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I don't think that is really a problem. We hire people to do a good job and most of the times kick-ass programmer isn't the best person for the job. At least for a smaller company we need someone who can understand business needs, can communicate better and Add Value. This is a far complex job than implementing red-black trees.

Consider this: We need to find the most shared URLs on Facebook in last 24 hours.

I can perfectly see why a lousy coder might achieve this objective better than a kick-ass one. A coder with average skills quickly figured out that Buzz-sumo has a public webpage with that content which can very easily be scraped using phantomjs. Job got done.

Another great coder suggested to me I should buy $10K per month Facebook firehose. He is not wrong and that is a good solution too but he failed to see that we are building a POC and not a full featured product.

Needs of companies are complex, many times if you can pay great salary just having a filter for IQ is good enough. But in most cases I think it is far better to look at an individual and judge.




Would the Buzz-sumo programmer be expected to investigate their terms of service too? (Often scraping is prohibited.)


I am just giving an example. For a POC it does not matter much.




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