Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

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.

OK, a lot of different things here. First, having opinions about vim/emacs is correlated with being a good dev, so yes, it can be a good predictor, but hardly a requirement. 2, I hear a lot of complaints about white boarding, but I don't get it. I don't use it in my interview 1/

process, but I don't understand why a capable developer wouldn't be able to write code on a whiteboard, apart from obvious mistype-level errors

One issue is that when you code in a text editor you will typically write lines in a different order than the one they ultimately appear in. Difficult to do this on a whiteboard. And that's just one way in which they mess with the way people normally think.