[TUHS] [SPAM] Re: Re: Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[Adam Thornton via TUHS]

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 11:01 AM Larry McVoy via TUHS <tuhs at tuhs.org> wrote:

> I took a different approach, we hired excellent programmers
> and our stuff worked.
>
>
This is probably a COFF question, but I'm interested in your process for
hiring excellent programmers.  CCing to COFF and I suggest we continue it
there.

Through too much of my career, choosing whom to hire has been plagued by
"we end up picking people a lot like the people already on the team,"
which, while it maybe helps team cohesion, isn't a great way to get fresh
blood and new perspectives, but also by the even-less-tractable problem of
"people who are good at interviewing, know their algorithms, whatever, but
once they start working, they're not really very good at thinking in the
context of the actual problem before them."

And that itself can come in several flavors.  One is the person who
interviews well but doesn't actually do good software engineering, because
they've optimized for interviewing, not for shipping maintainable code, or
working on a team where their output has to play nice with other people's
output, or whatever, the point being, they sounded good for the two or
three hours you sent with them, but they don't actually produce good work.
Another is even worse: the person who really *is* all that good, but who's
a jerk that no one wants to work with.

Figuring out who's going to work well as an addition to an existing team
seems like a really difficult problem, particularly the Toxic Genius
problem.  I'd *much* rather work with someone who's OK-to-good at their job
and is easy to work with, doesn't get defensive if you ask "why X rather
than Y?", et cetera, than someone who's absolutely brilliant but everyone
dreads getting their code reviewed by them, or even worse, reviewing code
that the Toxic Genius has put a lot of ego into (which is generally all of
it).

My current boss is really good at hiring people who genuinely like working
together (and in my estimation, we're a highly competent team), and she's
written down some of her methodology down in https://sqr-081.lsst.io/, but
I'm very interested in how other people do this as well.

Adam