Comment by Ben Buchanan (200ok) on "3 things you look for in a good programmer?"

Attitude - you can teach skills, you can coach behaviour, but attitude is very hard to change. I'm looking for someone who can work on the team; who wants their peers to succeed (not just themselves). People who champion ideas; who encourage people to grow and support them when they're struggling; who share their knowledge... they make a massive difference.

Passion - it's hard to get much out of someone who doesn't give a crap. This doesn't mean they work stupid hours pulling hero efforts, it's about enjoying what they do and having a desire to do it well. It doesn't have to be their first or only passion in life, but they should care.

Curiosity - some people call it the hacker gene, it can show as habitual learning and experimentation. Basically I want to see some evidence that they are curious about how things work, what comes next, how they can build things with it, etc.

...

In a more literal sense, how do I decide if they're good at a particular skill? I try to ask them open questions that get them to tell me what they do and don't know. I'll have them talk through their approach to solving a problem. I'll dig into specific areas the job absolutely requires and make sure they talk confidently about working with that tech.

Sadly

It's hard to get much out of someone who doesn't give a crap.

You just described in my experience 95%+ of the people working in web development. That's WHY idiocy like "frameworks" thrive as the only people ignorant enough to be duped into using it have no passion for development, and correspondingly cannot seem to be bothered to learn enough about the ACTUAL underlying languages like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or PHP to even be aware how badly scam artist hoodoo-voodoo like bootcrap, turdpress, jQuery, smarty, less/sass/scss, etc, etc is saddling them up and taking them for a ride. Or they blindly include packages like NPM for even the simplest of tasks without even looking at the code they are trusting -- or blindly roll the dice saying that "git will handle everything so I don't have to talk to my coworkers ever" sucking the life and humanity out of everything.

That lack of passion and drive, lack of interest or even care prevents them from ever bothering to learn enough to even form a valid opinion on if those tools are ACTUALLY easier or ACTUALLY make them more productive, and instead they just blindly accept that they are because everyone says it is. Band wagon, card stacking, glittering generalities -- is this programming or cultism?

... and the results are broken, bloated, slow, hard to maintain projects that ALWAYS costs more in the long run. But what can one expect in a "credit mentality" society where NOBODY gives a flying purple fish about tomorrow -- they want it yesterday, with no investment, and they'll throw their future under the bus to get it. "Pay more later for something you can't afford now" is NOT a recipe for success.

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