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by baxter001 4415 days ago
Putting aside the fact you're considering firing perfectly competent devs because they're not solving the halting problem for you, hiring is in practice a random process and what you have is probably a better outcome than most, consider what skills your team missing and look to make a 'star' team rather wishing for single points of key failure, even to the extent of going out of a pure dev role to look at BAs and architecture hires.
2 comments
asbestoshft 4415 days ago
I agree that hiring is random and the focus should be on making a star team. That is what I have done and I'm pretty happy with how it has turned out. Have you ever seen a big change in the level of productivity of a given programmer that isn't related to longer term general experience ( an average programmer with 10 years of experience should be more productive than an average programmer with 1 year of experience ).
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baxter001 4414 days ago
I'm not sure it scales like that for that long, sure there are benefits of familiarity with a language or system, the major changes in productivity I've seen come about through cross-skilling you can only expect the majority of devs or BAs or whatever to reach a certain level of competence when constrained to their core roles, encourage them to develop skills outside their usual BAU activities and the mutants you get back are an asset both in individual productivity and team redundancy.
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greenyoda 4415 days ago
"Putting aside the fact you're considering firing perfectly competent devs because they're not solving the halting problem for you..."

Why do you imply that he's asking his developers to do impossible things? He doesn't say that the developers are working on particularly difficult code (and the vast majority of developers aren't).

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baxter001 4414 days ago
Admit to a slight use of rhetorical effect there, I completely agree the vast amount of developers aren't working on even slightly tricky code, or at least if they are it's a minor portion of their time, a good dev should be abstracting over that sort of complexity so that they don't need to think that hard in the future.
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