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Better Development Through Competition?
theodp writes "Among the tips Derek Sivers offers for how to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen is an intriguing one: hire more than one person to complete your first programming milestone, with the expectation that one will go bad, one will be so-so, and one will be great. 'Yes it means you're paying multiple times for this first milestone,' says Sivers, 'but it's worth it to find a good one.' It's not a new idea — the practice of pitting two different programmers against each other on the same task was noted three decades ago in Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine — but one that never gained widespread acceptance. Should the programming code-off be adopted as a software development best practice?"
My first employment was handled that way.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'd say that when you hire three programmers, it is more appropriate to expect that one of them will be bad, the second one will be bad, and the third one will be the worst of all.
I HATE people who generalise ... it's always fat bald middle-class suburban under-achieving married white people who do that!