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Comment by beseku | Hacker News Reader

I think you're showing a fundamental misunderstanding of what working within a team means. Full time experience interacting with other people and with stakeholders of the product you are creating is something you're friend won't have, regardless of how amazing she is with RoR.

Being a developer is as much about being able to write code as being able to identify the best solutions to problems within the particular domain. This ability can only come through working as a developer and dealing with these situations first hand.

Put another way, I've been called very rude names by very famous musicians and being able to deal with that and continue working with these people was a massive learning experience to me.

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You're arguing for my point, not against it. Writing code isn't the only thing that a programmer needs to do. Considering that, having life/work/team experience outside of the IT sector is very valuable. The fact that my friend is skilled in Ruby/Rails was but a small part of why she could run circles around many seasoned developers.

Granted, I zeroed in on the experience point because it particularly boiled my blood and you responded directly to that hang up I had. However, my larger, more nuanced view of why this algorithm is bad definitely agrees with your point :)

Then you weigh in favour of those that aren't very good developers but are good at navigating office politics.

There is a real difference between being able to work in a team, and "being good at navigating office politics".

When you want some software shipped, you don't only need good programmers, you need good programmers that can work together, and fulltime experience helps with this. That said, I do not think fulltime employment is the only way to get this subset of abilities.

I don't think I mentioned office politics once in my response. If you regard all communication in your office as 'office politics' you are probably going about things in a less than optimal way.

A 'good developer' is someone who can speak to his team, his bosses and if exposed, the stakeholders, to identify the problem and be able to identify any potential hurdles or roadblocks that may pop up. All of this is learning to be a good communicator, (not politician), learning that your tools have limitations and learning how to manage peoples expectations and understand that what they ask for isn't what they actually want.

For what its worth, your post is an oxymoron - you can't be a 'good developer' without the above. You might be able to code but you aren't a developer.

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