How to recognise a good programmer (2007)

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

by j_baker • 17 years ago

77 40 17 years ago

diN0bot2• 17 years ago

quality is still hard to measure.

speaking from experience, i've always had passion and personal projects, etc, but i used to be a sucky programmer. now i feel like i've mastered certain things, but i'm still developing and getting better.

for one thing, quality comes from sustained effort and committment. i've been working full time on startups for a while. that's a hell of a lot different than someone doing a different weekend toy project every month.

i'm friends with some pretty passionate "hackers," and i'm definitely not knocking that kind of activity---heck, i have side projects sometimes, too. but there's a big difference between hacking and building something serious. toying with tons of APIs and langauges doesn't make someone a good programmer.

finding a good programmer is still hard. even if programmers were completely honest, and the metrics all objective, would they even have the language to explain to business guys that they were good programmers, both in technical proficiency and quality? it's not impossible, but it's quite difficult.

csytan• 17 years ago

I find that for me, side projects are very beneficial because they give me absolute freedom to try new things without stepping on co-workers toes.

I have to agree that metrics don't tell the whole story. It really depends on what the programmer is looking for. Some people may be attracted to new features & complexity in their projects, while others look to design a small simple project.

ldh• 17 years ago

Agreed. Often the worst part of my day job is having to worry about what might confuse or frustrate co-workers.

diN0bot2• 17 years ago

trying new things is great. it's also extremely different, or rather limited, than what is needed for a start up. that is, you need A LOT more than the desire and experience of toying with new things.

toying is part of the inventor spirit and different projects need different things. one project might be ok with one of the mockups architects make. another project might need the life sized building. and so on in between, changing as the project grows.

dbz• 17 years ago

I fit some of those criteria! I don't feel it in my place to judge my programming skills in front of everyone here though. =p

sketerpot• 17 years ago

If loads of false negatives are okay, here's a simple heuristic: I don't think I've ever seen a Haskeller who wasn't plenty smart.

ggruschow• 17 years ago

I've seen a lot of smart people who weren't good programmers.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

In practice, how much of this article is about informing business folk and how much is about patting ourselves on the back?

rw1402• 17 years ago

I'm generally interested in other people's criteria for hiring people as it makes me think about what I'm not doing (and whether that's a concious decision or I've just got distracted / out of the habit), and what I could be doing better.

j_baker5• 17 years ago

I'll be honest. It's probably all about back-patting. Personally, I like having my back patted though.

edw519• 17 years ago

I know OP means well, but this post provides far more data about his own experience than anything that can be reliably used by the reader.

What he calls "indicators", I call "co-factors". They may or may not accompany a given programmer, and they predict nothing.

Generally speaking, good programmers are intelligent and do care about their work, but his positive indicators are much more a matter of personal preference than the quality of their work.

For each good programmer OP can identify who programs as a hobby, will talk your ear off, started programming before university, or has knowledge of a lots of technologies, I can cite a counterexample.

Similarly, I can also identify many good programmers who possess some of OP's "negative indicators" like having a day job, enjoying a single technology, not wanting to talk shop, or enjoying other activities.

There is one sure-fire way to identify a good programmer: their work. In fact, it is by definition the way that we should evaluate programmers. It is the great equalizer, and with web technology, exposed for all to see.

It really is as simple as cause and effect: good programmers produce good work; bad programmers don't. Anything else, including OP's positive and negative indicators, is just a detail.

marciovm123• 17 years ago

That misses out on efficiency. Good work that takes an inordinate amount of time can indicate high standards but not the ability to get things done (which I would consider an attribute of a good programmer).

azanar4• 17 years ago

Unless you are presuming a team of only a couple of developers doing their own thing, there is a real challenge in determining the extent of the programmer's responsibility for something that is exposed for all to see.

There are a number of other causes that might make a site a developer helped work on look or run like complete garbage. Organizational inertia might have forced the site into sucking, regardless of how good the programmers developing it were. The organization may have one or more bad programmers who were assigned to work on some critical component, screwing the whole site and all the good programmers.

We can wax on eternally about how the good programmers in this situation should've seen the writing on the wall and gotten out as soon as possible, but that's very easy to say seated in armchairs gazing from afar. Maybe they thought things were going better than they really were; maybe they saw things going bad, and thought they could motivate others to turn things around before things become a disaster -- and maybe they failed trying to do that[1]; maybe they have been trying to get out, but they are already tainted by the bad work of the organization that has become part of their image as well.

They could do work outside of their employer, for instance on an open source project, but these can succumb to the same sort of pressures that push profit-seeking organizations toward mediocrity. A single developer, even a really willful one, will have a hard time overcoming this inertia.

[1] At one of my prior employers, I was in this boat; I both tried and failed to get things turned around. I did quit, but probably not soon enough to convince people that the site was not a reflection of me and my standards. The site was absolutely shameful, and I'm sure anyone who used that site to infer things about my skill level would've sworn I had no skill or experience outside of a weekend PHP crash course. Granted, it would vet one organization I would probably not want to work at; but it would represent wasted potential based on presumption, which is a shame.

I really think the details matter, because they are a chance to determine if the work you are using to assess the programmer is spurious input, and reflect an influence largely made up of things other than that programmer.

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

Yes. This is a far more difficult problem than people seem to appreciate. Except for open, solo projects, finding out the work that people have done is challenging. Which goes a long way to explain the difficulties of the job-finding and interview process.

Consider the common case of the average developer (especially so for a non-web developer). They've worked on several closed source projects on which the extent of their participation is non-trivial to determine. Ultimately you have to talk with them and suss out what they actually know, which is at least a day long process in order to attain any degree of accuracy.

Even if they've worked on open source projects, it may take a lot of effort to grovel through their commits to find out whether or not they're telling the truth on the size of their contributions.

Incidentally, all of this is a good reason to have your own personal solo project and your own personal blog, though it can take a lot of effort to do so.

j_baker5• 17 years ago

I think a case can be made that even if someone who meets the author's criteria isn't a good programmer, they can probably become one with some mentoring. Of course, that probably isn't good for a business person looking to hire their first programmer. But then again, that person's in a pretty tricky spot to begin with.

araneae• 17 years ago

Just something I noticed:

"If your potential programmer didn’t do any programming before university, and all his experience starts when she got her first job, she’s probably not a good programmer."

This is the only time he uses the female pronoun anywhere in his post, and he uses it to describe a programmer that started in college and isn't any good.

Conscious or not, it's somewhat accurate; female cs majors are less likely to have prior experience with programming going into college.

mistermann• 17 years ago

Maybe it shows he actually knows what he's talking about! ;) Not that I agree with the article entirely...

patio11• 17 years ago

I subscribe to the Build Stuff school of programmer evaluation. Why do you hire a programmer? So you can have him build stuff. Has he built stuff? Then he can probably build stuff. If he hasn't build stuff, he might be able to build stuff, but it is a better idea to have somebody else pay to figure out whether he can build stuff or not.

derefr3• 17 years ago

So, if everyone follows your philosophy, how do people get started building stuff?

mquander3• 17 years ago

Hint: You do not have to be employed by a company in order to build stuff.

tptacek• 17 years ago

Everyone doesnt follow that philosophy, and he's advocating exploiting that.

azanar4• 17 years ago

I think this perspective is overly simplistic. But then you might have meant it that way, so the rest of us can fill it in with our sundry biases. So, here's my chance to make my biases obvious. :-)

Hiring a programmer who has built stuff is like hiring a contractor who has shown an ability to do carpentry work. It's swell when all you need is the carpenter equivalent of a programmer; but often there is more involved than just nailing lines of code, classes and modules together from someone else's specification.

So, having a criterion of having built stuff is not sufficient, although I think it is reasonable. What qualifies as "stuff" is pretty subjective, though, and probably can't be anything but subjective. As I mentioned above: biases abound.

You also need to make sure they are able to figure out what to build and how, and sometimes what not to build -- whether that means they buy it, or it is a superfluous component.

You need to make sure they can think about what they are doing, rather than just being able to do things. The couple of outside projects I've become involved in so far, and some of the code I've read for other projects I'm not actively working on, suggest that some people don't do enough thinking. They've built plenty, but they didn't appear to build it with any goal but to build version 1 and be done. Think the software equivalent of a contractor coming in to fix what the first carpenter screwed up, because the first carpenter didn't care once the house passed inspection.

The code I've dealt with inside of organizations I've worked for is, if anything, worse than the code outside. But just looking at the end product wouldn't indicate anything is particularly wrong, excepting that maybe improvements to the site tend to occur only once every geologic era. Sometimes this can be indicative of quality of the developers; sometimes it is indicative of the quality of the management. Either way, it may not reflect on the developer you are talking to.

Depending, the developer may be able to think at many levels, and might be able to think lucidly about their work from a business strategy perspective. And depending on the organizational culture, this can either be a wonderful thing, or the most undesirable thing imaginable.

But this is all based on some amount of personal bias based on the kind of work I would want to be doing. I know there are places where programmers are expected to be nothing more than carpenters given specifications by the system analysts to turn into code. In these cases, I can see showing just an aptitude for building things to be enough. But I don't think these cases are common enough to warrant a single best practice.

j_baker5• 17 years ago

I subscribe to the Spolsky school of hiring: you need someone who's smart and gets things done. After all, any idiot can put together a neat website given a copy of "Learn Django in 21 Days". But is that person going to be able to move that site very far? Will they be able to understand other people's code?

Now, I'm not sure I agree with the author's point of any business person being able to spot a good programmer. But I think that if such a thing were possible, this would probably be how such a list would look.

But then again, we probably don't even agree on what a good programmer is. If there were an objective, standard way to find good programmers, articles like this wouldn't be necessary.

jquery• 17 years ago

TL;DR - they're smart and their whole world outside of work revolves around their profession and they've been doing it their whole lives.

You could write a "How to recognize a good [X]" article about almost any profession if that's your thesis.

Let's face it, the vast majority of work programming isn't that hard. A lot of programmers, perhaps especially the good and smart ones, might rationally realize that having a life outside of work--in other words, working a 9-5--often makes more rational sense than putting all of one's considerable intellectual energy into writing yet another CRUD (or whatever application du jour one normally writes) remix.

InclinedPlane2• 17 years ago

I think there's a good point in your comment but I think you have buried it in unnecessary insults and mischaracterizations of the article.

For all of the great devs I know and have known programming is very much a passion for them, and they will engage that passion outside of work. But this doesn't mean their job is their life or that they don't maintain a healthy work/life balance. Indeed, working on projects they're passionate about outside of work can often provide a release from toiling with a brain-dead code base at work.

Also, the vast majority of software development may not be hard, but perhaps that's because the vast majority of developers aren't that good. The work being done by the best devs is orders of magnitude better (and more challenging) than the work being done by the daily-wtf generating paycheck programmers in the enterprise trenches.

mlLK• 17 years ago

I am going to extend the discussion by asking this, how do you recognize a good programmer who wasn't born from the culture of academia?

The only reason I ask is that I consider myself a late-bloomer, and after reading Coders at Work (which I highly recommend) I was kind of bummed out that I squandered my opportunity in college by not hanging out with CS crowd. It seemed like so many of Seibel's interview subjects accomplished so much in this period and were more or less born to be programmers. . .it sounds trite when I read it aloud but I can no longer ignore this unspoken caste system amongst programmers.

rw1402• 17 years ago

How much weight would anyone here give to the "Started programming at university" criterion? It's one that is bugging me slightly because 1) it applies to me and 2) it's not something I can go back and change.

nickelplate• 17 years ago

I know a lot of good programmers who started in university. Not everyone discovers their passion when they're young, or has the opportunity to pursue that passion (in the third world, starting young may mean starting in university). Some of the skills that help you "code smarter" are not necessarily learned in front of a keyboard (math, English, etc.).

gridspy• 17 years ago

Why did you wait until Uni to learn to program?

Is that the point when you finally realised you had the freedom to do what you wanted in life? - If so, perhaps you are alright.

Is that when someone told you that you needed a job, and programming looked well paid? - Perhaps not so good.

richieb• 17 years ago

"Why did you wait until Uni to learn to program?"

Because at that time computers took entire floor of building and costs millions of dollars. By the time I got my hands on Apple II I was in graduate school...

azanar4• 17 years ago

Honestly, it would serve more to guide my questions than it would to just flat dismiss someone as untalented or apathetic.

Curiosity and genuine interest develop at different times for different people depending on the circumstances of their life. They might have not discovered programming until later in their life, or they may have been soured by an bad experience early on and only came back later on.

For some people, they don't discover programming until university, but then find the absolutely love it and quickly develop a considerable talent. For these people, who do exist, the pre-university test is a false negative.

A lot of these tests people come up with are based on the concept that past performance indicates future potential. The thing about these tests is that they suck really bad, except that for certain things there are no other tests.

A meteorologist I once heard talking about weather phenomena in Alaska joked in his talk about how there are two possibilites for available weather data there: data sparse, or data void. It is much the same in finding good programmers. There are a lot of important considerations, and getting a feel on each depends on sparse data at best. The best advice I can offer is don't take things like this too personally. Following advice from pg almost certainly applies to applying and interviewing for jobs as well.

Don't be put off if they say no. Rejection is almost always less personal than the rejectee imagines. Just move on to the next. (This applies to dating too.) - Paul Graham, Undergraduation.

Just take it as a sign that they probably would be judging you even after you are hired in ways that you might find unreasonable. Not every hacker is meant for every programming job.

j_baker5• 17 years ago

As with all things, it's about weighing the pros and cons. What you cite certainly is a negative, but you have to evaluate the whole candidate. I don't think that it's fair to expect that all good programmers meet all of the criteria presented.

clistctrl• 17 years ago

I would say I fit all of his criteria, but I would define myself as a mediocre programmer at best.

JosephAltmaier• 17 years ago

A "good programmer" hasn't been defined, has it? Does it mean an architect, designer, tester, integrator, debugger, coder? Each of these requires a different skill set. Very few have all of these skills. Some are nearly mutually exclusive. I know for instance that a good tester (worth their weight in gold) has almost completely orthogonal skills to a good developer. The tester focuses on regression, corner cases, code coverage, etc. The developer is sprinting toward a goal. I've had some limited experience hiring - 15-member teams for startups. My approach is to fill out the skill set, put them in a snug environment to promote communication and collaboration, and then monitor the heck out of the progress. My job then is to keep them on track, make sure all the holes and cracks are addressed, and mediate disagreement. I've repeatedly hired (different startups) a plodding, methodical, university-educated, by-the-book programmer to crank out database schema with its 200-plus-dialog query frontends. And an inspired, chaotic, brilliant, chronically sleep-deprived developer to write the 100,000+ lines of code a year we needed to get to the next funding stage. In the same team. In the right environment these guys even learned to respect and admire each other.

How to recognise a good programmer (2007)

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