Comment by josefresco
8 years ago
Authors of widely successful but "buggy" software are now lottery winners? My point was that these "unqualified" engineers clearly have something that separates themselves from even "genius" engineers. Hustle (to name one trait) matters, sometimes more than qualification and academic credentials.
No, but if being an author of successful software makes you a good employee (Because surely, that success is wholly transitive), then being a lottery winner would too. (After all, you were lucky - and it's good to hire lucky people.)
Put another way - does being a security engineer for Equifax make you an obvious hire at Google? I mean, every American Google employee has used Equifax's credit report systems, or used a bank that uses Equifax's credit report systems - clearly, said security engineer knows what he's doing.
Equifax's ubiquitousness is not a direct result or byproduct of the engineer's work.
And neither is the ubiquity of any one particular software product. There are always factors beyond 'Was Bob a good engineer.' 95% of businesses exclusively used Windows in the early 2000s, but that doesn't mean that you should blindly hire anyone who worked on it.
The author of that blog post wrote Homebrew. Thousands of engineers use it on a daily basis. That's great. I use thousands of pieces of software, worked on by hundreds of thousands of people, on a daily basis. That doesn't mean I should skip the interview process, and hire all of them. Some of those people are rock stars. Some... Are awful developers.