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You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

blog.lunarlogic.io

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Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#41

Post by smdz »

twobyfour wrote: post #10

It depends so much on what you're building. If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. If you're building the average CRUD-plus-workflow application, the last thing you want are superstars who are going to get bored with routine work. Then they'll go off over-engineering some minor feature or spending weeks at a time inven…

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars.

No - AI and ML stuff does not need technical superstars (i.e. from a programming perspective). Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfortable with uncertainty on timelines.

In most of the other cases, hiring superstar developers help you save costs in the longer run. It helps product (or SaaS) companies.

But for consulting biz that means less of the recurring consulting work. Superstar developers cost higher - means more work in fetching some consulting work. Consulting/service businesses will rarely value superstar developers. Because it does not help the topline as much.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#42

Post by DavidWoof »

I think most of this is, or should be, uncontroversial. While it's incredibly important to avoid bad developers, once you hit a certain high level of technical ability other traits become more important. Besides, this isn't a fixed scale. Except for a few outliers, the concept of "more skilled" doesn't really have a meaning once you pass a certain level.

At that point, what many shops do is hire people they enjoy being around, which is usually a shorthand for hiring people just like them, and then create all sorts of pseudo-psychological justification for it. The truth is that one day isn't going to tell you much about a dev. Some people are really good when first meeting strangers, some people are very uncomfortable for at least a week. Everyone deals with that nervousness differently, and on the other side, most people are incredibly unaware of their own prejudices that might be affecting their one-day reaction to a new person.

At the end of the day, there's really no magic formulas for creating great teams.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#43

Post by santaclaus »

smdz wrote: post #41
twobyfour wrote: post #10

It depends so much on what you're building. If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. If you're building the average CRUD-plus-workflow application, the last thing you want are superstars who are going to get bored with routine work. Then they'll go off over-engineering some minor feature or spending weeks at a time inven…

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. No - AI and ML stuff does not need technical superstars (i.e. from a programming perspective). Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfo…

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research

I think research is the key word here. If you are developing fundamentally new ML techniques (like the folks at Google), you'll probably need some serious technical chops.

> Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfortable with uncertainty on timelines.

That sounds less like research and more like applying established tools (Tensor Flow or Keras or whatever).

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#44

Post by eksemplar »

Team working skills, business understanding, the ability to communicate from a social constructive point and an openness to working with prototyping in consumer focused project groups are much more important abilities than technical skills in a lot of modern development.

Superstars and best practice masters can be important, but all those enterprise applications we build on all the right practices are being replaced by web-apps, microservices and a range of other things, effectively rendering all the brilliant work useless because no one ever revisited shit.

I get why you'd want a technical superstar for certain things, like developing your long term libraries, but for most tasks a shitty programmer who is business savvy and actually capable of talking to non-it people will deliver a better end project.

Of course a lot of superstar developers do the other things really well, as well.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#46

Post by klagermkii »

> In our case, we want a new hire to be able to act as an independent contributor, i.e. their work doesn’t have to be double-checked. We also focus a lot on craftsmanship since it means that we all are getting better at what we do and at a good pace.

Maybe this varies between cities and job markets but when I read that baseline description he gives in an off-hand manner for the programmers he hires, I think I would probably be calling them "superstars". I don't know if the availability of skilled employees is great in Krakow, but when FizzBuzz type tests are still filtering a large percentage of applicants, it makes it sound like it's from another world.

That's my concern when reading these kinds of hiring articles, it feels very different to how hiring looks when you aren't privileged to have an abundance of skilled candidates available.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#47

Post by maxxxxx »

santaclaus wrote: post #43
smdz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. No - AI and ML stuff does not need technical superstars (i.e. from a programming perspective). Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfo…

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research I think research is the key word here. If you are developing fundamentally new ML techniques (like the folks at Google), you'll probably need some serious technical chops. > Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfortable with uncert…

"That sounds less like research and more like applying established tools (Tensor Flow or Keras or whatever). "

This is what most AI, ML and data science people do from my experience. It's really not that groundbreaking.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#48

Post by nradov »

crdoconnor wrote: post #17
twobyfour wrote: post #10

It depends so much on what you're building. If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. If you're building the average CRUD-plus-workflow application, the last thing you want are superstars who are going to get bored with routine work. Then they'll go off over-engineering some minor feature or spending weeks at a time inven…

>If you're building the average CRUD-plus-workflow application, the last thing you want are superstars who are going to get bored with routine work. Even the average CRUD plus workflow application is only really routine & repetitive if you're using suboptimal tools. If you're good, you're good at choosing the optimal tools and automating all the tedious stuff. In large companies, managers would rather have a mediocre…

You're describing an idealized theoretical team organization model with strict separation between the engineering manager, product manager, and developer roles. In the real world with highly productive teams those roles tend to blur together. In order to produce actual business value — not just churn out code to spec — developers absolutely need to be able to communicate clearly, empathize with customers, and collaborate with colleagues.

Re: You Don’t Need Superstar Developers

#50

Post by hobofan »

santaclaus wrote: post #43
smdz wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research in, say, AI or facial recognition or whatever, you may need people who are technical superstars. No - AI and ML stuff does not need technical superstars (i.e. from a programming perspective). Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfo…

> If you're doing _groundbreaking_ research I think research is the key word here. If you are developing fundamentally new ML techniques (like the folks at Google), you'll probably need some serious technical chops. > Usually it is a rinse-test-repeat kind of job. It needs people with patience and who can interpret data and who can be comfortable with uncertainty and then can make their bosses comfortable with uncert…

> If you are developing fundamentally new ML techniques (like the folks at Google)

Nope, still no superstars needed. The most technically challenging thing they've built is probably is what they are doing with the TPUs, but even there you "just" need people expierienced in the right fields. Most groundbraking research stuff these days is mostly on the mathematical side, not the implementation.

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