Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I've spent many, many very tiring hours interviewing developers. All I wanted was to hire the most cost-effective ones, not even the best (I can train juniors). How exactly am I incentivized to keep the barrier high? Do you think I enjoy being overworked?

You're not. You're the one being thwarted.

Please elaborate. How exactly am I being thwarted? How do you think this cultural barrier conspiracy works?

Why do you think you're overworked? Why do you think it is extremely difficult to hire cost-effective devs?

When I ask some theory question, most answer with something their memorized, but when I ask follow-up questions it's often evident they did not understand it.

Devs like this can sometimes manage to glide by because the people interviewing them (for low-range salaries/hourly work, anyway) aren't themselves technically competent & are easy to impress via jargon and conceptual sleight-of-hand (basically, a Nerd Savvy performance)

Yes, I agree. But I thought we were arguing and you were trying to prove that it's just a cultural barrier? Aren't you kind of disproving your own point now?

It's not the case that *anyone* can be a strong dev... but for a long time, you were expected to play the Nerd Savvy game for access to the market — e.g. have strong opinions on vim/emacs, be able to whiteboard runnable code, etc. Wrt creative problem-solving, it's a distraction.