How to find a good software developer?
/Finding good software developers is probably the most important thing for any software venture be it a micro startup, a giant bank starting a new project or software company like us adding new developers to its team.
A good developer makes a software possible, it’s as simple as that. You can find a developer (there are millions out there just go to any jobseeker or freelancer site) with all the certificates in the world, you can pay him well, you can give her the more time than you had planned for, you can give him the best tools that money can buy but the output - the software she makes depends only on one variable - is she good at what she does. In most other professions as long as you get someone who has been trained to do his thing he will get the job done at some point - some faster than others, some better than others but the job will be done. But with software the number of years of training or the number of framed certificates is in no way a guarantee that your software will be made. Some people can make software (without a single certificate on his wall) and others just can’t.
Given this situation, finding a “good” software developer is critical. But how do you find one? How do you know that someone is that “good” developer? Not easy questions to answer and even after 16 years in this business of finding developers we get things wrong sometimes, but I’ll try to share some ideas that might help.
1. Good developers are “get the job done” people
The first thing is to define what is “good”. The easiest is to say “good” software developer is someone who gets the software made :) But we would not know that right at the beginning when she hasn’t had the chance to make the software (and we definitely can’t wait for the project to fail and find out she wasn’t our choice after all). So let’s define “good” based on qualities we are seeking in a coder which we can somehow test:
Good is someone who gets the job done.
“... the duct-tape programmer is not afraid to say, “multiple inheritance sucks. Stop it. Just stop.”
You see, everybody else is too afraid of looking stupid because they just can’t keep enough facts in their head at once to make multiple inheritance, or templates, or COM, or multithreading, or any of that stuff work. So they sheepishly go along with whatever faddish programming craziness has come down from the architecture astronauts who speak at conferences and write books and articles and are so much smarter than us that they don’t realize that the stuff that they’re promoting is too hard for us.”
In our profession you’ll find many (too many in my opinion) who are at the level of a University professor with deep theoretical knowledge about design patterns or Java history. You do not want them. They are going to waste your time by thinking too much about what’s right and what’s not. You want someone who might know everything about Java but can go into a piece of code, use google to find answers to his questions and put in a band aid like fix without any guilt complex about his lack of knowledge! You need someone who gets the job done. Someone who can play a multi-hatted role in the everyday business of software development. Joel used to call these rare people the “duct tape programmers”. A good read in this line of thinking is Eric Sink’s superb little timeless piece You need developers not programmers.
2. Good developers are not afraid to write code in front of you.
“Would you hire a magician without asking them to show you some magic tricks? Of course not.
Yet, every day, programmers are hired on the basis of an impressive resumé or because the interviewer enjoyed chatting with them.”
You hire developers to write code. So it is a very natural expectation that they should be able to write code right in front of you, right? You’ll be surprised about how often great resume holding (and of course certificates… OK you get my irrational bias against certificates…) people will just be too scared to write code in front of you (say during an interview). Or they’d just be all over the place with the code and come back to say something like “this will need to be refactored of course” or something fancy like that. Run. Run like mad from any developer who can’t start writing code at a moments notice. Good developers should be better at expressing themselves in code rather than in language.
3. Good developers come with references
Joel Spolsky
Author of the best blog in the world for software development experience www.joelonsoftware.com
This one so obvious that I won’t delve too much into it. But leave by saying that before a developer is called the quality of their reference from someone you can trust (rather than their resume) should be the big marker. You see good developers easily make themselves felt. So every manager, team lead, business owner knows who is good very easily just from experience. Because they have gone through and got (or did not get) their software. Only downside is most manager don’t want to lose their good developers and want to get rid of their bad ones, so you got to be careful about whose words you trust! Our trick has always been to find our own references from peers rather than bosses.
4. Good developers are found in forums
Good developers are often found lurking around in tech forums asking and answering questions. Stackoverflow is definitely the big one, but there are many others. So finding links to their stackoverflow status or contributions should be a good thing and similarly if you are desperate forums are a good place to seek these rare individuals out. Microsoft is infamous with this trick, we’ve lost several of our super stars with MS poaching on them all the way from Redmond. Imagine getting a call from MS one night? Who can fight with the gods? D… the Internet :(
OK before I lose it I’m off. Hope you find your good developer and if you can’t just get us to build your software for you, we are best after all :p
