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But programming is special! The same approaches to hiring used for accountants or electricians couldn't possibly work! Don't you know programming is like painti

• twawaaay 4y ago
  Yeah, people kinda forget that not every job is the same. You can pretty much easily test if you have enough knowledge to be a good accountant or if you can play the violin well. There are couple smaller issues. Having knowledge will not tell you if they are hard working a knowing how to play violin well will not tell you if they will do well with orchestra and large audience. But in general you can do a testing period and be done with it. With developers... the main issue is that it is super difficult to judge how good a developer is and that is IMO mostly because there is a huge delay between making a decision and suffering consequences of the decision and then it is frequently difficult to tell how the consequences are connected to the decisions and what were the alternatives. And a lot of it is just opinions, so even if you hire a better developer you get into territory of trying to figure out whose opinion is right (probably the higher paid one? maybe?) And so when I hire developers I am trying to look at various other things that I hope are proxies for what I really need. So maybe I will try to look whether they have good judgement in general, how they dealt with difficult situations in the past. Maybe get to know them a little bit as a person. Which you don't have to do with an accountant or violinist.