[harryh]

> Because the industry doesn't have objective ways to

> evaluate programmers, it over-relies on heuristics and

> cultural traits that favor people who "fit the mold."

I think this is mostly wrong. It's hard to objectively evaluate many professions. How do you evaluate marketing professionals, or lawyers, or graphic designers? It's all fuzzy. And it's especially fuzzy for 22 years olds without a track record of experience to look at. I don't think that software companies do it much differently than anyone else when it comes to hiring. We base decisions on gateways like prestigious degrees. We look at whatever experience we can (even if it's just a github repo). And we conduct interviews where we do our best to ask real world questions.

Is this process perfect? Of course not. But is it pretty good? I think so. It's obvious who the great programmers are. It's obvious which ones are awful. And there's a mushy middle where it's hard to tell who's gonna work out and who isn't. I suspect that most other fields are about the same in this respect.

[rayiner]

I don't know anything about graphic design, but the marketing and legal fields approach recruiting differently, at least at the entry level. Companies hire people that they think can be trained, and train them using the extensive institutional knowledge companies hold and pass on internally. There's no belief that say the best marketing folks were the ones doing neighborhood projects as teenagers. Marketing folks usually are subject to very intensive internships or entry level jobs that teach them everything they need to know. The prevailing model in law or banking or consulting or accounting is to take people with aptitude and train them to do things "the firm's way."

There's a lot more similarity at the level of experienced hiring obviously. And this model of hiring is expensive. But it also has benefits. Firms create new professionals from raw materials. They don't have to wait for trained professionals to walk in the door.

[harryh]

Your comment really had two separate points one around training practices and another around hiring standards and occasional cargo culting. It was only the latter that I was objecting to.

It's interesting to think about the first point though. Why are training practices different in software? I can think of a couple of hypotheses:

A) Programming is one of few fields where it's possible to self train. B) Programming is a relatively young field that hasn't matured enough to develop rigorous training practices. C) Software companies aren't profitable enough to support expensive training programs. D) Training of programmers is a relatively futile endeavor as most programming success will come from innate talent that is either present or not in any given individual.

Just off the top of my head I put the most weight on A and C (especially for startups) though I'm fairly uncertain. There might also be other reasons I haven't thought of.