Hiring Good Programmers Matters

Doctor O writes "Joel Spolsky (of joelonsoftware fame) has some good points and fun with numbers on the quality of programmers and whether it is more profitable to go with cheap or good programmers. His point is that a good programmer will simply create code of a quality that average programmers never can create. An interesting read."

Comments

Stan Eisenstat is an amazing professor...

[Vengie]

I took CS 323a...in fact, I took it in Fall 2001, making my times part of the COMPRESS01, (which we called encode-decode, and we had to learn how to do hard and soft links, as they called the same executeable), SHELL01, et cetera. The best part of TFA is where Joel discusses the assignments in 323a.....I still have my time.log files, and am shocked at some of the time figures -- although they were posted when I was an undergraduate, I never really paid much attention to the statistics...

As a side note, Stan Eisenstat puts CS kids through some crazy hoops. In the compress program, you have to detect how you have been called (Argv[0]) -- except you cant just look for "encode" or "decode" -- as one of Stan's favorites was putting the file in an /encode/foo/ directory and then calling it. His method of teaching things (YAGNI) was simply amazing....and it is sad that he isn't more well known. I still cherish my class notes.