11–20 of 34 posts
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.
>If after you interview a candidate you find that you aren’t completely sure about them, don’t hire them. If you can’t tell if they are good or not, don’t hire them. If 2 out of 6 people on the interview loop are either ‘no’ or ‘maybe’, don’t hire them. The consequence of letting a bad developer in the door is far greater than maybe missing a good one.
This is exactly what people do, and it's the exact reason why finding great developers is hard. And ironically, this tip is posted under the section "We’re Awful At Distinguishing Great Developers."
Great developers are difficult to spot because they can look like bad developers. Great developers are often honest about what they know and don't know. If you ask if they know mysql, their answer might be that they're very familiar with it, but there's a lot about it they don't know. Great developers can often lack the confidence that average developers exude to make up for their lack of skill. If you ask how to do something, they might express that their way may not be the best. Great developers can be nervous, because they can believe that they may not be as qualified as a company is seeking.
All these signals make people doing the hiring uncertain. To put a filter of "unless 1000% certain, do not hire" just ensures you get someone of, at absolute best, your skill level, and at worst, a fantastic bullshitter.
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…
Agreed, these are all attributes that help make the job of managing corporate developers much easier.
As opposed to those stubborn, arrogant, stud developers who are only useful for doing things like rewriting the unix kernel and open-sourcing it.
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 fla…
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 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.
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 fla…
Basically everyone is still rewriting the same essays that Joel Spolsky wrote around 10 years ago. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
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…
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…
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 work, when in reality it is highly creative. The advantage of good developers isn't just that they do what others would do but more efficiently, the advantage is that they do much more. Often times they expand your business. Quite often the genesis of a multi-million dollar product or services offering doesn't come from the top-down, conceived in management and merely implemented by the rank and file, but instead comes from the bottom-up, from a wacky idea that a developer has and rolls into a tech demo. Without great developers that's the sort of thing you miss out on.
This article was very confusing. They go on to praise the great developers, and how much companies need them, etc, but then they end with this: >If after you interview a candidate you find that you aren’t completely sure about them, don’t hire them. If you can’t tell if they are good or not, don’t hire them. If 2 out of 6 people on the interview loop are either ‘no’ or ‘maybe’, don’t hire them. The consequence of let…