Yeah it is true. When you are working on a small team (2-3 people) it is real important that you all get along. Plus being a small office (~35 people) we can't hire people that aren't willing to chip in and work on basically anything. One guy left because he felt some of the things asked of him were beneath him.

A couple things about this.... First it is very hard to find good people. I have interviewed a bunch of people lately and it is not only skill set that matters. That is actually almost secondary. Most important in my small shop is a cultural fit. By culture, I am mean the one in the office. Will the new hire be able to work with / on the team? We have hired some smart folks that weren't the right cultural fit and they either left to find a job that they were more comfortable with or flat out let go. Second off, we are owned by a big Fortune 500 company. We constantly get pressure to offshore/outsource. However, our attempts to do so have failed miserably. Generally resulting in my office having to actually do the work that someone over seas was contracted to do. It is so bad that I actually said to our GM, "Why are we paying people to not do any work?" Pressure from the Street. That really ticks me off cause my office is not a cost center. We make money and plenty of it. Still we are required by corporate to attempt to offshore a certain percentage of our work.

I think anyone that has been doing this for awhile recognizes the value of comments. If I have to go back and modify something I wrote a year ago and I can't understand what I was attempting to do, then the job will be more difficult. If I can't understand what I did, then the chances of someone else figuring it out are slim. Comments provide a road map. If I think what I am writing will be difficult to understand the intention of, then I always put in comments. I don't write function headers, but target my comments to the specific areas that I think will need it.