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I'm not saying it happened but if I had a developer who had worked for 5-6 years on an identical project, I would be very careful that your codebase does not in

by awjr 12y ago

I'm not saying it happened but if I had a developer who had worked for 5-6 years on an identical project, I would be very careful that your codebase does not include any of that project. I do feel you are taking somebody who had an immense understanding of the domain, who had delivered an identical project over the last 5-6 years (and probably had that codebase to refer to) and trying to compare it to an engineer with no domain experience and no identical project to refer to.

ghshephard 12y ago
No codebase to refer to, everything was recreated from scratch; but the concepts (basing a hopping sequence on MAC address, agressive discovery of neighbors on power up, sending a single data/ack packet, instead of a complete POLL-ACK-DATA-ACK for small packets, tracking information for all adjacent nodes in a nodeq, keeping track of both RSSI and info success, etc...) were concepts that he had learned/developed previously (thankfully many of them in early 1990s so patent issues were probably not an issue either) And you are correct - I am taking somebody who had an immense understanding of the domain, and testing them on a (close to) identical project and I am trying to compare it to an engineer with no domain experience - that was kind of my point. He was still an extraordinary engineer - but, moved into a new domain, maybe a 2x, possibly 3x engineer. (i.e. he could write code in a single month that would take a low level engineer three months to write to similar quality.) But, if you are looking to build a new product - isn't the idea to hire extraordinary engineers with 7-10 years of experience in that field to get the huge boost in productivity? And, if you really could get 20x-40x performance boost in quality and performance - what would it be worth to hire those employees away from their current companies to lead your team, if only for a few years? And, if these people really do exist - doesn't it make sense that they should be working for only one-two years at companies, where their skills are precisely matched to requirements, and get the huge boost in compensation for that time? The only thing that is missing, is some mechanisms, system, that could match up these "world class engineers with extraordinarily specific skill" to companies that need those specific skills.

by awjr 12y ago

ghshephard 12y ago

No codebase to refer to, everything was recreated from scratch; but the concepts (basing a hopping sequence on MAC address, agressive discovery of neighbors on power up, sending a single data/ack packet, instead of a complete POLL-ACK-DATA-ACK for small packets, tracking information for all adjacent nodes in a nodeq, keeping track of both RSSI and info success, etc...) were concepts that he had learned/developed previously (thankfully many of them in early 1990s so patent issues were probably not an issue either) And you are correct - I am taking somebody who had an immense understanding of the domain, and testing them on a (close to) identical project and I am trying to compare it to an engineer with no domain experience - that was kind of my point. He was still an extraordinary engineer - but, moved into a new domain, maybe a 2x, possibly 3x engineer. (i.e. he could write code in a single month that would take a low level engineer three months to write to similar quality.) But, if you are looking to build a new product - isn't the idea to hire extraordinary engineers with 7-10 years of experience in that field to get the huge boost in productivity? And, if you really could get 20x-40x performance boost in quality and performance - what would it be worth to hire those employees away from their current companies to lead your team, if only for a few years? And, if these people really do exist - doesn't it make sense that they should be working for only one-two years at companies, where their skills are precisely matched to requirements, and get the huge boost in compensation for that time? The only thing that is missing, is some mechanisms, system, that could match up these "world class engineers with extraordinarily specific skill" to companies that need those specific skills.