[brooklyn_ashey]

Interesting piece. Two things: 1. How do these few absolutely spectacular developers blossom into such impressive specimens of the lot? Why not get them before this happens and help them over the greatness threshold? 2. Isn’t there a kind of giant group of buried truffles that don’t fit the trad idea of what a great dev smells like? — so much so that you could identify this set with a couple of simple queries— a kind of sifting activity that would yield lots of truffles per square foot?

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

1 is why large companies have massive cohorts of interns. They don't expect to get much/any useful work out of them, they just fill up the interns on Kool-Aid, identify the ones that aren't completely hopeless, and hire them full-time as junior devs.

[brooklyn_ashey]

Right, but then every company would just grow uberdevs and be chock full of awesome at some point, but it seems like that isn’t happening w these interns as often as would make the intern thing “worth it” for identifying future wonderdevs.

[ptr]

A hypothesis could be that these great developers became what they are due to an extreme internal drive at a young age; they already have tons of experience and the right attitudes/thinking patterns when joining the work force. If they continue learning (and why shouldn’t they, given their internal drive), how can anyone compete with them?

This intrinsic motivation implies that companies really can’t “grow” great developers, nor “pick them before they’ve blossomed”; what they can do is step aside and not create obstacles.