Blog For .NET

At my current employer we’ve spent a long time trying to refine our hiring process. While the process is by no means ideal, after conducting dozens of interviews a few key indictators of great developers have emerged. While not requirements, the developers we’ve hired who are successful and continue to innovate, improvise, and impress all share these qualities.

1. Reading books.
   This one sounds simple. One applicant I spoke with said “Books make a good reference but I find online resources better for learning and keeping up with technology”. This misses the point entirely. Books are indeed a great reference - they’re more than just a quick answer to a shortlived technical problem. Books help you avoid bothersome technical hurdles in the first place. Jeff Atwood from coding horror expresses this much better here. My team and I spent almost a year working extensively with javascript and the ASP.Net AJAX framework before we ever read a book on the subject. Not suprisingly we learned more from reading the book than we had from all the online references and tutorials. Granted, we were much more receptive to the author’s ideas because we’d already struggled so much with the technology, but reading this book made us better developers by helping us connect existing dots and drawing new pictures.There are numerous excellent books out there about everything that software developers do. From books that expand your horizons, books that help you write better code, books that give you perspective on the bigger picture, books on patterns and practices ,and even fictional books that reinforce what I love about developing software.Many people go out and buy the bible for the next version of some framework or technology. The version they wish they were using, but never end up reading because it doesn’t apply to their work. People who take an interest in doing what they spend 40+ hours a week better are more likely to do a better job for you.
2. Subscribe to blogs and follow websites
   Blogs keep you abreast of developments in technology. There are really smart people out there with facinating things to say. Following particular blogs shows you have an interest in the world around you and want to see beyond your immediate perspective.Steve Yegge’s blog is brilliant. It’s also opinionated and ignorant of all things microsoft, but he has a lot of really cogent thoughts. Scott Gu’s blog is an invaluable resource to keep up with Microsoft technologies. For year’s Joel Spolsky has provided original thoughts on a wide variety of topics that software developers share in common. I’m glad these guys (and many others) share what they think because there’s a lot to learn from them.
3. Work to understand the frameworks that they use
   The following are interview questoins I’ve asked:
   • How does the .net xmlSerializer work?
   • How does declarative databinding in the aspx markup work? e.g. <%# DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem,”au_id”) %>

   The questions themselves aren’t perfect judges of a developer’s caliber. They do, however, speak to other concerns- Are they using the framework(s) as designed? Is it all voodoo magic or do they know how it works? Before you can understand the limitations of a technology or framework you have to know how it works. Are dynamic languages better or worse than static languages? There are no right answer here, it depends on what you’re trying to do. Neil Ford (from Thoughtworks) said in a talk once that you should generally understand one level deeper than the the code you’re writing. If you’re using asp.net, how does the asp.net framework work? If you’re using a business layer, how does it retrieve and persist data? If you’re writing web pages, how do HTML, HTTP, and web servers work? Technology choices should be based on evidence and fact; learning how things work is a very basic part of that.

4. Find technology interesting and exciting in its own right
   Most of my time at work is spent with issues that involve code- developing software that is scalable, secure, and efficient while continually work more efficiently. I probably won’t use the next version of Java (I didn’t use the last one much either). I probably won’t make my living coding Ruby on Rails applications. That doesn’t mean that they don’t have interesting innovations, patterns, or paradigms. I love my job, I love doing my job well. Technologies that help me do my job better help make me better and that’s something to be excited about.

The underlying quality in these traits is passion. People who love developing software, like learning, and want to improve as developers are people that we want to hire.

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