Well, I don't mean that competence is 10% of a hire, more that attitude is 90% of competence, especially in our field where things change so quickly. Your hires should be competent to perform the job.
Still, the analogue to doctors or lawyers is quite different. Most programming languages are pretty similar and once you get the basic concepts down you don't need to radically modify it to switch from one context to another. Information and manuals about programming languages, troubleshooting, etc., is available plentifully online, and someone with a basic grasp and an attitude of teachibility and eagerness to learn can make a lot of progress very quickly.
Things don't work the same way with lawyering or medicine, but probably the most important difference is that someone isn't going to be sent to the jail or the morgue because your programmer wrote a naive implementation of something (generally).
I agree with the basic idea of reasonable testing, which is why I said that it "sounds good on paper". It's just that most places don't do it right, so I don't get excited anymore about workplaces that claim to test for competence.
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Well, I don't mean that competence is 10% of a hire, more that attitude is 90% of competence, especially in our field where things change so quickly. Your hires should be competent to perform the job.
Still, the analogue to doctors or lawyers is quite different. Most programming languages are pretty similar and once you get the basic concepts down you don't need to radically modify it to switch from one context to another. Information and manuals about programming languages, troubleshooting, etc., is available plentifully online, and someone with a basic grasp and an attitude of teachibility and eagerness to learn can make a lot of progress very quickly.
Things don't work the same way with lawyering or medicine, but probably the most important difference is that someone isn't going to be sent to the jail or the morgue because your programmer wrote a naive implementation of something (generally).
I agree with the basic idea of reasonable testing, which is why I said that it "sounds good on paper". It's just that most places don't do it right, so I don't get excited anymore about workplaces that claim to test for competence.