I've hired quite a lot of programmers over the years, but I'm Danish, and around 95% of our junior applicants and 100% of the people we interview come with a re

I've hired quite a lot of programmers over the years, but I'm Danish, and around 95% of our junior applicants and 100% of the people we interview come with a relevant degree (2.5-5 years) because of our free education system. So it may be a tad different in the US where a lot of people are autodidact. Basically I look for the following things. * Do I think the candidate has the capacity to learn. Every hire we've taken straight out of college has been fairly useless for the first 3 months. They typically know how to write software, but they have no idea how to do it in an actual production setting. We've had hires who couldn't publish and deploy a simple asp mvc site to an IIS for instance. I typically judge this by what projects they've done during their education (and their free time) and what sort of roles they've filled in those projects. * Does the person have the minimum technical skills required to learn. I don't care if you can write a double linked list on a whiteboard, but I do want you to be able to do simple things, know about best practices and preferably things like SOLID. We'll typically ask what people think about test-first-development as an example, and we'll try to provoke an answer that doesn't come from a text book to see whether or not they actually have an opinion and knowledge on the matter or they're just telling us what they think we want to hear. * Do I think the candidate is capable of failing, accepting responsibility for the mistake and learning from it. It's perfectly fine to screw up, we all do it, but people who don't admit when they do it are dangerous. * Communication skills. I need candidates to be able to explain what they are doing to their grandmothers without getting angry. Both because the business end won't understand otherwise but mainly because politeness and a well mannered temper is more valuable than gold. * Do I think the person will be a strategically good fit in the team. * Does the team think the person will be a good fit. * Does it seem like the candidate wants to work for us. The best employees are the ones who value and take pride in their work. I don't want people to be blind zealots, but I want them to be able to tell their friends they're making a difference. Often we end up with a few who are strong technically and a few who are strong in personality and willingness. We always go with the latter. Obviously I can't tell you about what we've missed out on, but I can tell you that we've always had successful hires which is pretty important, because the most expensive you can make as a manager is hiring someone who doesn't work out.