Hiring and the market for lemons (2016)
When the topic of &quot;great&quot; developers comes up, I always challenge anyone to define <i>precisely</i>, in quantifiable terms, what a &quot;great developer&quot; is exactly.<p>How do you know someone is a &quot;great developer&quot; if you can&#x27;t, in tangible terms, say exactly what a &quot;great developer&quot; is?<p>This is even more of an issue when recruiting because recruiting is an assessment process to determine if someone meets some requirement.  But just like software testing, if you can&#x27;t quantify the requirement, then you can&#x27;t quantify a test to determine if someone meets that requirement, and therefore the interview&#x2F;assessment process is simply voodoo recruiting.<p>Voodoo recruiting is when you have the appearance of scientific process in recruiting.  - a process, - a set of questions that appear good, - a coding test that seems technical enough that it must be telling you something meaningful about the candidate, - the opinions of many people on the candidate.  But in fact all of this is voodoo because you still can&#x27;t directly define the requirement and thus you never known if you ever found what you are looking for, which is not actually known.<p>The final decision in recruiting a &quot;great developer&quot;, as always, comes down to some subjective opinion based on a range of criteria that can&#x27;t be proven to have had any meaning in the first place.