[gordonguthrie]

The key thing is that 'you don't want to hire people to write code'. Code is inventory, code has a cost, code-not-written is what you want (as much as possible).

So you need to hire a developer who knows 'how not to code', 'when not to code', how to write as little code as possible (libraries, reuse and designing things that don't take much code, clean, concise, elegant, and well-structured).

These sort of developers are indeed the best to hire - but hard to find. And, as the article points out, is not what most technical interviews test for.

[wtetzner]

Even better, a developer that can take an existing code base and shrink it.

[chris_mahan]

you mean get rid of it. Or, failing that, replace it with 30 lines of python.