I am a self employed independent software development consultant at 
Good Programmers vs. Bad Programmers
Via Raganwald I read On Programmers and Business by Eugueny Kontsevoy, which basically stipulates that dumb engineers can ruin a company.
A sufficiently dumb engineer may hurt you more than most competitors will. When organized in loose formations, even in modest numbers, they can even kill an otherwise healthy business.
Kontsevoy follow up post deals with the Ecosystems of Smart Hackers, which deals with how these dumb engineers gets hired in the first place.
There are many different factors that allow these unqualified individuals to get engineering jobs, lack of decent interviewers is certainly a big one. … What I discovered was shocking: literally everyone can get a programming job if he or she simply goes to enough interviews and tells the same made up story in response to “so… what exactly did you do at company X? Your resume said you wrote reporting system using Java and DB2…”
Answering the question as to whether good programmers costs more or not:
As shocking as it may appear, money is not everything. Smart people like to hang out with other smart people. Similarly, mediocrity comes in volumes too.
I especially like this last quote: “mediocrity comes in volumes”. So true, so true.
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on September 30th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
[...] fits nicely with a previous post of mine on Good Programmers vs. Bad Programmers. For many reasons this quote fits perfectly with my exprerience as job hunter, but also from [...]