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Computerworld - For much of the work that human beings perform, both the what and the how are defined. Under these circumstances, it's easy to evaluate employee performance or to devise hiring criteria. But where the task offers a limited degree of freedom, hiring managers must decide whether any marginal benefits to be gained with a more creative individual would justify the drawbacks, such as a higher salary.
Staffing software development positions is the case in point. For most companies, software isn't the principal product but a tool to support operations. Often, they lack in-house expertise in software development (especially given the methodological advances of the past decade). Companies need to devise hiring criteria for software developers, because those used in other fields translate poorly to IT.
For software developers, the what and especially the how of the work aren't rigidly defined. Gathering business requirements (the what) upfront is fraught with problems, because the requirements are usually ambiguous and will evolve in ways that will affect the software design. As for the how, programmers are often given a lot of leeway in the implementation with only loose guidelines. This shifts the burden of partitioning the task to the developer. All these factors have a bearing on the hiring criteria.
Below is a highly simplified matrix of worker types and types of work (of course, each dimension isn't dichotomous; also, experience and creativity aren't mutually exclusive, but they're only made so here to illustrate a point):

Type of worker Diligent, experienced, narrow specialization Creative, conceptually oriented Type of work Routine (limited degree of freedom) + (1) (mass production) - (2) Creative (many degrees of freedom) - (3) + (4) (conceptual work)

The general trend today seems to be that the more conceptual approach is making it into the mainstream, from college curricula to best practices.
Still, many companies treat software development like Category 1 and thus prefer diligent, experienced workers, sometimes to the detriment of conceptually oriented ones. This can be a problem at companies where poor software practices are deeply ingrained. Where developers aren't required to program against a well-designed blueprint (a framework of abstractions), the benefits of hiring conceptually oriented programmers who can deal with architectural issues are particularly pronounced. Paradoxically, such companies tend to have rigid salary caps for programmers, narrow requirements and a habit of hiring technical-school types who might be experienced but lack an understanding of general issues. IT managers in these companies tend to quantify the amount of work to be done in terms of deliverables that business users care about (such as a certain number