Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#1

Post by benlakey » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 1:15 AM UTC

Why You Need To Hire Great Developers
benlakey.com

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#2

Post by mbailey » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 2:37 AM UTC

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.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#3

Post by sanswork » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:11 AM UTC

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.

Is there any way to view your own profile on gild?

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#4

Post by larryfreeman » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:22 AM UTC

I hear this statement all the time. Great developers are 20x more productive than average developers.

I've been a software engineering manager for 20+ years.

I've worked with great teams and I've worked with teams where it fell on me to fix a bug because no one else could figure it out.

In my experience, it's more complicated than good developers vs. average developers.

There are best practices that great developers demonstrate. There are great developers who are terrible team players and there are terrible developers who turn out to be great product managers. There are average developers who have a critical ability to keep the team together and to get even more out of the top developers.

In my experience, I prefer the right attitude, the right drive, and a person who is constantly striving to do better.

There's a lot of arrogance in our industry. I'm not sure it's something that we should continue to embrace.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#5

Post by blackhole » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:27 AM UTC

This article is operating on an assumption that you let any given developer access your entire codebase. By partitioning developers into certain projects, you can isolate bad developers and move them into less harmful positions, while moving the majority of your great developers into critical infrastructure areas. There are ways to handle this that do not include missing out on good developers.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#6

Post by spitfire » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:29 AM UTC

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.

"automated scoring" and "social network activity".

That sounds like a fantastic way to find scads of mediocre developers. Development isn't about language, it's about comprehension.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#7

Post by dinkumthinkum » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:36 AM UTC

Are we done with having original thoughts now? Why was this written? Programming bloggers that are in some kind of management or, especially, founders write this exact same post 100 times a day ... We get it ... The "20x rock star progammer" meme is real and we have to pay attention !!!!

Ok, whatever. Stop talking about it. I think it is probably true that great programmers are order of magnitude BUT please don't flame over that because I don't care.

However, why do most of these CRUD projects think rock stars want to work for them or why do they think they are doing "really important stuff" when they are really just doing CRUD, and in some cases plain old boring CRUD.

Anyway, this whole concept, true or not is just cliche at this point.

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#8

Post by jiggy2011 » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:43 AM UTC

Can somebody invent a way to filter programmer circlejerk articles out of the HN homepage?

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#9

Post by jiggy2011 » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:44 AM UTC

Can somebody invent a way to filter programmer groupthink articles out of the HN homepage?

Re: Why You Need To Hire Great Developers

#10

Post by Timothee » Sun, Jul 01, 2012, 3:48 AM UTC

This post feels a bit too much self-congratulatory. "look! I'm a great developer! And if you're one too, upvote!"

For one thing, the problem is that it's not a simple dichotomy of great developers vs. average developers. I have nothing to back it up, but I'm guessing it's a fairly typical normal distribution of talent… Then, where does "greatness" start? 20x sounds fantastic, but what's the difference between a great developer and a developer that just a bit less good? Will I get a 2x at least?

The other thing that bothers me is that it's a very selfish and elitist idea. I'm pretty sure that most of the great developers didn't start as such. To become "great", they worked and learned from others who were better than them. And they certainly did so by working in teams that accepted a "not-great" developer amongst them. The horror.

If everybody did like you're saying, we'd eventually run out of great developers, because the not-great-by-a-hair would have to work with the terrible horrible average developers and wouldn't progress as they should/could. (except for the rare breed of truly great developers who were better at 14 than most developers will ever be)

edit: in this last paragraph, it sounds like I consider myself a great developer. Let it be known that I think no such thing.