How to hire a programmer when you're not a programmer

I have to say I disagree; their list provides some good, sufficient indicators of a good programmer. You appear to have read an assertion that these are necessary qualities into the article, but I'm not seeing that anywhere.

> Everyone has an opinion, assholes included.

Not true in my experience; there are plenty of apathetic floaters who don't care enough to form an opinion about anything. They use what they're told to use, don't look around at anything, don't form comparative opinions, and don't care. They all produced terrible work, because they didn't care enough to form opinions, or look around for better tools and techniques, and so never learned anything

> Many of the best programmers I know contribute nothing to open source because of confidentiality agreements.

Absolutely. But again, it's a good sufficient tell, not a necessary quality.

> You mean when it's fun specing something out or at 4 in the morning when everything is down?

Yes. You want them to fundamentally enjoy what they do. Dispassionate automatons may exist who nonetheless churn out solid work, but in my experience there are far fewer passionate, horrible developers than uncaring horrible developers, so it is again a good sufficient distinguisher to help find a good developer.

> And what does it cost to maintain or fix it? There are 2 ways to find out. a. Read the source. b. Wait a year. Which would you prefer?

c. Contact previous employers/coworkers, see what their reputation for shipping (and shipping quality) is.

> Who cares? What they do on their own time is their own business. This is an indicator of nothing.

It's an indicator of intellectual curiosity. Again, intellectually incurious developers who nonetheless do solid work and stay up to date may exist out there, somewhere, but I've never met one, so it's yet another good sufficient identifier.

> This is important for all people, for all things, so it doesn't even need to be on this list.

If you really believe that, you haven't met a lot of hiring managers who completely and utterly forget about it or think it is unimportant for technical positions. There are people who absolutely need this reminder.

> b. Hire a programmer to hire a programmer.

Turtles all the way down?

I enjoy programming both when specing it out AND when things are down at 4am. I would prefer it not be 4am that they be down, but I still enjoy the challenge and feeling of accomplishment when I fix it.

Are you being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian?

Beside, if everybody become a programmer, who will produce the pencils?

The only way one can hire a programmer is to be a programmer.

That's a awfully large sense of entitlement there, one that is very, very difficult to support. I'm surprised such a comment is coming from you.

While I don't excuse idiot HR recruiters and headhunting firms on quotas, there is a level between clueless and mastery that a person can attain that allows them to make the comparative judgement required in the hiring process.

I know little about law, but enough to hire a semi competent lawyer, I know little about masonry, but have successfully hired a firm to rebuild a chimney. They are probably not the absolute best at their professions. They probably take shortcuts that purists wouldn't like. So be it. They get the job done and that's good enough for me.

There is really no reason that someone with little knowledge of programming cannot properly hire or outsource a competent developer for work that they need to get done.

To suggest otherwise is only to worry about which way the mortar is spread in between the brick, when it all boils down.

I wouldn't consider it moot, but I wouldn't necessarily deduct points either. Open-source contribution is a good bonus in a developer; it shows that they have been able to cooperate others (among a group of people that are often unpleasant, ornery, or crotchety) and adhere to the requirements of the BFDLs, which shows adaptability. The big benefit of course if that you can go back and look up their interactions and the code they submitted and how they went about the whole thing, which is definitely useful in determining if the person would be a good hire. It also demonstrates a level of conscientiousness about their place in the community.

So, all that said, there are good reasons a developer may not have many open-source contributions, as you stated. So while I don't think it's good to necessarily detract from developers without that, I wouldn't exactly consider it moot, either; open-source dev is a very useful reference and a good demonstration of the candidate. If you can't contribute, you will miss out on some of those good vibe points, but that's the way things go sometimes I guess.

I was really opinionated ten years ago, before I had tried to build anything serious. These days, I think every choice is a trade-off. I wonder if I'll ever be opinionated again.

I think you're right in thinking the "wrong kind of opinionated".

I'm pretty f'ing opinionated about certain things and those are not trivial things - testing for instance.

I'm also opinionated about languages but I can clearly articulate why I would choose python over ruby and vice versa in any given situation. Same goes for rdbms vs. schemaless data stores.

Some of my favorite and best interviews have been geeking out discussing technology with a potential employeer.

What was really left out was "make friends with a trusted geek". Have someone you can call on to perform the interview on your behalf. I have pretty solid bullshit detector and have frequently helped out friends who couldn't find a technical resource to perform a phone screen.

I agree with you. I almost stopped reading the article at that point, because it will tend to get you clueless zealots rather than competent engineers.

Not only that, but the specific example they gave is even worse.

Ruby vs Python? My only opinion on Ruby vs Python is that I wish one would die so that we don't have two utterly similar languages fragmenting the same niche and causing lots of duplicated effort (e.g., ruby oauth and python-oauth2). Does that make me a bad programmer?

> Those who contribute a lot of free work without compensation don't have much business sense.

Yeah, just like a writer who blogs, a soccer-mom who drives all the neighbourhood kids to practice and basically anyone who ever volunteered their time or resources for anything have no business sense. It feel like 1999 all over again, but here goes: Rewards comes in other forms than money.

> You also have to worry they will contaminate your code with GPLd code that they have secretly reattributed.

Frankly, I'd be more worried that a person not familiar with the workings of the open source community would be more at risk for making this kind of mistake. Why would copy-pasting this method I found in the open on teh interwebs not be OK? And who's ever gonna find out?

Not so much that they'll secretly take GPL'd code, but they'll just dump it in without telling you and then 2 years later when somebody finds it in your widget, it's a major pita figuring out what's happening.

> What computing blogs / magazines do you read?

Would Hacker News/Proggit be an acceptable answer?

>What computing blogs / magazines do you read?

Someone asked me this fairly recently, but he said "what technical stuff do you read?", which I had a pretty hard time answering because I think my definition of technical was much stricter than his. He mentioned that I had written about Joel Spolsky, for instance, but Joel is not really a technical writer -- he writes about business, etc. within his technical company.

I ended up just saying "whatever's on Hacker News, basically", because I don't really follow any blogs regularly any more. I should have said Lambda the Ultimate, I guess; that used to be on my feed reader (still is, but I never use feed reader anymore).

How would you judge their answer if you're not a programmer?

I TOTALLY agree and I've never heard anyone say the same thing. My interviews have all been boiled down to:

(a) can they code and TEST int atoi(char *)?

(b) Are they a good cultural fit (ie they like the startup environment)

(c) Then to be sure, I start giving them some real-world challenges we're having with a product and see if they can help.

But (a) eliminates most candidates before I even have to go any further, and if they can do (a) they're generally a good hire. It's kind of bizarre.