As a Manager: What I value in developers | Hacker News Reader

As a Manager: What I value in developers

codemonkeyism.com

14 pointsfogus12 comments

I don't think I quite get what he means by "professionalism" (which is a stupid word in most contexts). I think he means "high quality craftsmanship," ie "not amateurish."

My question to the author is: how do /you/ balance the need for craftsmanship against deadlines? Most managers pay lip service to quality at best, some don't even do that. How do you meaningfully encourage your professionals to craft carefully?

There is a minor irony in that he seems to praise that kind of thing while at the same time making some slightly jarring grammatical and spelling errors.

Of course, English may not be his first language, so I am certainly not trying to condemn him, but it is still ironic in an essay that spends substantial time talking about not cutting corners.

When I act as a hiring manager, I take a slightly different tract from this essay. Professionalism (by which he seems to actually mean craftsmanship) and "getting things done" are certainly important, but they are neither enough nor necessarily the most important things.

If it is a large project where the new developer will have to work on a team, than being able to work with and coordinate with that team are almost more important than just being able churn out the code. After all, if he writes beautiful code that no one else can interface with than it is of little value.

Also, in technology a willingness and ability to learn are vital in a long term employee. The technology will continue to change, if the new employee is not willing and able to change with it than they will not remain valuable for the long haul, and with the difficulty of firing people in large organizations that can be a major problem.

Craftsmanship and an ability to "get things done" should certainly be criteria and high on the list, but they should not be the only ones in most cases.

UofIowa psych dept did some stats: what applicant-questionaire items correlate to 1st annual review. Was it IQ? Education? Professionalism? No, the #1 correlation (only correlation of significance) was Conscientiousness.

Out of curiosity, what sort of applicant questions and responses did they use to measure conscientiousness?

"Are you conscientious?"

A meta-analysis of 85 years worth of studies on the subject places IQ as the best predictor (conscientiousness comes in 4th)

See here: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...

Interesting contrast.

Short term view: Superficial markers of success are most highly valued.

But in the long run: Intellectual power matters most.

The article seems to echo the "people who don't do TDD are not professional" cant from Bob Martin.

I think Martin has started a whole new movement of browbeating developers when they don't follow whatever arbitrary policies you think are best. Instead of showing them the benefit and getting out of the way, the new strategy seems to be to label them unprofessional until they submit to your way of thinking.

(sigh)

As a reader: I value good fonts.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

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