3 ms·
Perhaps most people reading HN would be able to recognize a good programmer. But there are still challenges when you need to hire someone with area of expertis
by pmsaue0 18y ago
Perhaps most people reading HN would be able to recognize a good programmer. But there are still challenges when you need to hire someone with area of expertise that is outside of your own - if you're hiring someone to do your own job or your clone, it's straightforward.
For the last two start-ups in which I was involved (as a graphic designer), a co-worker and I were placed in the position of choosing developers to build our application. We were the most technologically savvy people on our start-up team of businessmen, attorney's, accountants, etc. (in many ways those startups followed the inverted timeline of most startups).
At first the only questions we could ask the applicants were... what languages do you know? what projects have you worked on? how would you solve this problem?... as if their answers would inspire some confidence regarding their abilities as a programmer - their answers inspired nothing because WE knew nothing. What I'm saying is that if you are going to hire people, you have to educate yourself to a conversational level+ in their area of expertise.
Nowadays my said co-worker and I both know RoR and are building our own startup apart from that original group. And when we decided to hire another developer we were in a MUCH better position not only to recognize a strong programmer but to leverage our own abilities.
Be wary of his point regarding PASSION. We met with some programmers who were passionate, but were obviously charlatans.
- hhm 18y ago"We met with some programmers who were passionate, but were obviously charlatans." And how did you tell the difference? (when it wasn't obvious... or was it always obvious?)
- pmsaue0 18y agoWell, we did hire one charlatan programmer, but we dropped him pretty quick when we realized that he couldn't produce the quality and quantity of work that he claimed possible. Like I said, this was when we didn't know diddly about programming / hiring programmers. Regarding the ones that were obvious (as it seemed to me), they were lingo dropping high-horsers, and when we looked at their previous work and saw that they were producing crusty web applications while claiming that they were abreast of all the latest technologies, we knew something was up. We chose at one point to work with a web development firm that promised great things and they had a strong team... but what I wish we would have payed more attention to was the fact that they were working on MANY other projects and were spread way too thin. In the end they were late on every deadline so we stopped working with them. I feel fortunate to be working with two other great developers now. But I've worked with several doozies, and it has been through that process that I've learned more about who to hire, and I'm much more cautious now.
- hhm 18y agoThanks a lot for taking the time for writing such useful reply.