Anecdotally, this is basically always worse than having someone with significant coding experience. Two thoughts come to mind immediately: 1. Making key hiring

Anecdotally, this is basically always worse than having someone with significant coding experience. Two thoughts come to mind immediately: 1. Making key hiring decisions is hard: coding experience lets you better see how a potential hire's technical strengths, weaknesses, and opinions intersect with personality traits to produce value or dysfunction. 2.Coding experience helps you understand different kinds of value - it's very hard to explain to non-technical folks that while a developer is brilliant and productive, he's not careful enough and six months down the line we're going to be buried in tech debt if he's allowed to keep going.