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A comment on Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist. Parent comment

Re:Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist by lostcolony on Friday October 31, 2014 @02:17PM (#8540233)
It would make sense to bring on someone with knowledge that isn't held in house (i.e., you need to interact with X, and no one is familiar with X, so hire someone for a few months who knows X backwards and forwards), on a contract to contract basis, but it doesn't make sense to do that for the entirety of new development. The cost to bring someone up to speed can be quite sizable, and you're looking at paying out that cost again every time you replace a contractor.

Similarly, I really, -really- dislike the idea of institutionalized discrepancies between "the rockstars who develop" and the "grunts who maintain it". Because then any problems with your code after the initial "it works"...are blamed on the maintainers not being good enough, rather than the fact you wrote it as quickly as possible, without concerns for long term sustainability. In fact, it provides an incentive to getting code written as quickly and sloppily as possible, rather than as robustly and maintainable as possible.

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Re:Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist by rcvassallo on Friday October 31, 2014 @04:36PM (#8540986)
Great points, re: discrepancies. In a way, I'm seeing both sides of the coin with a client for whom I designed and developed custom business software. Initial monthly budget gave me the flexibility to be a rockstar that actually put in quality tests and refactored for long-term maintainability.

The client is happily using the software and has many more ideas to implement, some of which I supplied! The system helped them explosively grow their business but over time has become part of the daily business routine which inevitably means they want to reduce costs.

Naturally, this means we are building fewer features each month but the cost focus pressures me to sacrifice some refactoring, testing, and UX quality which makes me feel more like the grunt that maintains it. On the plus side, my effective hourly rate has improved since I negotiated a fixed monthly fee into our contract and I've had time to find a couple more clients :)

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