
Whom to hire: The best, the mediocre or the cheapest - fogus
http://codemonkeyism.com/hire-mediocre-cheapest/
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slantyyz
Hiring on raw talent alone is a fallacy. All things being equal, yes, go with
raw talent. But make sure you consider how well your candidates play well with
others.

Would you rather have a pig-headed, anti-social, lone-wolf genius on a
project, or an above average coder with a great attitude?

Sometimes that 10x factor in raw coding productivity is offset by the side
effects of any major personality flaws.

One guy I used to work with was a brilliant coder who burned up any skill
benefits by wasting time on investigating bleeding edge technologies (many of
which didn't pan out), reinventing the wheel (look at me, I created a grid
control from scratch, and I only wasted a week on it!), ignoring customer
needs (you better spend 100K+ upgrading your servers and desktops so you can
run our $15K app!) and being nasty to his coworkers.

As much as I knock the guy for being an ass, he wrote nice, elegant code
faster than everyone else... when he was coding. I'd never hire him in a
million years.

