Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Protip: hire the three developers from different countries
how long until
And the job I just quit was being managed by a jack ass with neither managerial nor industry experience. He was literally hired so that his boss wouldn't have to worry about competing with him for his job in the future. It's something which is richly rewarded in the US. Screw things up via incompetence and you'll almost certainly get bought up. With all the executives getting a golden parachute while massive layoffs for redundancy affect the people actually doing the work.
Sucks, but that's what you get for working in a nation with one of the least free markets in the free world.
The front-end is the whole point of the program. If it isn't driving the backend development, you are doin' it wrong. Companies who let the backend drive development get blown away whenever something new comes along.