guys who maintain the hubspot pages... Currently we don't let people claim their profiles, but will in the future. "login" is really just for customers at this point.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#32

Post by jamesbanner » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 5:03 AM UTC

InclinedPlane wrote: post #19

I don't think hiring great developers is something everyone must do. After all, there are not enough of them to go around. Instead I'd say that the ability to hire great developers is a key advantage to being a smaller company. Also, I'd say that the notions of "10x" or "20x" greater productivity from the best developers are set on the wrong footing entirely. Such ideas presuppose that development is just production…

Software development has lot of challenges and doing things fast isn't one of them.

We should get over the "x times more productive" notion altogether. Emphasis should be on doing things right than "fast".

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#33

Post by mbailey » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 7:09 AM UTC

benlakey wrote: post #21

amcintyre wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...even with the wealth of information developers tend to make public about themselves. I guess I'm gonna be a negative Nancy here, but I know some very good developers that don't make anything about themselves public. I expect some of the very best are completely invisible on the internet, at least by their real name, because they're too busy working on things their employers would rather keep as trade secrets.

I suspect you're right, though I'd rather they share the non trade secret advice that they have in a more public fashion, such as a blog or stackoverflow.

Yeah, this is what we're aiming at, making how developers interact with the community as part of our scoring metrics.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#34

Post by benlakey » Mon, Jul 09, 2012, 1:27 AM UTC

jamesbanner wrote: post #30

In my experience hiring great developers brings more challenges then benefits. They are difficult to retain, They are difficult to be made satisfied, you need to change your company compensation rules to accommodate them and various other problems. It's much better in my experience to hire a mediocre developer and train him in your domain.

If it requires changing your company compensation rules, you have different problems at hand. Great developers don't cost more in dollar signs so much as they do in operating in an environment with other great developers, working on great challenges.