Better Development Through Competition?

theodp writes "Among the tips Derek Sivers offers for how to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen is an intriguing one: hire more than one person to complete your first programming milestone, with the expectation that one will go bad, one will be so-so, and one will be great. 'Yes it means you're paying multiple times for this first milestone,' says Sivers, 'but it's worth it to find a good one.' It's not a new idea mdash; the practice of pitting two different programmers against each other on the same task was noted three decades ago in Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine mdash; but one that never gained widespread acceptance. Should the programming code-off be adopted as a software development best practice?"pa href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdevelopers.slashdot.org% 2Fstory%2F10%2F06%2F20%2F1224250%2FBetter-Development-Through-Competition" target="_blank" title="Share on Facebook"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Better+Development+Through+Competition %3F%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F92jIIz" target="_blank" title="Share on Twitter"img src="http://a.fsdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a/ppa href="http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/06/20/1224250/Better-Development-Through-Competition?from=rss"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./ppa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/PiIei1zof7mWqa5lS8Vi_I09Fq8/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/PiIei1zof7mWqa5lS8Vi_I09Fq8/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/PiIei1zof7mWqa5lS8Vi_I09Fq8/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~at/PiIei1zof7mWqa5lS8Vi_I09Fq8/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotDevelopers/~4/LzClc4RESZw" height="1" width="1"/

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