Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Meh.

1. Exceptional programmers write neat, maintainable code. Anyone can ship something that works right now but has maintenance costs up the wazoo later.

2. If you recruit based on open source contributions you'll miss out on the many, many fantastic devs who have no involvement in FOSS in their day jobs and like to switch off at night. (I love FOSS but I also love sleep)

3. All of what is written about in this blog entry is better termed experience. What you want is experience of working well in the industry. The blog entry is about as useful as saying "if you want a good employee then choose someone that's already shown they can do what you're asking". This is not new information.

++ for #1.

There are dozens of projects I've supported that were built by guys who banged it out in a couple of weeks, or a month or so of development, and it's almost always built for a single purpose. The moment the business starts thinking about other ways to use it, it becomes a mess.

Unfortunately, there are a ton of businesses who think they can get ramped up with a tiny, banged out product to sell and then 'scale up'...when in reality, they have a throwaway toy on their hands.

On the plus side, there are those of us who are brought in for their experience at untangling these messes and coming up with solid solutions that can scale up feature-wise. The same people will willingly dig out problems and fix them in production when all else fails.

People queue at your door if you have these skills.

Mediocre programmers create a lucrative market for unicorn shit as I was once told.

#1 is very true. But exceptional programmers are also extremely rare birds. To the fact that it's quite plausible to expect that the average company trying to hire one won't be able to. And even if they do manage to find one, keeping him may prove challenging and arduous.

Given this, having a mediocre coder whose managed to ship finished projects is worth many times the mediocre coder who hasn't.

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