Damage Control

A bunch of people took issue with the previous job posting, in particular where I said:  “Other studies have shown that there can be a ten-fold or thirty-fold difference in productivity between coders.  You guessed it:  we only want the people on the high end of the curve.”  Paul Sinnet said I lacked humility;  some guys offline said it was John Romero-ish; Chris Busse called me a snob...

Woah!

Maybe I miscommunicated.  Maybe everybody's thinking that we only want to hire those one-in-a-million Tiger-Woods-of-programming types – the absolute top of the curve. And that's not what I meant.  All I meant is we want programmers who are above average in productivity. Just like every other studio out there.

And Paul Sinnet has a good point.  People aren't necessarily good at self-assessment. I'd hate to think that somebody's out there going, “Oh, Torpex wouldn't hire me...I mean, I'm productive, but I don't know if I'm that productive.”

We do not think it's “worth rejecting a false negative over accepting a false positive.”  If we fail to hire somebody who would have been great, we've screwed up.  I keep thinking back to all the interviews I did when I was younger, trying to get a job, that I screwed up, where I froze and couldn't say what “SHLD” did, or was overly enthusiastic about Grady Booch's book with a team that only used C – those teams didn't hire me and I'm pretty sure they made a mistake. I turned out to be a pretty good coder.  We don't want to make that mistake.

And Paul's right: by posting a job listing that says, “Only apply if you're above average,” we might be ruling out a whole class of people who are above average but don't realize it. 

So, if you read the job posting, and you thought to yourself, “I'd like to apply but I don't know if I'm good enough,” hey, give it a shot!  Apply!  (Once again, jfristrom – at – torpexgames.com.)

Comments

[Jeff Knecht]

I've played a full round of golf about 3 times in my life. If I took 3 strokes to Tiger's 1, I bet I'd come out on top most of the time. But in programming, the game doesn't end when the programmer is done with the task. He still needs to integrate anything if necessary, add features in the future and fix any bugs that pop up. All code is a work in progress. And if you have someone with experience + intelligence (both in a gross amount), "30 times" does not even begin to describe the amount of time it saves.

[yeah]

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html

[Jamie]

Both these comments bring up the topic of experience: Jeff says it's essential, Joel says "hire an intern because the guys with experience are happy where they are."

In my own experience, an entry-level guy just out of college (or even just out of high school!) can kick as much ass as a vet. (Usually they're the guys who go above-and-beyond their course curriculum - they're involved in some kind of online development community somewhere, whether it's making mods or demos or contributing to Linux.)

That's why I didn't make any mention of necessary experience in the job post. If someone is good, we want to hire them, no matter what their experience level.

[jvalenzu]

It's a lot harder to evaluate candidates without experience. But those hardcore GNU/Lunix guys are usually pretty good.

[krassimir touevsky]

Your posting is still far better than the one I saw for Pandemic on gamasutra.com last week: "Junior Programmer w/ Intermediate Brain?"

what a joke...

[AnonymousCoward]

A side note, please, please change the lok of blog. Black background is a strict no-no. It would also be nice to tag all articles so that one can look at say all the malloc related stuff, rather than thingies about hiring interns.

[AnonymousFriend]

Jamie don't listen to AnonymousCoward. White on black is totally stylish and will get you hot chicks.

[jvalenzu]

Word.