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I hear this argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together, I'm not disappointed to learn they're not a

I hear this argument all the time and it makes no sense to me. If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together, I'm not disappointed to learn they're not a skilled carpenter. When I hire a children's entertainer, I'd be surprised to learn they were an extremely talented musician. There are people out there who know how everything works under the hood, and that's great. But they're typically expensive and unavailable. If I can hire someone within my budget to build something that solves my problem, why is that a bad thing? And if I can build something for someone that gives them value, again, why is that a bad thing? It just sounds like snobbery to me.

sbuttgereit 9y ago
Why assume that both positions are mutually exclusive? There's nothing wrong hiring a mediocre developer (or anything) so long as they aren't tasked with doing something that needs more skill is fine: I've done it myself in the past and will do so in the future. When that something escalates into something that does require more, it can be sad or disappointing to see what the less skilled or less caring person did. Conversely, it can be wonderful to see someone that is a true accomplished craftsman at work, even on banal projects and they should be lauded... if that is snobbish, fine, count me in. Finally here's a clown that is also a talented musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3O1XojnTag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3O1XojnTag
- blowski 9y ago
  Who decides how much skill a given task needs?
  - sbuttgereit 9y ago
    At the end of the day whoever it is that is deciding that there is need they will have filled. This can be different from the person that will be the intended beneficiary of the task, or different from the person that will execute or oversee the execution of the task. Of course, this means the adjudication may happen after the fact, but it doesn't change who was initiating the action to make something "a task" and whether or not that person is satisfied with the outcome. In the professional world, I call this "the person signing my check". (Edit: ok, ok, there can be superseding criteria as well... mostly in areas where life/safety issues are at play).
tonyarkles 9y ago
It's great, if they can solve the problem! My experience, as a kid who self-taught C after feeling that QBasic was too limiting, is that to debug problems, you often need to go a level or two deeper than the code you're working on. As an example, I've encountered bugs with Python libraries that I had to debug using GDB. If I wasn't comfortable with C, my only option would have been to throw my hands up in the air and say "I don't know why it crashes sometimes" Re: snobbery... maybe? I'm sufficiently self-aware to recognize that I have a lot of pride in the fact that I am comfortable pretty much anywhere in the development stack. Out of high school, I recognized that I would occasionally encounter software problems that appeared to be deeper in the system than I was comfortable with, so... I went and did a dual EE/CS degree. At this point, I'm happy writing JS (React/Redux are my preference), and I'm happy debugging ARM machine code (I once had a peripheral fail to initialize because the gcc optimizer had reordered code such that I was violating the wait states on the periph). Glitches on the power supply rail? Bring on the oscilloscope. Shit performance in your web app? Let's profile it and see what's up. So sure, I might be a bit of a snob about this. I put years and years of effort into deeply understanding all of this stuff. You want to hire a guy who knows jQuery and has never manipulated the DOM by hand? Go for it! And when the app is buggy and performs like shit, give me a call and I'll help you untangle the giant ratsnest they made.
- blowski 9y ago
  That's actually the perfect way to be. A startup hiring someone of your level to build an MVP is probably wasting a lot of cash. Most startups will never grow big enough to worry about performance. And if they do, they can afford to pay you to come and in fix their code. That sounds like a balanced ecosystem to me.
  - tonyarkles 9y ago
    Totally! And that's what some of my gigs have been. "We've got a product, we've found a market, and we need to fix some things about the product that we don't have in-house talent to do" On the MVP front, I somewhat agree with you. It all depends on what the product is. I've worked on tech spikes that have involved hardware prototyping, signal processing (both embedded and desktop/mobile), image processing, RF, etc. Those are the types of things where you often can't really "hack it together". I've also worked on simple, e.g., React Native MVPs. The only advantage I might have over a less skilled developer is that I can generally bang those things out quite quickly; in many cases, faster than the business part is ready for (which is likely just wasteful).
bjornlouser 9y ago
"If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together... " talk about snobbery ;)
monksy 9y ago
It's all about craftsmanship, and it's about the depth of knowledge. You can hire most people to build a car from a kit. However, you also have to accept blame from getting someone with a shallow understanding of the car when something goes wrong on the car. > But they're typically expensive and unavailable. Because the value of the knowledge is extremely high and the market is flooded with people that can do the job of creation but not solve the problems that arise out of it. > why is that a bad thing? TL;DR Short term, that's ok, long term: they have no understanding of what they're truly doing and the consequences as a result. You should accept responsibility for that.

sbuttgereit 9y ago

Why assume that both positions are mutually exclusive? There's nothing wrong hiring a mediocre developer (or anything) so long as they aren't tasked with doing something that needs more skill is fine: I've done it myself in the past and will do so in the future. When that something escalates into something that does require more, it can be sad or disappointing to see what the less skilled or less caring person did. Conversely, it can be wonderful to see someone that is a true accomplished craftsman at work, even on banal projects and they should be lauded... if that is snobbish, fine, count me in. Finally here's a clown that is also a talented musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3O1XojnTag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3O1XojnTag

blowski 9y ago
Who decides how much skill a given task needs?
- sbuttgereit 9y ago
  At the end of the day whoever it is that is deciding that there is need they will have filled. This can be different from the person that will be the intended beneficiary of the task, or different from the person that will execute or oversee the execution of the task. Of course, this means the adjudication may happen after the fact, but it doesn't change who was initiating the action to make something "a task" and whether or not that person is satisfied with the outcome. In the professional world, I call this "the person signing my check". (Edit: ok, ok, there can be superseding criteria as well... mostly in areas where life/safety issues are at play).

tonyarkles 9y ago

It's great, if they can solve the problem! My experience, as a kid who self-taught C after feeling that QBasic was too limiting, is that to debug problems, you often need to go a level or two deeper than the code you're working on. As an example, I've encountered bugs with Python libraries that I had to debug using GDB. If I wasn't comfortable with C, my only option would have been to throw my hands up in the air and say "I don't know why it crashes sometimes" Re: snobbery... maybe? I'm sufficiently self-aware to recognize that I have a lot of pride in the fact that I am comfortable pretty much anywhere in the development stack. Out of high school, I recognized that I would occasionally encounter software problems that appeared to be deeper in the system than I was comfortable with, so... I went and did a dual EE/CS degree. At this point, I'm happy writing JS (React/Redux are my preference), and I'm happy debugging ARM machine code (I once had a peripheral fail to initialize because the gcc optimizer had reordered code such that I was violating the wait states on the periph). Glitches on the power supply rail? Bring on the oscilloscope. Shit performance in your web app? Let's profile it and see what's up. So sure, I might be a bit of a snob about this. I put years and years of effort into deeply understanding all of this stuff. You want to hire a guy who knows jQuery and has never manipulated the DOM by hand? Go for it! And when the app is buggy and performs like shit, give me a call and I'll help you untangle the giant ratsnest they made.

blowski 9y ago
That's actually the perfect way to be. A startup hiring someone of your level to build an MVP is probably wasting a lot of cash. Most startups will never grow big enough to worry about performance. And if they do, they can afford to pay you to come and in fix their code. That sounds like a balanced ecosystem to me.
- tonyarkles 9y ago
  Totally! And that's what some of my gigs have been. "We've got a product, we've found a market, and we need to fix some things about the product that we don't have in-house talent to do" On the MVP front, I somewhat agree with you. It all depends on what the product is. I've worked on tech spikes that have involved hardware prototyping, signal processing (both embedded and desktop/mobile), image processing, RF, etc. Those are the types of things where you often can't really "hack it together". I've also worked on simple, e.g., React Native MVPs. The only advantage I might have over a less skilled developer is that I can generally bang those things out quite quickly; in many cases, faster than the business part is ready for (which is likely just wasteful).

bjornlouser 9y ago

"If I hire somebody to put my Ikea furniture together... " talk about snobbery ;)

monksy 9y ago

It's all about craftsmanship, and it's about the depth of knowledge. You can hire most people to build a car from a kit. However, you also have to accept blame from getting someone with a shallow understanding of the car when something goes wrong on the car. > But they're typically expensive and unavailable. Because the value of the knowledge is extremely high and the market is flooded with people that can do the job of creation but not solve the problems that arise out of it. > why is that a bad thing? TL;DR Short term, that's ok, long term: they have no understanding of what they're truly doing and the consequences as a result. You should accept responsibility for that.