[mgas]

Too many people here are crowing about the GitHub thing, and not enough about:

> Above all, I try to hire people who I'd want to pair with tomorrow. People who are better than me, and people who I can learn from.

It seems the only way to get hired period is to have all the experience in the world, at least from the author's perspective. This mentality is far more dangerous since it disallows the idea that someone can get better at a job over time.

Also I feel like this conclusion is just a longform version of "we only hire ninjas and rockstars". The author openly disdains applicants who are so "full of themselves" that they send in overly detailed resumes, but conveniently omits the fact (which everyone here knows) that resumes have to be catered to the filters of your HR software to even land on a hiring manager's desk.

His conclusion is that stuffed resumes are for losers, and only he, the hiring manager with the Midas touch, can see the true value of an individual by glancing over their code and preparing some pitfall questions. This smacks of self-centered egotism and coder bro mentality.

Also as others have pointed out, good coding jobs exist in fintech, government, and 1000s of other industries that this guy sneeringly looks down his nose at.

[em-bee]

well it depends whether you hire a junior or a senior position.

the general rule is that if i don't hire juniors, then as a manager i want to hire people who are better developers than me.

otherwise if i hire juniors, i obviously expect them to learn, but the paring point is still relevant, and even juniors may bring an interesting perspective to the team, not just their coding skills.

[mgas]

Totally agree on jr vs sr. Another point that is conveniently overlooked in the article so the author can have his holier-than-thou moment. It seems he's hiring seniors, and only wants stars.

[theshrike79]

"Programming" isn't a monoculture. People can be "better" than others in multiple ways.

I (started working in IT around the millennium) have learned stuff from juniors with a few years of experience - because their experience is in a different field from me. Most of the best practices in the Javascript ecosystem I learned from one young still-in-school JS savant. He didn't know crap about backend or databases, but the dude was a complete wizard with Typescript (and later Rust).

[drewcoo]

Not the author, but . . .

Better can mean better at learning or teaching, cleaner approaches to problem-solving, interesting combinations of ideas I wouldn't have thought of, more potential, or any number of other things.

I firmly believe in only hiring people who are better than I am. That involves looking for ways the candidate is better than I am instead waiting for the candidate to fail the entrance exam.