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0 pointsJtsummers9y ago0 comments

> Hiring another person just the same gets me the ability to do a little more of the same. Hiring someone different gets me something new.

At one job we had some people hired who, from the stories I'm reading here, wouldn't have been good "culture fits" at a lot of companies. They were older (50+). Didn't hang out after work. Came from a different background (cellphones).

Instead, one brought us much improved coding standards that greatly accelerated our development process (by greatly reducing our debugging time). The other was just ludicrously efficient as a programmer and knew the ins and outs of embedded like no one else and single-handedly rewrote one of our major projects (which the bosses had been toying with hiring a consultant to do).

But they weren't like the rest of us. Single, 20-something, male (not universally white, we had a decent mix there). They didn't hang out with us on Saturday night. They didn't go to lunch with us. They didn't game with us when we had random game nights.

But as professionals, they brought expertise and experience and mentorship that we desperately needed.

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superswordfish9y ago· 1 in thread

I've had the same experience, but only with embedded developers like you described. It probably has more to do with how talent is distributed age-wise in that field.

JtsummersOP9y ago

The good embedded programmers are awesome, and there's probably something beneficial to the era they developed their skills in. These guys would've started programming in the 70s, when even desktops weren't as powerful as a couple of the chips we got to use in our "embedded" environment.

They came out of that era without being spaghetti-coders like a couple of the guys that were, basically, ousted before I got to that office. So they learned to code well within constrained (cycles, memory) environments. As more cycles and memory became available, they just used it more effectively.