Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

How can you tell how good a programmer is?

Speaking as someone who’s had to evaluate the performance of developers in a project team of around 20-30: it’s not easy.

If you want to evaluate programmers for recruitment purposes it’s particularly difficult. It’s hard to make an assessment from a couple of 30-minute interviews and code written for a toy problem. It’s best to observe them in an actual work environment, see how they interact with their peers, see how they react to crisis.

If you’re evaluating a resume, you’ll want to look for signs of people who are passionate about programming - this might mean programming done outside of work/as a hobby (for example, open source projects, attending seminars, local programming group membership, etc). During an interview, ask them about best practices, refactoring, that kind of thing.