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122 Comments
- nedzeve, on 10/10/2007, -4/+39I'll probably get modded down by the PC police for saying this, but here goes.... Hire programmers from India and China? Big time headaches. They may be 1/4 the price, but you'll spend 4X the time just trying to communicate with them. Even when they say they can speak English, they CAN'T. The code is crappy, incomprehensible (like a high school project), and probably ripped off from F/OSS projects (uncredited). And comments? Forget about it.
So go ahead and modd me down you liberal hippy douchebags. - DariusMDeV, on 10/10/2007, -2/+31http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/11/110906.html
This is how you hire a Programmer. - kaelyiesta, on 10/10/2007, -0/+20I've always said that unless new blood is hired from time to time, eventually you run out of experts. Experts don't come right out of college, they become experts through experience in the field. Can't get that experience if they aren't given jobs though. Good thing too, otherwise all us new guys would have been out on the streets selling magazine subscriptions.
Obscure reference, I know. - manstein01, on 10/10/2007, -0/+18One of the big problems in IT today is that EVERYONE wants experts. God forbid your employee needs 30, or even seven days of training. It is frustrating to hear executives bemoan the lack of IT workers, but, in reality, go look at any job site out there. The real shortage is of experts - often needed to be proficient in several unrelated technologies - not workers themselves. But these people simply do not exist.
But, you want great programmers? Then pay them market value. You're not going to get an embedded assembly programmer/EE for 75 grand a year. Deal with it. - Leiterfluid, on 10/10/2007, -0/+12This article makes some strong points at the beginning, specifically the bullet points about what he and his associated agreed upon. However, it loses cohesion near the end of the article and statements like:
"Let's look at an example. One common argument from HR departments is that they "can't find any Perl programmers, but they can't swing a cat without hitting a Java developer". While this is fairly accurate, they are approaching the problem from the wrong direction. If you fill your shop with 15 average Java developers, paying an average of $60k per developer you have an approximate labor cost of $900k/year for your development staff. Not considering any non-salary benefits.
Suppose you instead took the time to find 5 expert, or at least above average, Perl developers at $120k each per year. Here is a partial list of the pros and cons of such a scenario: "
How does this resolve HR's complaint about not finding Perl programmers, expert or otherwise? - TheBogie, on 10/10/2007, -7/+19They mention hiring good programmers, and then mention Perl in the first sentence.
Maybe looking for Perl programmers is why you can't find good programmers. - jerrylin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+11A co-worker and I read this and were talking about it. Some good points were made:
1) Career development. You can't have all experianced expert programmers can you? Chances are they all want to move up, or better yet, they all deserve to move up
2) There are still mundane 'business as usual' tasks to do. With less newbies to handle this, will the experts be happy picking this type of work up? Experiance shows they get bored. - mclovin, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12but where does that leave us, average to below average programers?
- o0joshua0o, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
- cs02rm0, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10I think programmers paid less are more likely to jump ship.
If turnover cost is a problem it's because you're not paying them what someone else will. - Minishark, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9Companies today complain about a lack of skilled IT workers, but it's just not true. They just have unrealistic expectations. They want people with 5+ years experience writing software exactly like theirs, and they want to hire them for $40,000. Companies don't want to take the time to invest in their employees. What ever happened to job training? They want somebody who can be 100% productive tomorrow. Of course there's a shortage of those people, they don't exist. But there isn't a shortage of smart workers with a passion for computers. If only companies would invest in these smart people, they might find themselves soon enough with an entire team of very loyal experts.
- transeunte, on 10/10/2007, -1/+10There is no such thing. 95% of all programmers are amongst the 5% best programmers.
- ashchristopher, on 10/10/2007, -0/+9I think you might actually see more turnover of experts if you have them working with average developers, and force them to work within the same confines. An expert programmer is less likely to put up with it, and has many other opportunities to choose from.
- VSLOATHE, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9Nope you're right. There's a reason that there's an entire profession (which is very well paid) in IT that consists mostly of requirements gathering and coordinating with and communicating with programmers. Even programmers who speak English as a native language sometimes don't "get" what the users are looking for, how do you expect people who speak broken English to be able to do what you're asking?
You really do get what you pay for. - TheBogie, on 10/10/2007, -1/+9I agree that you would almost certainly have to learn Perl in your spare time. This is because most companies don't use Perl because it is only useful for one off scripts that you will never have to look at again.
If your potential hire knows Perl and during the interview can discuss its terrible syntax, bolted-on half ass OO, that most of the modules you will need were written by hacks in their spare time and are buggy, that "there is more than one way to do it" makes for a poor language to use on a team, its lack of a decent IDE/debugger, and the various other shortcomings, then maybe you should hire them.
If they say something like "We love Perl and think it's a great language that you graduate to after you have been forced to use less agile languages such as Java, C/C++/C#, etc." you should send them packing. - inactive, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8This is the same for any field of work today, Companies want someone thats 18years old with a masters degree and ten years experience willing to work for 5 dollars an hour. And work a 100 hour work week with no vacation or health care.
- willow0285, on 10/10/2007, -5/+13Although the article doesn't mention it, there's also the high cost of turnover. I think novice/low-paid programmers are more likely to jump ship than expert programmers.
- lordtyros, on 10/10/2007, -4/+11Actually, these days Perl isn't frequently taught in colleges. So if your potential hire knows Perl, it shows evidence of personal interest and outside study. As opposed to your average idiot Java developer who has never opened a programming book that wasn't assigned to him in class.
- inactive, on 10/10/2007, -5/+12Microsoft
- doodlebumm, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Why is it that almost every incident that I know of (though personal experience or from others that I'm acquainted with), projects done by groups of Indian programmers are poorly done, hard to fix, don't use the proper methods (they do it the expensive way, not the right way), etc.
I've never known of a project that was done by a group of Indian developers that could not have been done by a group of American programmers in the same time frame, and be much more maintainable in the long run, and actually work properly in the end without serious modification by "experts." - TroubleInMind, on 10/10/2007, -1/+8I would rather have a mediocre programmer with a good attitude than a brilliant technical prima donna drama queen. One can be taught, the other can only be fought.
Here's an axiom I found to be true. 30% of programmer time is wasted by management mistakes. Unclear direction, changing targets, meaningless meetings, useless procedure. Fix your process. Then take any ten programmers. Fire three of them - any three. Your productivity will be unchanged. - Hammerheart, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7An expert wouldn't see the easiest solution as the one that created even more work for him down the road.
- ashchristopher, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7Lets not take this out of context... "they work smarter rather than harder."
The smarter solution is usually the easiest. It is lack of experience that usually leads to unmaintainable code. - jerrylin, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Good code is not neccessarily complex and hard to understand.
More than often, it is well commented, readable, and well structured. It is more likely an average programmer can understand code in this fashion than poorly structured, improper code.
Chances are also that if the code is well designed, you will not be looking over it all again. It will be more modular, and the bugs are minor so no "newbie" needs to neccessarily go in and rewrite/fix everything. - BattleStar47, on 10/10/2007, -3/+9How about hiring average programmers and WORKING WITH THEM to help them improve? That would instill a lot of loyalty in them, and actually get you off your ass and interacting with your employees instead of sitting around and daydreaming about what it would be like to run the perfect company.
- Error601, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6Poorly written because the language isn't important and they're all easy to learn. It's the application systems and database design that take the experience.
- rm999, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5That doesn't make you a good programmer, it makes you someone who programs in his free time. Maybe there is a correlation, but it doesn't explain the author's attitude that you aren't an expert programmer unless you know perl.
C is still quite common in the world, and as I look for jobs that pay a good salary (>75K a year out of college), I consistently find that a solid and competent knowledge of C/C++ is a requirement. Never Perl. - Koldark, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5A good programmer can learn any language if they put their mind to it. It may not look pretty... but it would work.
- Homunculiheaded, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5So far during my learning experience I've found 'easiest solution that gets the job done' to almost always be a really good solution. Every time I bang my head with a problem I always realize that I'm not thinking simple enough. When I create a class and get confused by the methods, I need more simple subclasses, if you're trying to pass too many parameters to a function you need break it down into simpler functions. Programing requires many layers of abstraction at once to come to a solution, if any of those layers are to complex you're going to have problems. Each step should be as easy as possible, I can always tell the code from when I was a more amateur programmer because it's much more complex and I'm always trying to do fancier things then were necessary. I'm not an expert by any means but every time I have a real big break through it's always essentially the same 'stop trying to do complex things when a series of simple thing will work'.
- gernblansted, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5True. However, even a "good" Perl developer can't read a lot of 3rd party Perl out there - it takes a "rain man" to be able to read all Perl scripts. That's a weakness of Perl. A Good Java developer, on the other hand, can read a vast majority of Java code out there.
- jabab, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6That's hilarious.
- ssboisen, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8"Experts prefer the easiest solution that gets the job done." as someone studying software engineering I'dd say that's a silly comment. The easiest solution that gets the job done often involves the worst code - the quick hack that will make the system run for now but will make it harder to maintain the code as a unity in the future.
- fishinabarrel, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6In Bioinformatics PERL is rampantly used. Mostly for scripting. A competent java programmer can pick up Perl in a week. A competent Perl scripter can't pick up Java nearly as quick.
- ssboisen, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5good to hear that there's people who take this into consideration! it can be frustrating as a studying software engineer to hear all the "we only want expert/experience developers with years in the working industry" - how the hell is new programmers suppose to reach that level if all they hire is experienced people :)
- iamcool, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4As someone who's done web work and been looking for work for sometime I have found that hiring companies are very inflexible and don't understand technology. Sure, I did lots of web stuff at a previous job, and have always hand coded. I've about memorized every aspect of the DOM and CSS, yet because I did not have an official "web designer" title and not used Dreamweaver or some other off the shelf program I am denied employment. Sure I could site down with notepad and just start typing away code, but apparently that is not enough. The same goes for programming. They use VB studio and again, I have not used VB studio. Ignore the fact I've worked with C++ and Perl for several years. l find it absurd they think I could not peruse the language and learn the syntax rather quickly.
- ssboisen, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4hmm, maybe I didn't quite explain what I meant, when I thought easiest solution I was more thinking, the (in the situation) fastest thinkable (and writable) solution to a giving problem- the situation where you maybe choose to use a solution that's quick to write but involves a large amount of temporary variables, loops and whatnot instead of sitting down and thinking the architecture through and create easily manageable code from the beginning
- VSLOATHE, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Not necessarily true. I'll be the first to use the easiest solution. I know guys who will write their own libs or extensions to do things that bundled or freely available libs do just fine, why reinvent the wheel? Also modularization and good commenting makes the sort of "quick hack" you're talking about very easy to handle. At my last job, I maintained a lot of code written by programmers who were not necessarily bad at programming, but had a very different style than I do. Because of the standard commenting scheme and emphasis on modularization and portability of code, I never really ran into a snippet of code where I went "What the hell does that do?" or "Why did he put that in there?".
- jonashwing, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4office space isn't *THAT* obscure. at least not to the people reading the comments on digg about a story talking about programmers. :)
- transeunte, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6"I've never known of a project that was done by a group of Indian developers that could not have been done by a group of American programmers in the same time frame, and be much more maintainable in the long run"
Would it cost the same thing? You're missing the point. - HaMMeReD, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Stupid people can not hire intelligent people. They are too stupid to recognize intelligence.
- transeunte, on 10/10/2007, -1/+5Yay, time to start the Perl bashing.
Really, I thought this was over in like, 99. I guess it's still going on here because Digg loves drama and flames. - EricMiIIer, on 07/10/2009, -0/+3Sing it brotha'
- LordofShadows, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3The emphasis on perl made me lol. If only we could find a *perl* programmer. hilarious.
- jaypatrick, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3I was interested in the article until his last bullet point about Perl. I'm sorry, but Perl is not the end all do all for programming. In fact, I'd be very wary of someone who touted Perl as their first and foremost language on their resume.
- GorfTron, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3A novice programmer hired for $45K and learns for 2 years can live on his $53k from his standard raises. Or he can quit and get $80k elsewhere. Standard raises don't keep pace and management won't approve them.
- mojaam, on 10/20/2007, -0/+3It's the annoying paradox of the real world again: "nobody will give you a job unless you have experience, and you can't get experience unless you have a job"
Good luck man and keep ya head up. - EricMiIIer, on 07/10/2009, -0/+3shouldnt it be "you pay peanuts, you get squirrels."?
- GorfTron, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Hence the push for more immigrant workers from Asia.
- electronaught, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3yah, i just got let go yesterday after two months as a php developer among 8 other programmers. I don't really understand...I completed every single thing they gave me to program. It was basically because I was a begginer and the youngest there ,23, and everyone else there already had years of expierence. They even said everyone here really likes you when they let me go. But what I don't understand is that you have to start somewhere before your considered an expert and they hired me knowing that. How else do you learn about programming a massive system that controls the generation of thousands of webpages. Not by yourself, that would take years and years for one person to do, and surely not from school. whatever though. back to block A.
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