Roy Tang

Someone on quora asked:

If you are someone who hire programmers, what is more important for you: the personality of a candidate or the technology stack he is familiar with?

The technology stack certainly isn’t very relevant unless you are hiring for a position where you cannot avoid the additional spin-up time of someone having to pick up your technology stack. For very good developers, the spin-up time will be very low, on the order of 1–2 days or maybe a matter of hours, so it’s unlikely that the technology stack is super relevant.

The two things to look out for are personality (whether the person can work well with your culture or with a team; whether he can communicate well; whether he can be trusted to work independently with minimal guidance; etc) and general technical skill (how easy it is for him to pick up new technologies, assess technical options, etc.). Both of these can be difficult to interview for though