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Yes. My employer employs something like 70,000 programmers.

Your way gets you 10 programmers that do a really good job. Now find the other 69,990 programmers. (I like to think I get a lot of work done, but I can't get 7,000 people's work done.)

(If it was my company, would I have a bunch of unrelated development departments with no common standards on 5 continents? No. But it's not my company, so I don't get to decide, I can only observe.)



If you want to hire 70,000 below average developers in no time flat you can. Realistically you are not hiring that many at once but over a long period of growth.

All I am saying is that using open source as a way to find talented individuals who love what they do and are really good is one solid way I have found to find new talent. If that can only get me X number of devs a year than that is X number I don't have to hunt through resumes for.


I've yet to be convinced any company can productively employ 10,000 programmers let alone 70k. Do you have counterexamples?




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