programmer

How do you recognise good programmers if you’re a business guy?

It’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.

What about the role of the programmer on a maintenance project, and the resulting importance of programmer-owned design? Most of the time, I think, when developers talk about software development in the abstract and when authors write about development techniques, there is an implicit assumption that everyone is talking about the development of new software. However, many (most?) programmers are not working on the from-scratch development of brand new systems (even though that’s probably everyone’s preference). Instead, they are working on the maintenance of existing production systems, either in a bug fixing mode or in an extension mode, adding new features or otherwise evolving the software in new directions.3