The only way one can hire a programmer is to be a programmer.
That's a awfully large sense of entitlement there, one that is very, very difficult to support. I'm surprised such a comment is coming from you.
While I don't excuse idiot HR recruiters and headhunting firms on quotas, there is a level between clueless and mastery that a person can attain that allows them to make the comparative judgement required in the hiring process.
I know little about law, but enough to hire a semi competent lawyer, I know little about masonry, but have successfully hired a firm to rebuild a chimney. They are probably not the absolute best at their professions. They probably take shortcuts that purists wouldn't like. So be it. They get the job done and that's good enough for me.
There is really no reason that someone with little knowledge of programming cannot properly hire or outsource a competent developer for work that they need to get done.
To suggest otherwise is only to worry about which way the mortar is spread in between the brick, when it all boils down.
That's a awfully large sense of entitlement there, one that is very, very difficult to support. I'm surprised such a comment is coming from you.
Sorry if that's how it sounded; that's not what I intended.
A little background...
I have worked for about 100 managers over the years, and with few exceptions, here's my experience:
- Those who were programmers were able to understand, examine, critique, question, and drive almost anything I worked on.
- Those who were not programmers were able to fit whatever I was doing into their project plan and evaluate it only through the eyes of other programmers (who may or may not have done a very good job of it).
I have also maintained hundreds of thousands of lines of code and I can predict with uncanny accuracy that which was written for a programmer boss and that which wasn't. There is a difference.
There are probably billions (or trillions) of lines of shit code out there that never would have made it through peer review of almost any programmer here at hn. But no one had to worry about that; they were written by programmers working for non-technical bosses.
Hope that paints a better picture of my skepticism :-)
I can certainly attest to shit code getting through non-tech bosses.
It's not just a matter of 'getting away with something' either. A badly managed programmer won't know the larger scope of what they are doing, or even worse be doing something the wrong way because they 'have to', and the code inevitably becomes a series of hacks fixing whatever the latest requirement or problem is.
That's a awfully large sense of entitlement there, one that is very, very difficult to support. I'm surprised such a comment is coming from you.
While I don't excuse idiot HR recruiters and headhunting firms on quotas, there is a level between clueless and mastery that a person can attain that allows them to make the comparative judgement required in the hiring process.
I know little about law, but enough to hire a semi competent lawyer, I know little about masonry, but have successfully hired a firm to rebuild a chimney. They are probably not the absolute best at their professions. They probably take shortcuts that purists wouldn't like. So be it. They get the job done and that's good enough for me.
There is really no reason that someone with little knowledge of programming cannot properly hire or outsource a competent developer for work that they need to get done.
To suggest otherwise is only to worry about which way the mortar is spread in between the brick, when it all boils down.