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I don't understand why you want to look for indicators that someone will be a good coder... rather than actually see if they are a good coder (ie. actually look

I don't understand why you want to look for indicators that someone will be a good coder... rather than actually see if they are a good coder (ie. actually look at their code). I understand looking at peoples code takes time... but really that's why companies are paying recruiters, to save them time. I would guess if there was some magic set of indicators that shows if someone is a good coder or not... we would have worked that out by now. It turns out there isn't... look at code. If you aren't able to read code and evaluate someone by their code, you shouldn't be hiring software developers. How did we end up in a position where people that understand code, hire people that don't understand code (recruiters) to hire people that can code.... what am I missing here.

prodigal_erik 15y ago
We have to watch them write code for some problem they didn't cram for. We can't just read code because we don't know how much trouble they had producing it, or whether it's even theirs. Our recruiter (when we had one) just looked for reasonable fit with the claimed skills, and asked a couple of elementary conceptual questions (not single-language trivia like this), then brought in engineering.
slurgfest 15y ago
I think "good coder" tends to be somewhat to completely irrelevant to the way that recruiters make money. I imagine it's all about what you can sell - about generating convincing appearances cheaply, rather than proving true things at length.