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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps, but consider there is a shocking number of professional developers who have never actually built and shipped something. They have only done maintenance on existing products, and for all you know they are NNPPs hiding out in a large team under thick blankets of political management.

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NNPP - Net Negative Producing Programmer

I had to look it up, so for other's benefit: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?NetNegativeProducingProgrammer

Sounds like you are creating a false dichotomy between maintenance and greenfield short-cycle product development. What about the embedded developer at Ford or Boeing for whom product development means taking the code from the previous product and adding/removing features? Where product life cycles are measured in years instead of months? How about the developer writing machine learning code for Bloomberg or Wal-Mart, whose code will never see the light of day and whose "product" is never really finished?

I could go on, but this demonstrates there are many good professional developers who do not fit the SV bubble's concept of a good developer.

Of course what you are saying is true. I didn't mean to imply that I think this is some kind of great litmus test. In fact I think all litmus tests are bullshit. The uncomfortable truth is that there are probably people out there with no programming experience at all who will be better programmers after a year than some 20 year veterans who have learned enough to get by but just aren't that good.

My point was simply if you have to filter on some arbitrary criteria, finding people with a habit and verifiable record of shipping is probably a pretty good indicator.

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