A few years ago I met a 'superstar' type developer who was considered hot shit amongst the usual crowd. I met him with a view of hiring him (or, trying to) mostly because of his reputation.
I think i must have been the first person who really drilled into his knowledge, because he was more interested in talking about who he knew, projects he had been associated with etc.
I got a funny feeling about him, and asked that he do a simple code project. A week overdue later, he asks for our FTP credentials to upload it. I say that we don't run ftp anywhere, and that he needs to scp to the box. He said he had no idea that ssh can 'copy files'. urgh. He later worked out that his GUI FTP client supported SSH and got so excited about it that he messaged me to tell me about it.
I have never judged the capabilities of a developer based on reputation since.
It's kind of hard to judge this superstar developer you mentioned based on his knowledge of some of those UNIX tools.
Josh Bloch admitted himself that he's kind of not really "up"-ing his knowledge/skill when it comes to tools (git, eclipse, intellij, etc) but he writes damn good code with just Emacs.
He knows his Math & Stats to debunk benchmark and stuff like that and he knows the pitfalls of complexity.
ye but the mistake I made was to take his reputation and have a pre-conception about his abilities to the point where I almost didn't test him on anything.
he also fell apart in the code test, which was pretty simple (using a library I had written, which he made a copy of and edited). I have no idea how this guy got his reputation, but it seemed to be more amongst non-tech tech people, if you know what I mean (who are easier to bullshit, I guess)
when I started my career I worked with a bunch of old IBM mainframe guys who had no idea about modern web stuff but were some of the best programmers I have ever met. I could take a problem to them in a language they didn't know (so for eg. VB.NET) and they would talk me through it.
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A few years ago I met a 'superstar' type developer who was considered hot shit amongst the usual crowd. I met him with a view of hiring him (or, trying to) mostly because of his reputation.
I think i must have been the first person who really drilled into his knowledge, because he was more interested in talking about who he knew, projects he had been associated with etc.
I got a funny feeling about him, and asked that he do a simple code project. A week overdue later, he asks for our FTP credentials to upload it. I say that we don't run ftp anywhere, and that he needs to scp to the box. He said he had no idea that ssh can 'copy files'. urgh. He later worked out that his GUI FTP client supported SSH and got so excited about it that he messaged me to tell me about it.
I have never judged the capabilities of a developer based on reputation since.
It's kind of hard to judge this superstar developer you mentioned based on his knowledge of some of those UNIX tools.
Josh Bloch admitted himself that he's kind of not really "up"-ing his knowledge/skill when it comes to tools (git, eclipse, intellij, etc) but he writes damn good code with just Emacs.
He knows his Math & Stats to debunk benchmark and stuff like that and he knows the pitfalls of complexity.
ye but the mistake I made was to take his reputation and have a pre-conception about his abilities to the point where I almost didn't test him on anything.
he also fell apart in the code test, which was pretty simple (using a library I had written, which he made a copy of and edited). I have no idea how this guy got his reputation, but it seemed to be more amongst non-tech tech people, if you know what I mean (who are easier to bullshit, I guess)
when I started my career I worked with a bunch of old IBM mainframe guys who had no idea about modern web stuff but were some of the best programmers I have ever met. I could take a problem to them in a language they didn't know (so for eg. VB.NET) and they would talk me through it.