Re:Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)
by ravenstine on Monday December 21, 2020 @11:08AM
(#25496151)
Employers also seem to tend not to value the notion that employees have different strengths. There are some coders I know who seem to savor working hard on what I would call the "boring stuff", and there are those who can intensely work on a new problem and come up with novel approaches, but they're not going to be as good at doing assembly-line work. Both have their place, but employers want the best of both across the board, which is impractical except when you have the occasional wizard.
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Re:Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)
by Viliam1234 on Monday December 21, 2020 @09:14PM
(#25502136)
Imagine that you have two employees with complementary skills (one excels where the other sucks, and vice versa) working on the same project. They will probably enjoy it a lot, because from the perspective of each, they can do the "easier" part (easier for them, than is). And the quality will probably be high, because each is working on what they know best, and what they enjoy.
However, from the average manager's perspective...
What happens if one of these two takes a vacation, and you decide to put in the sprint something that the other one sucks at? (Planning? What planning? This is Agile!)
What happens if you later decide you could save some money by moving one of them to another project, and leaving the other one to handle it all?
Also, what if one of them asks for a raise?
This is the part that came very very quickly when I started managing people. I had people who are useless on tech but can pick up the phone and get it sorted,no matter what's the problem.On the other spectrum there were detail obsessed people that would take ages, but when I open that file I know it shows reality. Personally,I find this extremely interesting during the management meetings,where CEOs need have to listen to all of and often make decisions upon given info. I often find myself in a situation,where I can only think ' oh shit, didn't even think about it', while I'm sure other do too. To expect the same office drone functionality from everyone is insanely stupid.
Re:Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)
by kemiller2002 on Monday December 21, 2020 @01:36PM
(#25497867)
I used to work with a guy just like this. He slogged through crap code happily. He did his job and went home. Sadly, the first company I worked with him at fired him. "He wasn't competent, blah blah blah." He did a fine job, people just didn't like that his mentality was different than theirs. I tried to explain to them that the one person who would actually work on their horrendous software was the one they let go. Was he a superstar? No probably not, but he was good and liked his job and went home to his family at the end of the day. A lot of people don't realize a great employee comes in many forms.