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A comment on Why You Shouldn't Hire More Developers. Parent comment

Re:Why You Shouldn't Hire More Developers by michaelochurch on Friday February 03, 2012 @12:31PM (#3547994)
Sadly many ("smart", "rock star") devs I've seen are content with shortcut, local maxima solutions that only buy a little bit of time before the team starts hurting again. I don't know why this is. Maybe b/c it's more fun (or feels safer) to code and produce behavior than to do the vigilant things required to stave off complexity.

General intelligence is a necessary condition, but far (very, very far) from a sufficient one for being a good programmer. Most of the inept developers I've met have been smart. Intelligence wasn't the problem.

This is why I hate Java and C++. Because it's impossible to evaluate code for quality in these languages at 200-500 LoC (while you can easily do this in Python or Scala) you can't hire based on code samples. So you have to hire based on general intelligence + interviewing skill and you end up with about 15% of your team being outright duds (worse yet, intellectually brilliant and persuasive duds because they passed your hiring process, but still bad programmers and dismal architects) even if you're extremely selective.

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Re:Why You Shouldn't Hire More Developers by Tommabeeng on Friday February 03, 2012 @01:56PM (#3548324)
Alan Kay expresses something similar:

http://tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/

"Knowledge is silver. Outlook is gold. IQ is a lead weight." (~00:30)

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Re:Why You Shouldn't Hire More Developers by michaelochurch on Friday February 03, 2012 @02:00PM (#3548352)
That was a great talk. It was really interesting to me that the initial vision behind object-oriented programming was diametrically opposite to the disaster that it has become.
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