Revolution Systems Blog: A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality
Wait a minute… so you’re telling me that if I hire LOW quality programmers, and hire a lot of them, it won’t be the same as hiring several GOOD quality programmers? That’s radical, man.
Radical common sense, ufortunately.
The Mythical Man Month. “If it takes a woman nine months to have a baby, then nine women can make a baby in one month.”
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to hire a good programmer. You can’t do it by looking at the resume. You can’t do it by filtering with a multiple choice test. You can’t do it by hiring a bunch, and looking at the rate of lines of code per time.
You need to have a good programmer on staff do the interview. The questions need to be somewhat open ended, like “What are your favorite tools?”. If the response is, “I like SubVersion.”, you can’t evaluate that by noting that you also like it. The explanation is key. In short, both interviewer and interviewee must pass the Turing Test. The Turing Test for a good programmer can not be passed by anyone else.
Once you have a programmer, you can have a good programmer evaluate them by performing code reviews. But you should be doing that anyway.
The original article is pretty good. Judging by the enourmous repsonse, there’s interest in the topic. But that doesn’t mean that anyone knows what they’re talking about. It’s excellent troll bait.