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If you can’t get to a conference, let the conference come to you! There are a ton of free recorded conference presentations online... Coming soon to a cubicle near you.
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There are a lot of good webcasts from Microsoft.
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What about free beer and useless toys? It's not a conference if I haven't won yet another USB-powered rocket launcher in a Gran Turismo contest.
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Second 
Sincerely Yours,
Brian Hart
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As if the level of social interaction we get wasn't bad enough already.
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Historically, the lengths of text messages were usually limited due to technical reasons. For example, the data packets holding SMS messages only had room for 160 characters (see below). Now that those technical reasons matter less, people are recognizing that limits have other advantages. I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
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Definately on phones don't want long messages, and I do like short emails on some topics.
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This post describes the relatively undocumented API for debuggers (or other low level programs) that can be used to enumerate the existing threads in a process and receive asynchronous notifications when threads are created or destroyed. This API also provides asynchronous notifications of other interesting thread-related events and feels very similar to the interface exposed by libdl for notifying debuggers when libraries are loaded dynamically at run time. Understanding this might also help unravel the plot in Primer.
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The difference between a bad developer and an average developer is small, but the difference between an average developer and a great developer is enormous. It’s an ocean of difference. A great developer is 20x more valuable than an average developer, easily, and so it’s critical to hire one great developer, instead of 20 average developers. Help us Rockstar Ninja Developer. You're our only hope!
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So I posted a comment on his website and he didn't like it so now he's blocked me from ever posting on his blog. I wasn't even that rude. I only asked where he got the 20x number from and suggested he made it up. He doesn't, apparently, have the courage of his convictions and felt it better to delete my post and ban me rather than try and answer my questions.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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Rockstars sometimes have huge, but fragile, egos.
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I take it these are your posts:
"•Mark
What a pile of festering crap. 20x? Really? Where did you get that number from? Thin air is my guess. There is no objective way to decide who is a great and not so great developer. It can change with time and project and by the people you are judged against in the team you happen to be in at any given time. And you might be awful at distinguishing great developers because you’re a self-obsessed and talent-less twat but some of us have gotten reasonable enough at it not to keep hiring morons. Keep your mouth shut and let people think you’re a fool; open it and let them know you are a fool.
•John
Seriously? You think by deleting my post that makes you right? You’re not right: you can’t just pluck a number out of thin air and not expect to be lambasted for it. Still, I suppose you’ll delete this as well – your ego must be terribly fragile if it can’t take any criticism."
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Your point?
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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No. I'm assuming they are your point, not mine. I found his article too poor to even summon up the energy to be apathetic about it.
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They are indeed. Normally I don't bother but I am 86.7% against people who make up random numbers or statistics to make a point.
"If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur." Red Adair.
nils illegitimus carborundum
me, me, me
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I'm 15.2x more likely to agree with that point than with a poke in the nose with a wire brush.
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20x seems too high to me. I seem to recall that it's been measured as 10x difference in productivity between different ability levels (I forget where this stat comes from, probably Mythical Man Month, Code Complete or Joel Spolsky, or maybe a combination of all?)
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TLDR version: good developers contribute code, bad developers contribute crud (not "create, read, update, delete").
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I kind of agree with the article but the 20x figure is completely arbitrary. To me good developers along with getting the job done also consider future implications of their actions. There are too many developers who get their immediate tasks done, only to stock your codebase up with future WTFs as soon as you need to reuse a part of it.
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Unless you have bushy-bearded purists who write .NET code as if it was still C++ and they say, "Our code is good, your new way of doing it is bad."
Sincerely Yours,
Brian Hart
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Or maybe hire a Rockstar Manager who can get the most out of one excellent and 20 average devs.
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Your odds of finding a dev that is 20x over the competition are pretty close to zero. I've worked with several devs at different companies who thought they were that great and what they produced was always horrifyingly bad. Usually along the lines of: "That's some great code there guys, it doesn't do what the client needs, trying to hack it into something the client can use will only take us 3x longer, but it is neat-o."
I'd rather have 20 devs to bounce ideas off of and to try new things than 1 rockstar.
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The developer skills are multiple.
Some are great coders.
Some are great documenters.
Some are great debugger.
Some are great finishers.
Some are great analyst.
... probably many more
In my experience when someone is super skilled in one of those skill he will then be really poor in others.
In my opinion there is no such thing as a great developer.
There are great teams though.
A great team of developers is a team where team members have complementary skills and respect each others strength and weaknesses.
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This is an extremely opinionated article. I am sure that there is a big advantage in hiring better developers, but he does not justify the 20x. Without backing data, the article is basically useless. Why not say 100x. He could have. Maybe not as beleivable. Also, what is even better, is hiring a manager that can create better developers. How much better would be a manager that can create a successful development group than even a great developer. There is a saying I saw: Learn from other people's successes, not their failures, and definately not your own failure.
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