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Comment by weswinham | Hacker News Reader

This story would make a great culture test! "Would you hire this candidate?"

You only want to work with team leads who agree with your answer, whatever that might be.

Personally, I love working with folks who enjoy playing with technology, so I'm a Hell Yes. I don't see a lot of risk that this candidate would actually try to ship that regex to production.

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I've worked with a few folks who are very talented, but only motivated by learning and working with new technologies. Even if they are enjoyable to work with in the short-term, they'll lose steam and saddle the team with doing the last mile and maintenance work. It may be okay to have one or two of these folks depending on team composition and sentiment, but generally I steer away from them.

I think you nailed it that it's a team composition question. Too many folks like that is a problem, just like too many folks who hate the pain of bleeding edge/messy/unstructured work is a problem.

I would be a "hell no", because I know people like that are infuriating to work with if you're trying to get shit done. I love programming and discussing programming trivia and etc, but on a team you also need your coworkers to work with you towards a common goal in a rational manner, keeping in mind performance, maintainability, stability, team knowledge, time constraints, customer expectations, etc. These are not skills this hypothetical candidate displayed.

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