Hiring Programmers and The High Cost of Low Quality

An anonymous reader writes "Why is it so hard to find good programmers? And why should companies favor hiring fewer more senior developers rather than many junior ones? Frank Wiles discusses his thoughts in his article A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality"

Re:Sigh.

[TheRealMindChild]

My advice is specialize in something to the point where when you do any work on it, it's immediately out of the comprehension of a generalist or a less accomplished programmer

Perl and Batch files it is!

Re:Sigh.

[realthing02]

^^ No kidding, it's like this guy just read about the Code team as surgical group. I'm a baby programmer (young, i don't actually program babies) and even i think this is old news.

Re:Sigh.

[Duhavid]

Not specific enough. Just batch files!

HR ...

[PPH]

... is still looking for a senior programmer with 15 years of .NET experience.

Finding Perl programmer

[hotfireball]

Finding decent Perl programmer is really hard thing, if ever possible... :-)

Re:Ant farm engineer

[Surt]

Your wish is google's command:

http://dribibu.xs4all.nl/dilbert19950813.html [xs4all.nl]
http://dribibu.xs4all.nl/dilbert19951230.html [xs4all.nl]

Re:Yeah, right

[DoofusOfDeath]

A properly trained, incentivized and provisioned Java team can run rings around a Perl team in terms of working code produced,

If measured in terms of number of lines of code written, absolutely ;)

Re:Yeah, right

[rla3rd]

A properly trained, incentivized and provisioned Java team can run rings around a Perl team in terms of working code produced, as well as (more importantly) cost to develop and cost to maintain. and a python team can do it in half the time, and half the code

Re:Testing....

[Chysn]

> So we've got some older guys from the VIC-20 days

Ouch. OUCH!

(He runs his hands through his graying hair)

ueber programmers do exist!

[Anonymous Coward]

>There's no one programmer who does the work of ten other programmers

Oh there is, I am one. I've had several occasions where I solved problems in a few days (or 4 hours once) that others were struggling at for months; some of these others were plain incompetent, others were pretty good.

I find that I'm pretty unique in fitting the right tool to the problem at hand, as well as in general overview. I've never met anyone as productive as myself.

I'm posting this anonymously, because I have to work with others, and one of the things you cannot do is alienate everyone around you; one sure way of doing that is being more skilled than them in all job related aspects.

All about team programming.

[Dareth]

I want to be the guy who gets to type the ; at the end of all the code lines!

Now that is specialization!

I completely agree

[Krishnoid]

In the style of a previous rant of mine:

I'm going to take advice on hiring writers from an English cool-aid drinker. Sure, just the very minute I get my brain replaced with a cauliflower. English is an horrifically bad language. It's full of pronunciation and grammar exceptions and idioms. It enables great writers to write nuanced texts, but can make good writers produce unintelligible documentation, and makes bad writers think they r the 1337. Feh. A properly trained, incentivized and provisioned Esperanto team can run rings around an English team in terms of clean text produced, as well as (more importantly) cost to develop and cost to maintain, since it's so uniform in its phonetics and syntax.

Expressiveness in a language can be used for good (see Perl::Critic [perlcritic.com]) or evil (obfuscation).