| You could sum up this whole article to "don't hire assholes" but I am not sure why that should be limited to tech? You probably don't want assholes in your business/ops side of the organization either. Most of the gripes in the article sound like management/culture issues as opposed to developer issues. > Many business folks begin by asking for a specific feature or function. For example, maybe you want your billing system to send out customer payment reminders as text messages. Sounds straightforward. But a good technologist, before rolling up her sleeves, flexing her fingers and firing up a text message cloud service and a windowful of code, will ask questions. If every company is now really a tech company as the article claims, why is it only the responsibility of the developer to extract requirements/intent? I am not saying that developers should not try to clarify problems but why is the onus of clarity on the implementer instead of the requester? Should business folks not be expected to clearly communicate the business goal that they are trying to accomplish? > One bad actor can do more damage than you can imagine. I have seen a multimillion-dollar, high-stakes initiative almost derailed by one jerk who didn’t think he needed to prioritize a colleague’s project above his own and masterfully exhibited passive-aggressive behavior for weeks before getting called on it. A single point of failure in a multimillion-dollar, business-critical project sounds like a management issue to me. > Hiring a developer? Check out the GitHub “repository,” which is essentially the portfolio site for coders. That is going to be a mixed bag. My GitHub account is a graveyard of half-finished toy projects in different technologies I felt like trying out. I would not say it is representative of my proficiency. |