How not to hire a software engineer
I look to see if I can trust them to not do dumb things. That&#x27;s really it.<p>What&#x27;s the ego, arrogance, competence, willingness to ask questions, interrogate things, redefine problems to be less work (or none at all).<p>Do you see what&#x27;s not there? Programming language competency. Database knowledge. Things like that.<p>I&#x27;ve been hired as a Ruby programmer, I didn&#x27;t know Ruby. I was hired for mainframes in the 90s - I had never seen a mainframe. I was told about 20 years ago to write a program in perl, my boss gave me a perl book with the assignment because I didn&#x27;t know perl and I did it.<p>This is not a bad way to go about work. Every codebase is new. Every job has a steep learning curve. Every requirement is a conversation which may only be internal, but has to always happen. Every programmer you work with is someone whose preferences, strengths, styles, and weaknesses you need to have intuition on. People good at those things are what make good programmers.<p>That&#x27;s why general competency, ability to learn, not to create a mess and not to waste time on stupid things are the only things I care about. That&#x27;s really it.<p>Preexisting technical skills aren&#x27;t as important as how dynamically you can apply new ones.