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Comment by danielrhodes | Hacker News Reader

Given the harm a bad coder can do to a codebase and the morale of a team, it is better to not hire a good coder than hire a bad one.

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I totally agree. The whole point of the post was to point out that there are lots of good coders out there that are being labeled as bad coders because of poor hiring processes.

I agree with you that these companies are probably turning away qualified developers. However at my current job it is the prevailing feeling, and I mostly agree, that it's better to turn away a few qualified candidates in order to prevent a mis-hire.

I generally agree with that sentiment too -- having seen what a bad hire can do first-hand. However, I feel like the industry has gone too far in that direction, and may in fact be selecting for a different kind of mis-hire.

When you spend an entire interview doing college computer science quiz type questions, and none of it on process, code review, coding style, development philosophy, approach to testing, etc.... you end up selecting for people who are good test-takers, but may not be any good at writing maintainable code. Or debugging. Or troubleshooting production issues. etc... etc...

I actually agree with you. This is why I never make a hiring decision based on a single trivia question, but I do ask trivia questions that are all over the map on a topic in order to find something the candidate is good at. Honestly, if you can answer any of my trivia questions in a deep and meaningful way that demonstrates insight into the topic then I'm satisfied.

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