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> why hire someone with just look-up skills before hiring someone who really tries, and enjoys the challenge

This attitude will keep you from hiring someone who will just "do the right thing," which is to look up stuff that can be looked up, and also persevere when an off-the-shelf solution won't be sufficient. Plenty of engineers will spend time trying to reinvent the wheel when it is totally unncesssary.

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At some point we had a brilliant junior dev who had a task to add some logic to some ES plugins in Java. When the code review went up, it was all a single Java 8 stream statement. He went out of his way to convert everything to a stream because he enjoyed the challenge I guess. It was 3 pages of nested declarations and inscrutable.

He left eventually but person was hard to work with because you had to beat back this kind of shenanigans every step of the way.

True, but in my experience it's easier to teach resourcefulness after hiring than injecting motivation for solving problems somehow.

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