Recently, a scene from a Netflix show caught the attention of the twitter dev community. It was that of a hacker’s computer screen while he was supposedly hacking. Now, to movie-loving folks, it was a perfectly normal sight but programmers saw the horror that was on that PC; a very basic java code that accepts a number and tells you if it’s an odd or even number! Programmers lol-ed about it then shed some tears for how much the show producer rated programmers, way to bring down a bank’s security system with an odd-even number detector code.
The fact is, code looks just like code to someone that does not know how to code!
So what do you do when you are building a product or running your software-based company but you are not a programmer? How do you identify a Good Programmer?
Some things stand out when judging the skills of a programmer, we will discuss and juxtapose a few under the sub-headings:
Code Quality
Engineer and author Martin Fowler said: “Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.”
A good programmer spends time documenting his code, chances are that he may not understand his code when he looks at it again in a few months. Good programmers keep their teammates happy with their code and not in despair. It is bad practice to churn out code that was not written with future maintainability in mind. By this, we mean that the code was not written for codebase growth and if an update or a new feature has to be implemented, it gets messy, bug-filled, and just breaks. Quality code is important for scalability. Code should be structured properly, neat, well documented, and with proper formatting, built to be test driven to avoid all vulnerabilities. Quick & messy code is fast, yes! But just think of how many man-hours would go into debugging that code in the future, no one likes to deal with bad code. If you don’t understand this — just think of tangled hair! Messy right?
Time and Delivery
You know that proverb:
What an elder sees sitting down, a child does not see even if he climbs a tree?
It takes a programmer with good coding ethics a lesser time to easily spot bugs than it will take an average “stack overflow” programmer. The more a programmer writes code using the best standards and practices, the better they get in avoiding a mistake before it shows up. The software industry works on time and productivity, every programmer gets stuck on code once in a while but a good programmer knows where to go when he gets stuck and that means he still delivers within time.
Ability to work with a team
The ability to work with a team is a high criterion for qualifying a good programmer when you already have an existing engineering team. A good programmer should be able to seamlessly integrate into an existing team and communicate effectively with teammates. Even if communicating means negotiating new deadlines or making the team lead see why a certain decision is better than the other, a good programmer should be a team player. A task that is broken down and well-distributed gets done in less time and with more efficiency. Good communication also means healthy suggestions and input to the product or service being built.
Conclusion
Rather than recruit a large number of unskilled programmers (who may and may not be cheap) to write fast code, build a team of good programmers and hire good talent because the success or failure of your product is directly associated with the kind of code that was written. If you’re not sure how to go about it, CodeLn can help you hire top African talent, contact us at info@codeLn.com or visit our website and log in to view our talent pool of skilled Programmers.
