"at least have a snowflake's chance in hell of recognising programing talent" is a good frame for the article. Unfortunately the article, as written, seems to promise much more.
"If you feel you can come up with a better list of indicators, please do so, I'll be the first to vote you up."
I think the counter point maybe that there may not be any valid "indicators" at all that a completely "programming blind" business guy can use. At least this is how I read PG's original essay. I agree with that viewpoint based on my experience.
Personally I found the essay (and the comments) amusing. It is just that I don't feel that this list of so called "indicators" have any practical utility, not because you didn't try your level best to come up with good indicators, but because the successful use of such indicators needs some programming experience (or trusted programmers for the business guy to delegate the decision to, who happen to be good at programming).
In other words I completely agree with your assessment that "Remember, a business guy is effectively flying blind. I can sit with someone for 15 minutes and tell you whether they're a good hacker or not without having asked a single technical question, but someone with no technical skills cannot do that - nor can they figure out how to recognise someone like me to ask me to do it for them. They'll get fooled by certification-laden "software architects" who haven't written a line of code in years and will happily help them hire a football team's worth of mediocre programming talent."
We disagree on what (if anything) can be done without a competent programmer in the loop somewhere, by a business guy with no programming experience using these(and possibly other) "indicators".
Unfortunately the article, as written, seems to promise much more
Well, I'll be sure to make the next version better. :-) This was posted 18 months ago (and it's the third time it makes the front page of HN).
We disagree on what (if anything) can be done without a competent programmer in the loop somewhere
I think these indicators can at least be used to whittle down the technical people that a business person knows down to a shortlist that is more likely to be good (rather than just have fancy titles). I'll grant you that the list can be improved, but I can't agree that the list is useless.
Fair Enough :-). As I said earlier, I think your intent (of finding these or potentially better indicators) is a noble one. I am not convinced of the efficiacy of such indicators in practice, when weilded by a business guy with no programming experience. But hey, I could be wrong and you could be right ! I'll be glad to change my viewpoint if I see this approach work in a consistent fashion!
That's kind of like the "hidden project" criteria, except public. Back when I wrote this article, I was only just starting to get to grips with the open source community (after using its products for a long time).
I think phrased as "has released things publicly", it's a bit too restrictive, because some people will be excellent programmers but just not have gotten into the whole open source community thing.
That said, from the point of view of helping narrow it down for someone who doesn't know programming much, then yes - if a programmer has released public libraries/applications that are in use, that's a great form of "extra-curricular" not-so-hidden project, so it could well be used as an additional indicator.
"If you feel you can come up with a better list of indicators, please do so, I'll be the first to vote you up."
I think the counter point maybe that there may not be any valid "indicators" at all that a completely "programming blind" business guy can use. At least this is how I read PG's original essay. I agree with that viewpoint based on my experience.
Personally I found the essay (and the comments) amusing. It is just that I don't feel that this list of so called "indicators" have any practical utility, not because you didn't try your level best to come up with good indicators, but because the successful use of such indicators needs some programming experience (or trusted programmers for the business guy to delegate the decision to, who happen to be good at programming).
In other words I completely agree with your assessment that "Remember, a business guy is effectively flying blind. I can sit with someone for 15 minutes and tell you whether they're a good hacker or not without having asked a single technical question, but someone with no technical skills cannot do that - nor can they figure out how to recognise someone like me to ask me to do it for them. They'll get fooled by certification-laden "software architects" who haven't written a line of code in years and will happily help them hire a football team's worth of mediocre programming talent."
We disagree on what (if anything) can be done without a competent programmer in the loop somewhere, by a business guy with no programming experience using these(and possibly other) "indicators".
peace,