Re: Anyone on this list?

[Steve Baker <sjbaker1@airmail.net>]

Katie Lucas wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 01, 2002 at 09:14:11PM +0100, Josef Spillner wrote:

> All of the games companies I spoke to, we had much the same
> conversation. It goes "yeah, we're really keen on hiring serious C++
> and development people with games experience to try and sort out our
> development because we're aware that too many projects are taking too
> long and costing too much and then failing and you want **HOW MUCH** A
> YEAR?!?!?! My god, we can hire THREE people fresh out of university
> for that!!!!"

:-)

What these people don't seem to understand is that a really good Alpha
Geek can be 10 to 100 times as productive as the 'average' programmer.
This is something you don't see in any other profession (that I'm aware
of).

It follows that it's worth a companies time to seriously check out
potential recruits and pay 3x the going rate for someone who is really
good.

You get far more than 3x salary for 10x performance because if you need
less staff to complete the job then you can have a smaller office, tighter
deadlines, etc, etc.

That doesn't work well for massive projects - but for things like games,
it's a good way to structure your team.

The only downside is that you have to be prepared to fire people who don't
produce in practice what it looked like they'd do when you interviewed them.
Checking out their OpenSource activity is a great way to get a handle on
whether this is truly an Alpha Geek or not.

> One company read my CV and then insisted on me taking psychometric
> tests to see if I was smart enough to talk to their programming
> interviewers.[1][2] It was only at that second interview I found out they
> actually wanted a visual basic developer not a C++ developer. I	don't
> do VB. That was the point I was rude to them, because they'd wasted
> quite a lot of my time by then.

Yeah - I'd be pretty rude to them too.

---------------------------- Steve Baker -------------------------
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