3 Surprising Qualities of Great Developers
I am not going to waste your time by talking about how to spot a good developer. What I want to share with you is the 3 surprising qualities of Great developers. You know, the ones who can write ten simple lines of code to replace the months of your blood, sweat, and energy drinks. You want to punch them, but you can’t, because their elegant code just made a tear roll down your cheek. What makes them so special?
Lazy
For starters, they are lazy. You usually first spot this laziness in their hair and clothes. Both of which should have been cleaned at least a month ago, and yet there they are, strolling in…right after lunch. This same laziness results in code that isn’t copied and pasted in 80 different places. Which is good because the code is way more maintainable and doesn’t resemble the ramen you just had last night. Oh and comments…you can forget about those. A good engineer will document page after page of what their overly complicated code does. A great engineer abstracts and teases apart so they only have to write a few lines of code. I am sure if we look through the pages of history, it was a lazy engineer that gave rise to AOP.
Forgetful
Their lack of commenting would easily drop them down a few pegs if it wasn’t for their forgetfulness. I’ve found that great developer know that a few days from now they will forget what their code does. So instead of commenting line after line, which they wouldn’t read, they write extremely large method and variable names. So, you never wonder what the method addFirstVariableThenSubtractSecondVariableAndMultiplyByThird does. Usually even an intern can follow their code. You can spot this forgetfulness because they will ask if you know how awesome Ruby on Rails is…six times in the same conversation. Paradoxically, these same guys remember every freaking key combination for VI.
Clean
I know I said they have messy hair and clothes. But don’t let that fool you, they write the cleanest code. So clean, you could eat off of it. Sure they might gripe about Python’s significant indentation, but secretly they know they love it. Because this forces the messy coders to comply. Bet you $20 that it was a great developer (lazy and forgetful) who thought of making indentation significant.
Great coders have to necessarily have all of these qualities, not just one or two, but all three. So, if you find a lazy, forgetful, and clean coder…marry her (or him). Seriously. I did.
