
Ask HN: Does anyone hire average developers? - haskellandchill
Obviously most companies do by definition.
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twobyfour
Depends on how you define average. I work on a software team that's about
twice as productive as any other team our size that I've previously
encountered, regardless of skill. But the technical abilities of everyone on
the team (with one possible exception out of ten) fall well within the fat
part of the Gaussian distribution. We're all "average" technically.

But I wouldn't call anyone here "average". We excel as a team because
everyone's "soft" skills are well above average. Self management, in
particular. But also pride in one's work. Ability to collaborate effectively.
Willingness to learn from one another. Lack of ego. Interest in solving
business problems rather than "sexy" technical problems. Empathy.

We're building what's 95% a CRUD app anyway, though with some additional
complexity to handle scale. Engineers with top 10% technical skills would be
bored out of their skulls here. But if we hired "average" engineers without
those exceptional "soft" skills we'd be accomplishing less than half as much
as we do now.

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slackingoff2017
:) average is probably worse than you think. I've followed the LinkedIn status
of couple guys I knew as "developer interns" that didn't make our cut to get
an offer at the end of their internship. We always told them we only had a
certain number of spots to make them feel a little better. The truth was some
of us devs would get together and talk about who wasn't "getting it" or was
generally clueless.

They were nice guys for the most part and I follow them mostly hoping they
will find a more fitting dev job somewhere else. This isn't always the case.
Maybe half the new devs that didn't make our cut end up leaving software
completely, or finding a job on the periphery like analyst, tester, or UI
mockup designer.

Software development requires a very logical mind and the ability to dream up
the idea of a thing and make it real. I think the creative side of software
development is downplayed, it's definitely the most fertile field for inventor
types.

Just like making pretty paintings, programming feels natural to those that can
do it. And just like art, everybody can draw but the quality of the artwork
varies wildly.

Again with the art analogy, some people are just not capable of being taught
how to program above a basic level of understanding. In the beginning I sunk
tons of time into helping some of our more clueless interns become productive.
I'm kinda jaded now, more in the "sink or swim" camp, because I saw just how
much the innate ability to grasp programming concepts affected outcomes. A few
of our interns that seemed to be charity cases at the beginning became semi
competent developers within a few months. Others came in with a CS101 level
understanding and never advanced beyond that.

Eventually I decided my time was better spent helping those who were catching
on quickly.

So the main reason everyone strives to get good developers is because so many
are terrible. The freedom in software design means the quality depends a lot
more on creativity than in branches of engineering with strong physical
constraints. It's a lot easier to decide if someone designs roads properly
than if they write "good" software. The terrible developers end up doing
menial jobs like maintaining a library's website or being the "tech guy" at a
small business.

Another example is that extremely successful software like Slack or Whatsapp
was designed by just a couple very creative and good engineers. As powerful,
smart, and huge as a company like Google is, they can't manage to outcompete
the couple guys behind Slack or Whatsapp.

