[ratww]

> Your good developers are often the ones who like to tinker with frameworks, patterns and complexity. Note: good developers don't force this down people's throats, but they're always thinking about what they can apply in the future. That's not to say they can't be perfectly fine working on boring code. But they often get bored with it. They can be 5x as productive as your average developer when working on the boring code, but you're just ticking down a clock in a lot of cases.

In my experience that depends.

But the tinkering kind is often satisfied when they are able to tinker on their own code. Even (or especially!) if they're allowed to do it during working hours. But allowing engineers to literally hone their craft on the clock is something that is becoming rarer and rarer, unfortunately.

But I agree that a developer that refuses to admit failure of their experiments and wants to force their experiments on others is a problem, of course.

On the other hand, there's more to this job than coding, and a lot of people interested in "learning" will leave as soon as they find out there's nothing more about the problem-domain to learn.

[lupire]

Why does tinkering on the clock matter? Why not just hire people for 30hrs/week if that's what they want?

It's not the 1970s where you can't afford a computer at home.