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How to Recognize a Good Programmer
KDan writes to share an article he has written about what some of the key factors in recognizing a good programmer. "It's not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don't always have the 'official' experience to demonstrate that they're great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone's a great programmer."
Now I know exactly how to manipulate my resume to look like a good programmer.
I would be much more interested in an article that tells programmers how to recognize good business people. I don't want to waste five years of my life implementing some POS idea by Joe Random MBA that is never going to make a dime. I am extremely hesitant to go work for any startup unless I personally know the people starting it and know that they have a track record of making good business decisions. From my experience, many business people feel the same way about technical people.
And what is this about startups failing because the business people hire crappy programmers. Has anyone considered that maybe selling pet food over the internet is simply less efficient that the distribution system build by companies like Wal-Mart?
After 15 years in IT, I've noticed that programmers as a lot typically cannot spell even the most basic 3-syllable words, so when you find a coder who actually spells properly get out your checkbook. Like it or not, being able to spell is a significant indication of character, especially the propensity for paying attention to detail (a trait you certainly want in a professional coder).
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
I think the author of this article is way off the mark. The title should have been "How to recognize a programmer who's likely to work 18 hours for very little pay." Almost all of his points boil down to the fact that he thinks all good programmers are the ones that can pad out their resume with 900 technologies and eat, sleep, and breathe programming. I can't even begin to tell you how many absolutely amazing C++/Java/Python programmers I've met who I can almost guarantee have never even touched Ruby before. Just because a programmer doesn't go out of their way to try out every single new technology that hits the market doesn't diminish their abilities at those they do use. The author of this article is clearly looking for a programming work horse that he can throw unreasonable expectations on and toss new technology buzz words at until their head explodes. Guess that's probably what you need when you plan a startup and only want to hire one guy to do the work of 10...
That list is very, VERY good in my opinion, if obvious (but not so obvious to HR people).
.NET, and even if you worked with them constantly for the next 10 years, learning something new every day, you'd still have more to find (and by more, I mean significant things). Thats why once, in .NET, I coded some tool, it took let say 50000 lines of code, then learned about some obscure feature that could have reduced it to 500. Yes, 500.
However, two things came to mind. The variety part. Yes, its good. I personally am fluent in just about all programming environments known to man, more data storage techs than I can count, too many business types, and things vastly different, like business intelligence and biology (I started as a programmer for R&D biotech softwares).
The catch is, that tends to show that you're too much everywhere. You can take one "enterprise" stack, let say J2EE or
Those are things that makes the difference between a project taking a year, and one taking a month. Once I realised that (and people hiring know this just too well), I specialised in a 2-3 technologies (specialising in just one isn't enough to keep track of the evolution of the field), and I've been a much better developer since then.
You need to have a broad VIEW of the field, but still be specialised, to be efficient at what you do. Knowing 10 technologies equaly well means that you don't know either of them at their peek.
Secondly, the certification thing. We all know certification means crap, I agree, but like the article does state, it helps hiring people to spend less time interviewing you about the obvious. If you say you're Java certified, they can only ask 2-3 questions to make sure you truly are, and forget about testing you on a Java hello world. That way, they can spend more time testing you on the important stuff, like actual development expertise, as opposed to syntax knowledge. Also, having a lot of certifications, if you can prove you didn't brain dump them, can go in the "broad knowledge" and "passionate" part. If you have 12 certifications with 12 technologies, well, it shows you like knowing your stuff (those tests can sometime ask for pretty pointy things...)
The first category is crap; "passion" is often mis-identified (as in the case of the article) and linked to what people do in their spare time.
The idea that not programming in your spare time makes you a poor programmer is abjectly false and amazingly stupid considering the amount of complaints within the industry about working hours, laundry-list job listings, industry only for the young and unmarried, etc.
I've known too many counter examples to debunk this; people who would talk on end on how "great" and wonderful a technology was only to mis-use it to the detriment of the business and the customer. People who had no lives; bragging about what they did at home, what OSS projects they were working on only to get fired for not being able to understand or structure requirements, not having enough domain knowledge of the industry they were working in, or not being able to meet the customer's needs.
Frankly, I work 50+ hours a week and the last thing I want or feel a need to do is look at a f*cking computer when I go home. And this comes from someone who got a Master's in CS while working full time; led implementation of new technologies and languages within the group.
It sure as _hell_ doesn't mean I don't have passion for what I do.
I wouldn't trust Bjarne on whatever he says about C++ - he's the creator, and he doesn't have an objective POV. Note that it doesn't matter if he's rather skeptic or enthusiastic about anything C++...
.NET is going up like a rocket in the Windows world, and companies seem to often be more concerned with their web appearance than with the quality of the programs they write - and thus use Java or .NET, because it's faster to deploy. The FOSS world is making a big fuss about C - and coding GUIs in C (like GTK) has to be the worst idea I've ever seen, by the way (Oh, I'll get modded down for that...). While new and powerful languages like Haskell seem to get a lot of attention.
That said, I don't really know if he's right anyways. Everything
C++'s main advantage is the same as Microsoft's: it's everywhere, there are just so many libs out there and there exist language bindings for just about everything. We don't really know anything about the lifespan of computer languages yet. Just when I thought it's finally dead for good, I heard about a release of a new version of a FOSS Pascal compiler.
And we're waaaay offtopic here...
I'm an infovore...
from the article, what's the #1 'negative'?
Negative indicators:
* Programming is a day job
excuse me, I am a really good programmer, did the whole 9 yards growing up as a stereotypical geek (not into sports, into programming way before it was fashionable to do so, from basic, to turbo pascal, to z80 assembly etc.), I lived and breathed programming and computers for many years of my life, however now I am in my late 30s and I try to have a much healthier work-life balance, I don't see why this should be a negative at all.
If I wasn't working at a computer dev job I would probably be coding a bit for fun, but there is no way that nowadays you could get me to talk shop for hours just for the fun of it.
Also
In fact, the great programmer will be the one talking your ear off about a new technology that you haven't even heard of, explaining to you why you must use it in your business, even if none of your staff knows how to use it. Even if it's a technology he doesn't know how to use yet.
gimme a break, for me this would be a huge no-no, it would be the hallmark of somebody going after every possible latest fad, instead of focusing on proven tools for the job. Yes, there ARE cases where the bleeding edge is needed, but they are the exception rather than the rule: if I have a business I want code that is mantainable, and that, if the 'wiz developer' gets hit by a bus, is understandable by others (read, it's not such a niche skill that if I lose that person my business will fold because it's impossible to find a replacement).
Good programmers will have a tendency to talk your ear off about some technical detail of what they're working on (but while clearly believing, sincerely, that what they're talking about is really worth talking about). Some people might see that as maladapted social skills (which it is), but if you want to recognise a good developer, this passion for what they're doing at the expense of social smoothness is a very strong indicator.
this is another totally bogus criteria: in nowaday's workplace soft skills (being able to work as a team expecially) are just as important; gone are the days of the single programmer in his ivory tower producing code that only himself can understand. You need to have a team, and if I have to choose between person A who is, say, a programmer worth 100/100 but has 0 social skills, and person B who is, say, worth 80/100 but gets along with everybody, I will choose person B every time. A gelled team is greater than the sum of its parts, but you can't gel a team full of primadonnas and socially maladapted people.
If you are such a 'smart' programmer you will realize that 'programming' social interactions is as important as programming computers, and you will apply your skills to that as well, making your workplace a lot better and likely improving drastically your career prospects.
If you're hiring for a small business, or you need really smart developers for a crack team that will implement agile development in your enterprise, you should disregard most formal qualifications as noise.
give me a break, being smart and having no formal qualifications is a lot worse than being smart AND having formal qualifications. I have a M.Sc. in Electronic Engineering: have I used anything I learned in university in my career? Not at all. Have those years broadened my horizons, introduced me to a lot of different concepts and methodologies that made me a much, much, much better programmer than I was before? You bet. Your 'crack team in agile programming' will likely end up implementing something O(n^3) (because they have no clue about computational complexity) while your university educated buzzword-averse reliable programmer will give you O(n^2) or even O(n log n) because they've been there and done that many times before in a lot of different other contexts.
THESE to me are the signs of a great programmer, experience, good grasp of architectural con
-- the cake is a lie
The best programmers I've worked with are the ones with a diversity of interests, are very capable of interacting with others. Our field demands that we can translate back and forth between business-speak and code. If all I wanted was a code monkey, I'd pick one up from Bangalore.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Some of the points made in this article are good, but a couple are way off the mark.
He lists as a negative indicator *anyone* who considers programming as a "day job." I know quite a few programmers who consider programming a day job. They come into work at 9, they work for 8 hours, they go home at 5, and then they do something entirely different. But the code that they produce while at work is brilliant. They are extremely bright people who enjoy programming, but don't live and breath it. They would rather do something else while not at work.
He lists as a positive indicator *anyone* who is passionate about technology. Sorry, but I've met a lot of people who are bubbling over with enthusiasm about programming, but can't code worth shit. These are the people dive headfirst into a programming job without any thought of design or architecture, and you end up with an application that uses half a dozen bleeding edge technologies, all bundled together with virtual duct tape, that disintegrates at the first input exception.
Life is like a web application. Sometime you need cookies just to get by.
And this voodoo code made it past review how? Anyone can understand it if you explain it well enough. If you can't explain it, you don't understand it either. If you simply can't be bothered to explain it, then I don't want you working for me.
However get a couple of really great guys who understand each other then you will get superior code in a fraction of the time.
Code that's worthless because it will have to be thrown away when the requirements change and no-one knows how to patch it.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
The Python Paradox
Paul Graham
http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html
August 2004
In a recent talk I said something that upset a lot of people: that you could get smarter programmers to work on a Python project than you could to work on a Java project.
I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know.
Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. Hence what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the Python paradox: if a company chooses to write its software in a comparatively esoteric language, they'll be able to hire better programmers, because they'll attract only those who cared enough to learn it. And for programmers the paradox is even more pronounced: the language to learn, if you want to get a good job, is a language that people don't learn merely to get a job.
Only a few companies have been smart enough to realize this so far. But there is a kind of selection going on here too: they're exactly the companies programmers would most like to work for. Google, for example. When they advertise Java programming jobs, they also want Python experience.
A friend of mine who knows nearly all the widely used languages uses Python for most of his projects. He says the main reason is that he likes the way source code looks. That may seem a frivolous reason to choose one language over another. But it is not so frivolous as it sounds: when you program, you spend more time reading code than writing it. You push blobs of source code around the way a sculptor does blobs of clay. So a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to a sculptor.
At the mention of ugly source code, people will of course think of Perl. But the superficial ugliness of Perl is not the sort I mean. Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts. Perl may look like a cartoon character swearing, but there are cases where it surpasses Python conceptually.
So far, anyway. Both languages are of course moving targets. But they share, along with Ruby (and Icon, and Joy, and J, and Lisp, and Smalltalk) the fact that they're created by, and used by, people who really care about programming. And those tend to be the ones who do it well.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
He/She says: I've written some truely amazing code which works quickly, efficiently and is used on hundreds of different high traffic websites. I have yet to find someone who can understand what it does and how it does it So you ask:
Unfortunately, the code you write *must* be understandable by other coders otherwise you're worthless to a development team. Assuming you're really so "good" that you can write inexplicable code that's also so awesome that it's used in the real world with no problems, then why are you applying for a job?
He/She says: [I wrote] a 20 line snippet which never needs to be touched. Thats why its perfectly acceptable. So you ask:
Can I see this 20 line snippet and your proof of its correctness?
He/She says: If your working in a team which doesnt understand each other's styles fluently then you'll be wanting someone with many interests. So you ask:
Why don't you know the difference between "You're," and "Your?"
He/She says: However get a couple of really great guys who understand each other then you will get superior code in a fraction of the time. So you ask:
So... Given that you "have yet to find someone who can understand" your "truely amazing code," how would you propose we find these other "really great guys who understand each other," (but, apparently, not necessarily each other's code) in order to obtain "superior code in a fraction of the time"?
Ow. Your awesomeness hurts my brain. I submit.