Why The New Guy Can’t Code

We've all lived the nightmare. A new developer shows up at work, and you try to be welcoming, but he 1 can't seem to get up to speed; the questions he asks reveal basic ignorance; and his work, when it finally emerges, is so kludgey that it ultimately must be rewritten from scratch by more competent people. And yet his interviewers—and/or the HR department, if your company has been infested by that bureaucratic parasite—swear that they only hire above-average/A-level/top-1% people. It's a big problem, especially now. There's a boom on. I get harassing emails from recruiters every day. Everyone's desperate to hire developers…but developers are not fungible. A great coder can easily be 50 times more productive than a mediocre one, while bad ones ultimately have negative productivity. Hiring a mediocre or bad developer is a terrible mistake for any organization; for a startup, it can be a catastrophic company-killer. So how can it happen so often? Like many of the hangovers that haunt modern software engineering, this is ultimately mostly Microsoft's fault. 2