[Shrezzing]

I enjoyed the entire article except this part:

> Unfortunately there is no easy way to distinguish between people who are good and need a paycheck from people who just need a paycheck. But you sure as hell don’t want the latter in your team.

If you can't tell them apart, then the distinction is unimportant. So if among the group of people who need paychecks, good is indistinguishable from non-good, the comment serves no purpose other than needless elitism.

[nonameiguess]

There is something I've started to notice as I've been working as a platform-layer consultant for the past few years. Many of the companies I've worked with don't have anyone in their company with any meaningful level of experience or expertise in environment administration, security, really anything ops-related. I see this especially when I start trying to hand off work I've done into maintenance phase operations and they don't have any kind of operations team to take over, but my contract sure as shit doesn't say I'm going to come in at 3 AM on a Sunday morning and I never will. So they may try to identify someone in the company to train up or they may try to hire, but the core problem they face isn't that it's impossible in principle to tell good apart from bad. The problem is it's impossible for them to tell the difference because they have no one in their company even qualified to conduct such an interview.

[solatic]

It's implied that it isn't easy to distinguish them during interviews. After they join your team, it's very easy to distinguish them.

[Shrezzing]

I've re-read the developer experience section, and I can't see where that implication is established. In that context, the paragraph stands out as an abrupt diversion from the main theme of the section, and undermines the argument of the entire piece. The section defines developer dissonance, and asserts that it's possible to overcome it with reasoned and sensible questioning. If it's possible to overcome dissonance with reasoned questioning, a hiring interview should a prime opportunity to roll out some reasoned questions and head-off dissonance before it enters the organisation in the first place.

[chpmrc]

I can't see how making that statement undermines the rest of the argument. It would help if you could clarify that relationship.

And I'm not sure I understand why, if you can't distinguish them, the distinction is unimportant. It's hard to distinguish an edible mushroom from a poisonous one and yet making that distinction makes a huge difference.

Interviews are definitely a limited tool to do so btw, this is only something that you realize over time. It's also very easy to play an interviewer if the interviewee's soft skills are better than the interviewer's (which happens often in this industry).