I don't understand why you want to look for indicators that someone will be a good coder... rather than actually see if they are a good coder (ie. actually look at their code). I understand looking at peoples code takes time... but really that's why companies are paying recruiters, to save them time.

I would guess if there was some magic set of indicators that shows if someone is a good coder or not... we would have worked that out by now. It turns out there isn't... look at code.

If you aren't able to read code and evaluate someone by their code, you shouldn't be hiring software developers. How did we end up in a position where people that understand code, hire people that don't understand code (recruiters) to hire people that can code.... what am I missing here.