Want good programmers? Then pay them. • Hacker News Board

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#491

Post by ashray » Sun, May 06, 2012, 8:16 PM UTC

weavejester wrote: post #488

ashray wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artists don't usually have to show what brushes or paints they used to make a particular work. Sometimes it's best to evaluate the work rather than what goes into it. Granted, this isn't always the case and can't be attributed to multi team environments, but I've often been asked for code when I have a large number of (successful) projects solely developed by me. Also, small code samples are fine but some employers a…

That's because it usually doesn't matter how an artist creates a piece of work, as long as their methods are not too idiosyncratic; what matters is the end result. For a developer, the how matters as much, or even more so than the result. You could create a complete mess that still manages to just about work, and it wouldn't be obvious from a cursory execution of the binary just how bad it was. Ideally, if I was goin…

I understand the urge to minimize risk as much as possible. However, the truth is that in any field whether it's business development, sales, marketing, etc. what you do see most often is the person's track record and not how they actually went about doing things.

So the fact that you can actually see more for a programmer is actually a bonus, but that doesn't mean it should be abused like plenty of companies try and do these days.

Risk aversion is fine, and obviously you want to hire the best candidate but like mentioned elsewhere on this thread:

1. Not everyone has public github projects and I hardly believe anyone should have to work on open source stuff just to show off their coding skills.. Thats really not the right reason to work on open source stuff.

2. For web projects while you might not have access to backend code you can always look at the front end and see if the guy is any good. This is especially true for me considering the fact that I have multiple projects developed from start to finish live and available on the Internet.

Again, small demos or code sample requests are always fine. However, an entire project to get a job somewhere ? Might have been okay when I had nothing to show for it, but after a bit of experience on your resume, it gets old..

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#492

Post by kragen » Tue, May 08, 2012, 7:22 PM UTC

Natsu wrote: post #484

kragen wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if there's a harder equivalent to FizzBuzz — one that doesn't take any longer to explain or do, but requires a much higher level of skill to pass. One we used at http://airwave.com/ was "Write a Perl subroutine to determine whether a string is a valid dotted-quad IP address," which is something you can do in various reasonable ways in one to five lines of code.

Is that really so much harder? Somehow, I expect you'd get a lot of opaque regexes like: sub isIP { return (shift =~ m/^((\d{1,2}|1\d{2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])\.){3}(\d{1,2}|1\d{2}|2[0-4]\d|25[0-5])$/)? 1 : 0; }

I failed to note in my earlier comment that yes, it is so much harder. Fizzbuzz requires that you write a loop, print some strings, and either maintain a couple of counters or use the modulo operator. Your solution requires:

- writing a subroutine

- understanding Perl parameter passing

- understanding Perl regexps, including =~, anchoring, alternatives, metacharacter escaping, character classes, and repeat counts;

- the ternary operator.

And then you could probe things like:

- Do they know how to fix the bug in your version where it incorrectly accepts an IP address with a newline appended to it?

- Do they know it would still work without the return and the ?1:0?

- Can they figure out that they could simplify and clarify the code substantially with qr?

- Do they understand why someone might prefer a non-regexp-based approach? :)

Re: Want good programmers? Then pay them.

#493

Post by keithnoizu » Wed, May 09, 2012, 1:17 AM UTC

ericd wrote: post #441

keithnoizu wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200,000-300,000 gross isn't that much really. ~150.00 an hour with 40 billable hours per week ~60 actual work hours if you're freelancing. Most good programmers should be able to hit that. As to providing infrastructure/etc, they aren't providing anything odesk and some research could provide. If someone talented set off on the own they should be able to put together similar marketing/framework/teams within a few yea…

When I say infrastructure/audience, I'm talking about the many millions of users in the ecosystem which your code will be used by, and the marketing machine to push it out there. The same code that's used by 10k people if you set out by yourself has a 100x impact if it's used by a million Google users. That's why Google has such a high revenue per engineer number, and you're not going to replicate that without a lot…

I work at a SV giant. I'm aware of the infrastructure we have in place. This infrastructure is primarily here to combat the increased complexity brought on by having x employees running around. Configuring something like github, automated deployments, change management policies, marketing/advertising campaigns is significantly easier with fewer employers.

Further provided you're targeting niche markets where the economies of scale don't matter nearly as much as meeting the needs of the market you can see decent returns per developer with out pushing your wares out to millions of users.