But they still want cutting edge results...

Adi had posted about my recent series of posts about getting the best tools for the job.

Guilty as charged about the suggested. I argued that that we can get better productivity and higher quality, at the cost of having to train developers that we pick off the street. Adi think that I am overlooking the cost here:

I would like to refer to this post for backup. There is a tremendous amount of effort already invested in the tools. This means that I wouldn't have to build it myself in order to get the functionality that I need. Hell, something as simple* as MonoRail's [DataBind] can drastically reduce the amount of code that you need to write and maintain.

At the end, the job has to be done, and insisting on trying to do it via custom code is simply NIH. There are cases where I say that whatever exists out there is not going to work for this scenario, and I roll everything from scratch, but to get to the point where the official policy is "either Microsoft or hand-written stuff, nothing else" - which was an actual statement made by a client to me is a long shot.

About training, I do not think that it is too much to invest three days to a week in giving a new guy a chance to learn all the stuff that you are using. I had to bring in three new developers into my projects, none of them had any previous encounters with any of the technologies that we are using. All became productive in a very short time, one of them is exteremely annoying in managing to find the wierdest corner cases in NHibernate. They are all good developers, but I never even thought to ask them about whatever they knew about any of the stuff that we were using.

As an aside, I keep talking about the first steps of interviews, because I stop so many interviews there, but one of the things that I do in an interview is find out what the candidate doesn't know, and have them write something trivial with that technology. For instance, one candidate didn't know GDI, so I asked him to draw a line on the screen.

One of the worst candidates that I interviewed was someone that actually had NHibernate experiance, he was one of those that could not reverse a string...

* Simple is defined in terms of usage, not implementation, the data binder is certainly not simple.