{"id":1252,"date":"2004-08-04T21:28:56","date_gmt":"2004-08-04T21:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-1252.html"},"modified":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","modified_gmt":"2006-09-23T19:30:11","slug":"not-a-great-hacker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/2004\/08\/04\/not-a-great-hacker\/","title":{"rendered":"Not a great hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There are so many superstar programmers in the blogging world, speaking in geek tongues, blowing off about the latest RSS aggregator they&#8217;ve written in their lunch breaks, and making 48-hour marathon coding sessions sound like a <em>good<\/em> thing, that it&#8217;s refreshing to find two articles in the same day that emphasize some of the <em>other<\/em> qualities that a professional developer needs:<\/p>\n<p>Eric Sink:  <a href=\"http:\/\/software.ericsink.com\/entries\/No_Great_Hackers.html\">Great Hacker != Great Hire<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/software.ericsink.com\/entries\/No_Great_Hackers.html\"><p>[&#8230;] When great hackers are as fussy as Graham says they are, they&#8217;re not worth the trouble.  We want the super-productivity, and we want the innate love of software development, but we don&#8217;t want all the extra baggage.  Instead:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Hire people who care about users.<\/li>\n<li>Hire people who understand the difference between a job and a hobby.<\/li>\n<li>Hire people who want to contribute in lots of different ways to the success of the product.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s okay to be in awe of these great hackers.  But as a practical matter, small ISVs would be much better off hiring professionals.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Paul Tyma:  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tyma.com\/modules\/news\/article.php?storyid=24\">Kick-ass Software Developer looking for work<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"http:\/\/www.tyma.com\/modules\/news\/article.php?storyid=24\"><p>So &#8211; the question wraps around to &#8220;Is a kick-ass programmer the best kind of programmer to hire to make the company the most money&#8221;. The answer seems obviously yes, but it may not be. In a specific instance we learned (as do all consulting firms) that sending 3 rockstar programmers to a client ends up with the &#8220;too many cooks in the kitchen&#8221; syndrome.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are so many superstar programmers in the blogging world, speaking in geek tongues, blowing off about the latest RSS aggregator they&#8217;ve written in their lunch breaks, and making 48-hour marathon coding sessions sound like a <em>good<\/em> thing, that it&#8217;s refreshing to find two articles in the same day that emphasize some of the <em>other<\/em> qualities that a professional developer needs:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-techie"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/martin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}