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On Finding Good Programmers
"...making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot."
-- Paul Graham
- mynameishere 19y agoJust having a body to fill the seat is not, I repeat not, always a win for the company. No kidding. Hmm. Interesting. Anyone who has been a developer or managed developers can tell you that an expert can accomplish as much as 10 average developers. Anyone who has already heard the standard cliche could and perhaps would tell you that also. Of course, the reason Brooks originally said "10" rather than "9" or "11" is because that is how many fingers we have, and it would be odd if that number somehow corresponded to a programmer ability ratios. In fact, ...the ratio is often incalculable, depending on the task. Average programmers simply won't be able to complete certain tasks. Easy tasks, like CRUD apps, are more a matter of typing speed than thinking speed, and so a 10:1 ratio isn't likely to happen...unless one programmer is good enough to force a paradigm shift...whether moving assembler to COBOL or Flat files to SQL to ORM or whatever. In that case, the productivity gain is 1000000:1 or more...if the innovation spreads beyond that one task.