4 ms·

It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't cont

by larrik 7y ago

It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't contributing positively either.

rightbyte 7y ago
Hyperbolic much? How can being "mediocre" be something bad? That's litterary litterary an ordinary programmer.
- pkroll 7y ago
  "Mediocre" is virtually always considered "poor" in the USA, even though the literal definition is "middling or average." Anyone would consider going to an average restaurant, but we'd avoid one someone described as mediocre.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    If I want a lot of OK sushi I go to a place I trust for that. It's mediocre, but priced accordingly; and thus has good value for the money.
dba7dba 7y ago
I just read someone talk about job post on linkedin with over a thousand applications. Are people on linked in truly mediocre that not one out of a thousand can fill the position?
- lukejduncan 7y ago
  I think many companies don't have exactly 1 job posting for 1 seat. For example, I've seen large tech companies have a single "Backend engineer" req that is used for every backend engineering role in the company (or org). So the pure number of applicants in a LinkedIn job post may be misleading.
- perl4ever 7y ago
  Maybe hundreds could, but only one of them was having a really good day on the day of the interview. Which is why candidates have to do so many interviews and companies have to interview so many people.
glitchc 7y ago
If everyone only wants “great” people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution. Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. Why do we devalue the grunts? They are the bedrock of every organization. It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental, and people need jobs, so why do we denigrate them so? Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge, especially when the domain is not fundamentally exciting (e.g. finance, geology).
- pytester 7y ago
  >Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly. >It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental, Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess). >Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.
  - 7y ago
decebalus1 7y ago
I always burst out laughing when I hear this. Mostly because the people saying it assume that themselves are not mediocre but good/great people. Reminds me of the anecdote when a Google hiring committee in Kirkland was tasked to judge each other's original (anonymized) interview feedbacks and everyone failed everyone else.
hadsed 7y ago
I think a lot of responses to this are missing something unsaid here: a single interview day for someone doesn't always give them a chance to be their best selves. That's ok but you do what you can given this fact. The whole thing is about being risk adverse with who you bring on to the team. This is the right thing to do because bad hires are exceptionally costly. It isn't a judgment on the candidate's innate value as an engineer, it's about a single sample of the "is this person a good fit for our team" function, which is different!

by larrik 7y ago

It's better to let good/great people slip away then to get a bad apple onto the team. Or worse, a mediocre one who never does anything wrong but also isn't contributing positively either.

rightbyte 7y ago

Hyperbolic much? How can being "mediocre" be something bad? That's litterary litterary an ordinary programmer.

pkroll 7y ago
"Mediocre" is virtually always considered "poor" in the USA, even though the literal definition is "middling or average." Anyone would consider going to an average restaurant, but we'd avoid one someone described as mediocre.
- mjevans 7y ago
  If I want a lot of OK sushi I go to a place I trust for that. It's mediocre, but priced accordingly; and thus has good value for the money.

dba7dba 7y ago

I just read someone talk about job post on linkedin with over a thousand applications. Are people on linked in truly mediocre that not one out of a thousand can fill the position?

lukejduncan 7y ago
I think many companies don't have exactly 1 job posting for 1 seat. For example, I've seen large tech companies have a single "Backend engineer" req that is used for every backend engineering role in the company (or org). So the pure number of applicants in a LinkedIn job post may be misleading.
perl4ever 7y ago
Maybe hundreds could, but only one of them was having a really good day on the day of the interview. Which is why candidates have to do so many interviews and companies have to interview so many people.

glitchc 7y ago

If everyone only wants “great” people, where are the mediocre people supposed to work? Think like this long enough and soon the have-nots are plotting a revolution. Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. Why do we devalue the grunts? They are the bedrock of every organization. It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental, and people need jobs, so why do we denigrate them so? Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge, especially when the domain is not fundamentally exciting (e.g. finance, geology).

pytester 7y ago
>Companies with defined, well established revenue streams need to build mentoring programs that turn mediocre developers (solid C) into good (solid B) developers. Those employees tend to be the most loyal and are capable of a great amount of menial to boring coding tasks without complaint. In general, when coding, if you're doing a menial or boring task you're doing something wrong. E.g. I've worked with a ton of mediocre developers who don't automate the menial tasks and end up doing the task manually, sloppily and slowly. >It’s not like Google’s Adwords is undergoing a complete code rewrite every quarter. Neither is Microsoft Word. Most code changes are incremental, Incremental changes are hard. Incremental changes to large and unwieldy systems while leaving them in a maintainable state are very hard (actually, from what I've heard, Google Adwords' code base is a mess). >Plus A players are only usually A in their requisite subdomain. A crack coder of financial systems is going to struggle mightily when writing a morphological filter or a seam carving algorithm. There’s real value to the business when an individual acquires domain knowledge It's vastly better to have a really good product owner/manager who knows the domain working with a really good coder than a mediocre coder with mediocre domain knowledge.
- 7y ago

decebalus1 7y ago

I always burst out laughing when I hear this. Mostly because the people saying it assume that themselves are not mediocre but good/great people. Reminds me of the anecdote when a Google hiring committee in Kirkland was tasked to judge each other's original (anonymized) interview feedbacks and everyone failed everyone else.

hadsed 7y ago

I think a lot of responses to this are missing something unsaid here: a single interview day for someone doesn't always give them a chance to be their best selves. That's ok but you do what you can given this fact. The whole thing is about being risk adverse with who you bring on to the team. This is the right thing to do because bad hires are exceptionally costly. It isn't a judgment on the candidate's innate value as an engineer, it's about a single sample of the "is this person a good fit for our team" function, which is different!