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I second this! From my experience the best or rather most productive programmers get stuff done focusing on customers over eligant code. Mostly, just because th

I second this! From my experience the best or rather most productive programmers get stuff done focusing on customers over eligant code. Mostly, just because they want to get something done so they can either avoid further meetings or work on their personal stuff. The "best" programmers you mentioned, from my experience, always end up souring the whole team. Most of the time, they can't seem to tell the forest from the trees. With that in mind, one of the things I tell my team we always need to hire more of are just developers with social skills. Being effective at working with a team is 100x more important than being a good developer. As an example, I have spent weeks in meetings debating archetecture. Each meeting I would make my same suggestions and then the rest of our "best" developers would debate. By the 6th or so meeting regarding the architecture I just presented a prototype of the project. I won the debate by acting, not by trying to find an ideal solution.

wruza 10y ago
I think it is false dichotomy. "Best" programmers at least do nothing before they have a plan and HLD (good or bad). Productive programmers simply get things done both ways, good or bad. I've seen many times how we "productively" produced overengineered unreadable spaghetti that works. Yeah, I can write even straighter single-page perl golf too to show selling prototypes, but that's not what we are paid for as a company. That can be outmanaged by detailed design specification, but then you have to have an expertise at the code level (easy) and spend half time on the task yourself (hard). Both types can do good or bad for you. Edit: iow, smart and get things done, not or.
rimantas 10y ago
Good attitude for startups which will die after barely releasing MVP. Others will learn that maintaining is where the most time is spent and that chasing customers' whims without any regard how it all fits together will lead you to the situstion where new features are no longer possible to implement and the old ones start to break in random places. But hey, you at least talk about it for hours with all those wonderful social skills you have.
xxs 10y ago
>>Being effective at working with a team is 100x more important than being a good developer. Having such a constant in your mind would be indicative of never having to do something 'hard' (algorithmic, latency related, extract every single bit of performance b/c you have to)
Nomentatus 10y ago
There are lots of ways to go wrong, of course, but make very sure anyone you hire with high social skills also has high ethics (there's an inverse correlation.) Because a good actor can trash almost any tech business, if they have enough knowledge to pass. The truly competent techies will be outmatched.
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wruza 10y ago

I think it is false dichotomy. "Best" programmers at least do nothing before they have a plan and HLD (good or bad). Productive programmers simply get things done both ways, good or bad. I've seen many times how we "productively" produced overengineered unreadable spaghetti that works. Yeah, I can write even straighter single-page perl golf too to show selling prototypes, but that's not what we are paid for as a company. That can be outmanaged by detailed design specification, but then you have to have an expertise at the code level (easy) and spend half time on the task yourself (hard). Both types can do good or bad for you. Edit: iow, smart and get things done, not or.

rimantas 10y ago

Good attitude for startups which will die after barely releasing MVP. Others will learn that maintaining is where the most time is spent and that chasing customers' whims without any regard how it all fits together will lead you to the situstion where new features are no longer possible to implement and the old ones start to break in random places. But hey, you at least talk about it for hours with all those wonderful social skills you have.

xxs 10y ago

>>Being effective at working with a team is 100x more important than being a good developer. Having such a constant in your mind would be indicative of never having to do something 'hard' (algorithmic, latency related, extract every single bit of performance b/c you have to)

Nomentatus 10y ago

There are lots of ways to go wrong, of course, but make very sure anyone you hire with high social skills also has high ethics (there's an inverse correlation.) Because a good actor can trash almost any tech business, if they have enough knowledge to pass. The truly competent techies will be outmatched.

deleted 10y ago

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