3 ms·

How do you stop mediocre programmers from working on advanced tasks, and is the overhead of doing so greater than the cost of hiring excellent programmers?

• marktangotango 8y ago
  Mediocre devs simply can’t do advanced tasks. They’ll spend months with no results. I’ve seen this countless times, especially working with offshore teams. One project was hobbled by terrible database performance. The app simply couldn’t scale. I listened to weekly calls for a year while they floundered. Finally I researched their connection pool and told them setting to control “verify connection before each call” to “verify connection every n milliseconds”, and told them how to fix it. I made sure to do it on a call with their architects and leads and our senior managers. Yeah that was a bit of a dick move on my part but I didn’t care.
  • phaedrus 8y ago
    Problem is there is a class of mediocre programmers who do get results - it's just that they are productive building things that appear to work just long enough for them to be able to move on to the next task, but their work either doesn't scale or falls over in production.
• hutzlibu 8y ago
  "How do you stop mediocre programmers from working on advanced tasks" Competent project lead/management Assigning the right person for the right job. But yes, nobody ever said that is easy. But in general: by definition there can be only some excellent programmers and lots of mediocre ones. So it simply would not work if every company only would hire excellence. And it is also not neccesary nor useful, since there are so many boring, mediocre task around, meaning the excellent programmers can focus their time and energy on the complex, interesting problems.