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Comment by mseebach | Hacker News Reader

In this context there are two kinds of people - the "just a job" crowd and the "live and breathe this thing" crowd.

Either is a completely valid lifestyle, but they just don't mix well, so they should screen each other out at interviews.

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If you live and breathe programming than you want to work with the best programmers. It shouldn't matter whether they're "entertaining". To me that sounds like the interviewer has no friends and uses work as a surrogate social life, not that he lives and breathes the actual work.

Kind of the opposite, really. I have a tremendous number of friends and a very active social life. I find "work" can be a drag if it's not as much fun as not-work is.

One of the ways I manage to be a very happy person is to not spend time with people who don't actively make me happy, any more than necessary.

I guess I can't fault that if you're running a lifestyle business, but hiring programmers on the basis of how entertaining they are isn't really defensible on the basis of delivering results.

I think it really depends upon the business. I mean, a genuinely bad programmer, who doesn't merely fail to positively affect a codebase but actually manages to worsen it, will be bad in any programming business. However, many software shops just won't see the return on having a superstar. For instance, consider a shop writing Excel VSTO plug-ins: it's not wildly difficult work once you've done it a few times, but the work is time consuming, so it'd make more sense in that business to have good programmers who can work together and cover each others' backs than it would to have one brilliant programmer who annoys the rest of the team into leaving, or bores the rest of the team into losing what little enthusiasm they have for an already fairly boring niche of software development.

It may not make sense to choose personality over technical chops if you're trying to hire a language designer, but it may make sense to do so if you're in a niche which requires teamwork.

I wouldn't hire someone just because they're entertaining. But I might not hire someone otherwise qualified if they're not. And I'm not even in the habit of socializing with co-workers outside the job. But the job is enough hours with someone that I'd much prefer to enjoy their company.

I'm not sure why you keep assuming the best programmers are boring or unpleasant. I've found the opposite to be true, generally.

I assume nothing. I'm just pointing out that being "boring" or "entertaining" is completely irrelevant to whether someone is suited for a programming job, and that unless you're running a lifestyle business where enjoying your work day is more important than delivering results for your customers or getting paid, you're doing your company a disservice by hiring people based on these kinds of irrelevant characteristics.

I should add here that "the best programmers" are, quite frankly, not always people I want to work with. I worked under a totally brilliant tech lead for a while, one of the finest programmers I've ever met. But he relished being an asshole, and really grated on people. I learned as much from him as I've ever learned from anyone, and I actually kind of like him as a person, but I'm so glad I don't have to work with him anymore.

Brilliant people don't always play well with others, and software is (in my world at least) a team effort. I want to work with people who pull the team together, not tear it apart, no matter how talented they are technically.

There's a difference between being boring and not being an asshole. In fact, assholes are rarely boring.

True dat.

"Best programmers" and "people who contribute effectively to a team's culture" can sometimes be exclusive sets.

One of the most intelligent and creative programmers I know is an arrogant douchebag who demoralises entire teams. He's very effective on his own, but stick him in a scrum team, and watch the culture of that team sour and watch its productivity drop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6562385

And if your team culture is "let's be interesting creative people with zany hairstyles and really unusual hobbies" (not my team, but I sit beside them), then someone who is passionate mainly about checked exceptions is probably going to be a bad fit.

I used the arrogant douchebag as an example of why a great programmer who doesn't fit a team's culture is going to drag down the productivity of that team - how they don't fit that culture can obviously vary.

The team I work on has gone from a culture of "single guys who stay after work playing board games and go out drinking sometimes" to a culture of "married guys who leave promptly at 5 PM to go home to their pregnant wives and/or children" by gradually introducing people from the second set while people from the first set leave. Guess what? It didn't affect how much we managed to accomplish, because it's work and that bullshit doesn't really matter.

Fair enough, each team's dynamics are different.

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