Re:Hiring and the market for lemons (2016)
by JamesBarney on Friday April 13, 2018 @06:01PM
(#16834262)
100% agree.
I had two jobs doing maintenance on very large(millions of LoC) projects that brought in significant revenue. And there success was making sure your code was bullet proof. And resisting the temptation to do any refactoring. Everything should work was close to how it's always worked. So a good fix was one that was a very specific if statement that covered a very small edge case.
This was a very different measure of success from the couple of large Enterprise companies where I worked on new projects, where success was managing 4 different stakeholders with a conflicting set of requirements. And meticulously following large sets of rules and processes around code.
Which was a different from building an mvp for a startup where shipping as much code as possible mattered, technical debt didn't matter, breaking things was ok, and there was only one stakeholder to manage.
Sometimes you can find one person who fits all these roles, but there are a lot of developers who would be great developers in some of the roles, and not others.
I had two jobs doing maintenance on very large(millions of LoC) projects that brought in significant revenue. And there success was making sure your code was bullet proof. And resisting the temptation to do any refactoring. Everything should work was close to how it's always worked. So a good fix was one that was a very specific if statement that covered a very small edge case.
This was a very different measure of success from the couple of large Enterprise companies where I worked on new projects, where success was managing 4 different stakeholders with a conflicting set of requirements. And meticulously following large sets of rules and processes around code.
Which was a different from building an mvp for a startup where shipping as much code as possible mattered, technical debt didn't matter, breaking things was ok, and there was only one stakeholder to manage.
Sometimes you can find one person who fits all these roles, but there are a lot of developers who would be great developers in some of the roles, and not others.