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Something seems a bit off about that anecdote to me--exaggerated perhaps?

There's a "highly recommended", "smart", Ph.D candidate developer and he can't do in 6 weeks what the author could do do in 30 minutes, even with the author holding his hand? That's not a 10x difference, that's a 500x difference.

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Yeah, I've worked with quite a few ppl like this. Usually they are very smart, read programming books, blogs HN, etc. and interview very well. The problem seems to be motivation, as the author pointed they face a problem and don't have the will power to keep throwing possible solutions at it. Or the motivation to write those 500 lines of CRUD and simple business logic.

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