How to recognise a good programmer (2007)

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.

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.

"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.