Mediocre Programmers Suck
Another great article from Joel Spolsky: Hitting the High Notes. This time it’s about how software companies are made by the quality of their programmers. It sounds obvious, but in today’s world of outsourced programming, software companies should really step back and look at the quality of their workers. Joel starts off with this premise:
| Best Working Conditions | ? | Best Programmers | ? | Best Software | ? | Profit! |
Fog Creek Software, a company Joel started, was founded based on this theory. Joel’s article dives into some nice proof points that show that better programmers are more productive and are more likely come up with innovations that mediocre programmers will unlikely be able to come up with themselves.
The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.
Five Antonio Salieris won’t produce Mozart’s Requiem. Ever. Not if they work for 100 years.
…
The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful, satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And they’re not going to make a dent in Apple’s market share because the magical design talent is just not there. They don’t have it.
The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas who can hit the f6 in Mozart’s Queen of the Night is vanishingly small, and you just can’t perform The Queen of the Night without that famous f6.
A great read, as usual, from Joel.
July 26th, 2005 at 12:26 AM PDT
I dis outsourcing as much as you do. However the problem mentioned is not just outsouring.
Do you think in most of American software house, the star programmers got what they deserve? In what percentage? The bigger the firm is, in general # of stupid manager will increase, then they tend to hire mediocre programmers instead of star ones. Just my observations.
From another perpestive, if I start an outsourcing firm or in charge of hiring, I will start to hire more star programmer as mentors, and core of them, pay them more than they can earn in America, then this will beat the average American software house in quality in a huge percentage.
January 24th, 2006 at 4:20 PM PST
Rich, its interesting that large corporations are vehemently opposed to the concept of code reviews - a simple step that would easily eliminate over 60% of bugs - and prefer the tedious process of automated testing. One manager I spoke to attributed this to “do not want to show lack of trust to the programmer” - gimme a break! there is nothing better than to learn from a pro and to have code that blazes instead of reinventing the wheel and perpetuating the solitary task of coding into a silo’s development….
In fact outsourced organizations have a much better attitude towards this concept - what they may lack in extreme talent they make up for it in process, collaboration and team work, the way it was supposed to be donw.