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Personally I would think you want somebody who can get job done instead of some ADD kid which is jumping from one hyped language de jour to other. But that is o

• tikhonj 15y ago
  That is a false dichotomy--just because somebody is interested in different languages does not mean they are "some ADD kid" and, moreover, somebody exclusively working 9-5 with no particular passion to programming is probably not "somebody who can get the job done" especially if the job is non-trivial. And if you're hiring for a trivial position, optimizing your interview process is probably a waste of time anyhow.
  • onemoreact 15y ago
    It takes a long time to become a truly awesome developer. And working more than 9-5 tends to burn people out over time. Which is why I suspect most of the top programmers in the world are much closer to 9-5'er than most people on HN are willing to admit. PS: One of my favorite stories of such a person goes something like this. Coder X was fired after failing to get a 6 month project finished after a full year. Greg, took two 40 hour weeks to read the documentation and slap something together to keep the project from slipping, but made a simple mistake which ended up causing significant problems in production a few days later. After fixing the problem he asked the QA people why they put it into production that quickly while missing such a basic issue was not discovered. Their response, we stopped testing your code a few years ago and this is the first problem that's showed up. The most interesting part of this story is if Programmer X had got his code to work after say 11 month he would no have been fired. Which means the company would employ someone that's 3% as effective as this guy.