Comments on: Hiring Developers and the Big Picture http://www.supertom.com/2008/04/14/hiring-developers-and-the-big-picture/ Tom in all his grooviness.... Tue, 02 Dec 2008 14:07:54 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2 By: zbo http://www.supertom.com/2008/04/14/hiring-developers-and-the-big-picture/#comment-6561 zbo Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:00:55 +0000 http://www.supertom.com/2008/04/14/hiring-developers-and-the-big-picture/#comment-6561 Great points, Tom, especially the "it takes a real expert to see this". Psychological studies show that when people are asked what option they prefer between two diametrically opposed choices, they choose the option they are most familiar with. *However*, this is only because people lack the training to distinguish which option best solves their problem. The same studies show that experts who know what to look for will not choose on the basis of familiarity but will select the option that solves their problem. One other comment: Intelligence is not uniformly distributed, both among people and within people. Just because you *know* Skippy is superior to Jiffy peanut butter doesn't mean you know when to allocate on the stack and when to allocate on the heap. Great points, Tom, especially the “it takes a real expert to see this”. Psychological studies show that when people are asked what option they prefer between two diametrically opposed choices, they choose the option they are most familiar with. *However*, this is only because people lack the training to distinguish which option best solves their problem. The same studies show that experts who know what to look for will not choose on the basis of familiarity but will select the option that solves their problem.

One other comment: Intelligence is not uniformly distributed, both among people and within people. Just because you *know* Skippy is superior to Jiffy peanut butter doesn’t mean you know when to allocate on the stack and when to allocate on the heap.

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