[eternityforest]

I wonder if any companies purposely avoid hiring any dedicated professional developers, and have everything done by other professionals who happen to know some code, and how it works.

Developers always come with their own perverse incentive. They like the new, the clever, the smart, and the simple, and rarely appreciate the battle tested and extensible.

[hn_acc_2]

Having seen several projects written by people who "happen to know some code," I can tell you there's a good reason this hasn't caught on.

These sort of people can work the very foundations of the company into an ungodly quagmire that would send you screaming back to the fad-chaser dev in a heartbeat.

Also despite the meme, most mid-senior devs are actually keen on making their contributions valuable to the business, having gotten over this phase of fascination with new tools

[eternityforest]

Mid senior devs do seem to be pretty good. Entry level devs who think they're senior cause most of the trouble....

I've seen some small projects by non-coders that are better than some real devs, because they can be really aggressive about avoiding original code. It might be hacky... but they find ways to leverage stuff that already exists.