Talent, Skill, and Knowledge
Often when I go interview with a company, they know what it is they want in a developer, but don’t know how to look for it.
Some companies present a candidate with someone from Human Resources. She normally doesn’t know a bloody detail about developers. What she’ll do is screen them for a degree and one or more certifications. Younger developers who have worked with computers since early childhood are quickly siphoned out, such as myself.
More technical companies send one or more technical leads to conduct the interview. Normally I work well with these people. They’re very excited about me, my skills and knowledge, etc. After the interview, I often never hear back.
Following one or two e-mails, I discover that they were uncomfortable with something, but are unwilling to say what it was. Skills? Great. Experience? Satisfactory. Lack of a Unix Beard perhaps? Only Richard Stallman can grow a Unix Beard.
Once I finally got a straight answer. They felt that someone in their early twenties couldn’t withstand the pressure of being in a ‘real’ ‘corporate’ ‘environment.’ Meaning, couldn’t hold up to delays, major bugs, working late hours, and all that goodness that I’ve been subjected too in the past.
I hit it very well with companies who, get ready for this: Care about technology, and possess teams of developers who genuinely love and understand what they do. I always get a positive response from them, that normally formulates into an offer or contract.
It almost always works out when I talk to someone who knows what a developer is.
We’re not elusive or enigmatic. What drives a good developer is simple: A common love for computer science and programming.
Now when you ask another developer what they consider to be a good developer, their answer will almost always sound like this: Someone like me, but better.
They’ll say that she should have written a video game at fourteen, but in 8086 Assembly rather than Blitz Basic. Also that they should kill people with their enormous brains.
Ask a manager, and they’ll say someone who can keep timelines, be communicative, on time, and not be a developer at all.
Human Resources will say someone with a metric butt-load of papers officially saying what they can do is an absolute must; framed, and hanging in their cubicles.
People who actually know what a developer is will simply say that they must know about software development (not so much the business as the scientific aspect), familiarity with the software being used (depending on how complex the solutions being made will be), and a love for programming.
A love for programming is important, only because developing software can be tedious, difficult, and time consuming. A good developer will take a minimal amount of issue with staying up till dawn, and drinking high-caffeinated beverages.
Finding someone who loves programming can be a bit difficult. Love for programming is expressed in varying ways between us developer folk.
Myself love to think about it all the time, read about it, write about it, and actually do it. For me, software development is like bacon, and programming is like bacon bits. Saucy bacon bits.
One developer I know loves to tackle difficult problems for the sheer love of it. He doesn’t care too much for platform or language, just as long as he can solve hard problems.
A good developer will almost always be enticed with difficult, complex, and interesting problems. If building a distributed piece of software in Erlang for a network of video game consoles to render gigantic mountainous valleys in real-time doesn’t pique their interest, they’ve either used Erlang before, or have absolutely no love for programming.
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