Until you ship a product so late that its declared DOA. Perfect coders are more dangerous than shitty ones. They usually slow down progress in the name of perfection so much that nothing gets done. IMO.
I don't know that I agree that perfect coders are more dangerous than shitty ones. When you're behind on a project because someone is taking too long, it's upfront and obvious and usually they can be encouraged to speed up things as long as they document where work needs to be done afterward.
Bad developers are the gift that keeps on giving. Everything looks great, you ship, it mostly works, and then you spend four years struggling to build anything on top of what was written, squashing data-loss bugs that take weeks to track down and can never have their root causes fixed, etc.
Companies that end up in the latter situation are basically zombies. They're already effectively dead, but nobody knows this is the case for years, pouring time, effort, and money into a bottomless sinkhole.
Perfect coders can also serve as really good mentors on teams, and catch serious issues everyone else would have missed.
For a startup, sure. But the machine doing LASIK surgery on a human's cornea dozens of times per day absolutely should have a perfect coder. There are some industries where sloppy code should get you fired, because it will get someone killed.
Bad developers are the gift that keeps on giving. Everything looks great, you ship, it mostly works, and then you spend four years struggling to build anything on top of what was written, squashing data-loss bugs that take weeks to track down and can never have their root causes fixed, etc.
Companies that end up in the latter situation are basically zombies. They're already effectively dead, but nobody knows this is the case for years, pouring time, effort, and money into a bottomless sinkhole.
Perfect coders can also serve as really good mentors on teams, and catch serious issues everyone else would have missed.