A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality
If any of you out there is thinking about hiring a programmer, read this article first. It’s very very true.
We’re not talking about customer service representatives or sales people here. Just having a body to fill the seat is not, I repeat not, always a win for the company. Sub-standard programmers drag down the efficiency of your other developers with beginner questions, poor comments/documentation, and bad code that someone else will later be forced to spend time fixing.
Companies need to stop thinking about their developers as cogs in the machine. They are more akin to artists, authors, designers, architects, scientists, or CEOs. Would your HR department rush to find the first person who would willing to take on the role of Chief Scientist, Art Director, or CEO in your company? Of course not, they would spend the time to do a through talent search for just the right candidate, court them, and then compensate them appropriately. They realize that having the wrong person in that seat is much worse than having the seat empty. It is absolutely the same with programming.
Experts use better tools and care deeply about their craft. They aren’t assembling bits on an assembly line, they are crafting a unique product to solve a unique problem. Experts are lazy, they work smarter rather than harder. Experts prefer the easiest solution that gets the job done. Experts aren’t interested in creating complex solutions simply to have the complexity, that misguided egoism is the territory of more junior developers. They often get it right the first try and almost always on the second one.
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