Hiring Programmers and The High Cost of Low Quality

An anonymous reader writes "Why is it so hard to find good programmers? And why should companies favor hiring fewer more senior developers rather than many junior ones? Frank Wiles discusses his thoughts in his article A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality"

Comments

Best damn article in a while

[COMON$]

While I am not a dev, Sysadmin here, this is probably the best article I have read on the subject in a long time. This idea of lets get someone in and train them up is assinine. Of course not every company can afford 120K a year but what about the lower end, midwest people get hit up with 45K a year jobs all the time, if the company would jump to 60-70K they would get 2X the dev and also get a much better product. I am currently with a company that made the mistake of hiring a below par employee to dev a site. Now they lucked out and got someone for the same price who doesnt care about salary but it a hell of a PHP developer, probably the best I have ever worked with. He spends 90% of his time fixing mistakes of the last dev and does things in minutes that took his predecessor days.

Same concept goes with my job field, I spend a considerable amount of time consulting, fixing poorly configured networks and servers. You cant just grab a joe off the street and expect him to be a professional or put out professional work without having learned his/her lessons, they will make mistakes learning, do you want it to be on your buck and your network?

Re:Sigh.

[Baddas]

I would say an expert can at times generate up to 3 times a much output, but 10 times is ludicrous.

Heh, quantity is not quality. Do you have any metrics? DeMarco and Lister do, and their data seems to show 10x. As in, not 'more code' but 'better code, fewer bugs, faster execution'