How to recognise a good programmer

http://inter-sections.net/2007/11/13/how-to-recognise-a-good-programmer

by terpua • 18 years ago

44 48 18 years ago

hhm6• 18 years ago

Aren't these instructions on "How to recognise an hypermind programmer"?

Edit: I agree that this way you can recognize good programmers, but are all good programmers supposed to be that way, or only hyperbrain/INTP/whatever?

swombat5• 18 years ago

Hia,

I wrote this article a long time ago, long before the whole hyperbrain thing. It was actually published here, although with "www" in the URL, which explains why it can be reposted :-/

This was actually the article via which I found HackerNews, since HN showed up as a large referrer in my logs so I came here to investigate and, finding it to my taste, stayed.

And to answer your question, no, I don't think these characteristics are in any way related to hyperbrains.

(initial post of this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=97121 )

hhm6• 18 years ago

Hi, thanks for answering. I relate this to hyperbrains because it talks about programmers that: a) are intelligent, b) work in a lot of different projects, possibly unrelated, that are usually hidden, c) are passionate, and self-taught. Maybe not(hyperbrains<->your good programmers), but I'm sure a stable hyperbrain programmer would have all characteristics on your list.

Anyway, I don't like the hyperbrain word (sounds too powerful, as if being better than the other brains and I don't like it), though I really like your articles on the subject btw.

truebosko2• 18 years ago

Everytime I read these kind of articles I see the one glaring headline, how programmers love to work outside of their regular work day

Then I become sad because 80% of my week I come home and have to handle something and by the end of it all, I don't have any time to play around (aka, program) because I have to go to bed. Sigh, vicious cycle :(

(I know I can work on managing my time better and I am, like cooking more meals for the week, and time-boxing other tasks .. but it takes time!)

jcromartie4• 18 years ago

I have found this to be creeping up on me as well. I think that particular work environments make it more likely to become a habit.

To combat it, I try to find time to squeeze in little unorthodox projects with my work, as long as they can be justified as valuable. Of course, I think my sanity and skills are probably valuable to the company too.

wallflower2• 18 years ago

Freud was once asked what he though a normal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably expected a complicated, a "deep" answer. But Freud simply said, "Lieben und arbeiten" ("to love and to work"). It pays to ponder on this simple formula; it gets deeper as you think about it. For when Freud said "love", he meant the expansiveness of generosity as well as sexual love; when he said "love and work," he meant a general work productiveness which would not preoccupy the individual to the extent that his right or capacity to be a sexual or loving being would be lost.

(From "Identity and the Life Cycle", by Erik H. Erikson)

Yes, this is a repost of a comment but it is relevant. Work can cut into life and life can cut into work...

swombat5• 18 years ago

On the other hand, someone said: "You can't be normal and expect abnormal results".

truebosko2• 18 years ago

Thanks for posting that, it's actually stuck in my head since you did yesterday .. just never got around to posting a reply :)

sfamiliar• 18 years ago

as a programmer, one of the things i look for in a company is a willingness to let a guy like me play around with technology on the side and not have scary legal documentation concerning their ownership of it. while i work for a startup at the moment, my previous employer (a well-known language learning software company) actively discouraged its employees from pursuing any side projects.

if you're looking to hire someone who's driven, this is a terrible idea; a good programmer will always be thinking of something, mulling some problem over in his head. probably several, a few of which aren't related to his job. if he has to worry about whether or not he can legally work on these things outside of his regular employment, he's less likely to explore, and less likely to learn on his own time.

so hiring managers and legal departments: look for someone who checks over the contracts for ownership rights and complains if they're too strict.

pmsaue02• 18 years ago

Perhaps most people reading HN would be able to recognize a good programmer. But there are still challenges when you need to hire someone with area of expertise that is outside of your own - if you're hiring someone to do your own job or your clone, it's straightforward.

For the last two start-ups in which I was involved (as a graphic designer), a co-worker and I were placed in the position of choosing developers to build our application. We were the most technologically savvy people on our start-up team of businessmen, attorney's, accountants, etc. (in many ways those startups followed the inverted timeline of most startups).

At first the only questions we could ask the applicants were... what languages do you know? what projects have you worked on? how would you solve this problem?... as if their answers would inspire some confidence regarding their abilities as a programmer - their answers inspired nothing because WE knew nothing. What I'm saying is that if you are going to hire people, you have to educate yourself to a conversational level+ in their area of expertise.

Nowadays my said co-worker and I both know RoR and are building our own startup apart from that original group. And when we decided to hire another developer we were in a MUCH better position not only to recognize a strong programmer but to leverage our own abilities.

Be wary of his point regarding PASSION. We met with some programmers who were passionate, but were obviously charlatans.

hhm6• 18 years ago

"We met with some programmers who were passionate, but were obviously charlatans."

And how did you tell the difference? (when it wasn't obvious... or was it always obvious?)

pmsaue02• 18 years ago

Well, we did hire one charlatan programmer, but we dropped him pretty quick when we realized that he couldn't produce the quality and quantity of work that he claimed possible. Like I said, this was when we didn't know diddly about programming / hiring programmers.

Regarding the ones that were obvious (as it seemed to me), they were lingo dropping high-horsers, and when we looked at their previous work and saw that they were producing crusty web applications while claiming that they were abreast of all the latest technologies, we knew something was up.

We chose at one point to work with a web development firm that promised great things and they had a strong team... but what I wish we would have payed more attention to was the fact that they were working on MANY other projects and were spread way too thin. In the end they were late on every deadline so we stopped working with them.

I feel fortunate to be working with two other great developers now. But I've worked with several doozies, and it has been through that process that I've learned more about who to hire, and I'm much more cautious now.

jcromartie4• 18 years ago

The list of qualities here would indicate a good person in any profession, not just programming. I think these challenges only exist because we (as a society) have learned to accept schooling as the indicator of qualification.

DaniFong2• 18 years ago

Schooling might not work so well as qualification, but take care not to trivialize the problem. You can't really figure out how good someone is until you've worked with them, unless they have a long string of accomplishments. Schooling might be a little above noise, but at least it functions as a fairly reliable minimum bar.

swombat5• 18 years ago

I disagree. I work with a brilliant coder who dropped out of high school.

jcromartie4• 18 years ago

Based on the deluge of resumes I've seen coming into tech shops lately, the bar set by college degrees is so low that you need to dig to find it.

maxwell• 18 years ago

Anyone with these traits probably is good, but a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good. I imagine there are plenty of plumbers and accountants who don't work on personal projects, have hidden experience, or play with bleeding-edge technologies and are still good. In those fields, schooling is still probably the best indicator of qualification.

The more artistic the profession, the less telling someone's formal education seems to be. Since programs can do anything that our minds can think, programming tasks range from the hardest of hard sciences (say, compiler optimization) to pure art (videogames, for example). I suspect the best compiler optimizers went to (and perhaps now work for) the best schools, while I doubt there's much correlation between schooling and great game developers.

gaius4• 18 years ago

a programmer that doesn't have them is almost certainly not good

Maybe that is true if your bag is Web 2.0 AJAX Rails etc etc. But I'll bet the people writing "serious" software (for example, safety-critical embedded systems) are treating it exactly the same as say Civil Engineers treat their jobs. I'd be very reluctant to call them "not good", how reliable is their work compared to the average website?

stcredzero2• 18 years ago

Unfortunately, there are programmers that you could recognize using these criteria who produce highly idiosyncratic code that's nearly impossible for someone else to maintain for the months it takes for them to come up to speed. There are also programmers who would be recognized by this criteria who are just as insightful and productive who produce beautiful intention revealing code.

How would we recognize the latter group?

raganwald3• 18 years ago

Try asking them.

"Hey, do you find most of your colleagues are familiar with your code or do you find most of them have trouble getting up to speed with it?" You can ask this question in a very neutral tone, one that implies that the colleagues may have been at fault.

And then, be very careful to determine whether the colleagues really weren't at fault. If you're trying to hire a very smart person, you may find someone who has chafed writing J2EE code in BigCo, and yes his code was inscrutable to his colleagues, that's why he wants to write Python code for you.

stcredzero2• 18 years ago

I've witnessed solo programmers writing brilliant but inscrutable code in Smalltalk. Bittorrent's code also fit this description for awhile. Someone who writes inscrutable code in J2EE in BigCo might do so because he's hobbled by their coding standards. But he might be one of those folks who is a brilliant coder but has no sense of what is intention revealing to those reading his code.

timr• 18 years ago

Make them read code.

Take a chunk of good code, a chunk of bad code (real code, not toy stuff), and ask them to explain it, find any bugs, and recommend improvements.

wallflower2• 18 years ago

I'm tired with people putting elite programmers on pedestals. I used to almost worship this one code guru at my company but I eventually moved on to just working on myself, taking up avocations outside of programming. I'm fortunate to be able to code/problem solve for a profession.

hhm6• 18 years ago

This is an article for recognizing good programmers, so you can hire them, not for other programmers to admire them.

raganwald3• 18 years ago

Exactly.

Maybe you are contemptuous of them, but you have a business plan that involves having them work back-breaking hours for some founder's equity you will dilute down to the strength of Budweiser beer.

That sounds like sarcasm, but consider the case of salespeople. Many people have trouble liking salespeople, and many people do not admire them. But many businesses would close without good salespeople. So you try to find and hire the best salespeople you can find.

Wanting to put someone to work in a manner advantageous to your business is entirely orthogonal to putting them on a pedestal.

ConradHex• 18 years ago

Just coincidentally, these happen to be the exact attributes the author believes he has! How fortunate!

browndog• 18 years ago

I would look for the ability to think i.e., quickly and logically breaking a problem into its components and get to the essentials. Ask good questions along the way, and come up with a solution to the problem. Do this in an area outside their expertise.

Anyone who passes that test with flying colors and is interested and engaged while doing it has a first-rate mind. The rest is detail -- do they know this language? if not, do they want to learn it? can they work with other people? do other people want to work with them?

Valuing "passion" (in the 20-something hacker crowd) or a university degree (large software companies too numerous to name) over the ability to think clearly in the abstract are both unfortunately too common. It seems to me that either is more a tool for recognizing "people like us" than to actually identify a good programmer.

shimi• 18 years ago

If this article is correct: I should make a career change

jwilliams• 18 years ago

I've got to say - In my experience, industry-based qualifications are more often than not a counter-indicator.

This was particularly true of the Java certifications during the dotcom boom - it was invariably the sign of someone who really just wanted to cash in... Out of the ten hires I was directly involved with, 6 were Java certified and 5 of those were absolutely terrible.

It might demonstrate a knowledge of Java, but at a very superficial level - even if you take someone with the best vocabulary in the world, it doesn't mean they'll be a good author.

A degree is a bit different. It at least demonstrates - a probable understanding of the fundamentals, the ability to stick at something and a certain level of exposure to broad ideas... Plenty of good programmers won't have degrees, but it's not a bad indicator none-the-less.

edw519• 18 years ago

I only use one criteria: demonstrated performance.

swombat5• 18 years ago

You mentioned that in the previous posting of this article, but I wasn't around to reply back then :-)

I agree that demonstrated performance is the ideal, but there are two problems with it:

1) it's slow and expensive. Who do you ask to demonstrate performance? You need some initial filter to cut out most of the crud, otherwise you'll spend all your seed money getting people to demonstrate performance. These indicators allow you to perform some sort of preselection, at least. Also, if you're interviewing, you'll find that most good people get snapped up before you have a chance of seeing their performance, so you'll miss out on 90+% of good hires.

2) What if you don't know how to tell good performance from bad? You can't reply that "a non-technical guy has no business hiring a technical guy". This article is aimed at business guys, and they have the very real problem of needing to basically boot-strap their business's technical expertise starting from nothing. This article can help recognise a good cofounder too. At that point "demonstrated performance" is fairly irrelevant, since as a business guy you wouldn't be able to tell good performance from bad - however, you can still tell passion from lack of it, or hidden experience from purely on-the-job experience.

kilowatt• 18 years ago

If I was hiring I'd say "point me at a public repo of some of your code."

known• 18 years ago

Introverts are generally good programmers.

olavk2• 18 years ago

That is a preposterous claim! Perhaps you meant that good programmers are often introverts?

I think programmers in general are often relatively introverted, however my anecdotal experience is that good programmers are not on average more introverted than bad programmers. So introversion is a really bad indicator.

olavk2• 18 years ago

Problem is that many of the positive indicators are also present in bad programmers.

My experience is that it is extremely hard to recognize good programmers from bad programmers on the basis of personality traits.

The only think that seems to work is to actually investigate how well they read and write code.

How to recognise a good programmer

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