Recognizing A Good Programmer (/ IT Person)

For those of you either hiring programmers / IT people or looking to get a job in this type of field you are probably aware there are tons of people available. So how do you recognize / know if you are a good one?

A great article to help answer this is “How to recogni[z]e a good programmer“. Although this article focuses on programmers, I believe the same points apply to IT people as well. To me, this article hits the nail on the head and I pretty much agree with everything here.

Side Bar / Rant Alert -

Personally, I have never been a fan of certifications (and I take it the author of this article shares my opinion). They do have their place and assure you the person has at least a certain level of knowledge, but this does not always translate to real world performance. I do not mean to take anything away from those with certifications, but I have dealt with so many “certified” IT people over the years that really were not up to snuff, which is where my cynicism is rooted.

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Coming in from the cold world of the IT Pro I have some certs.
Why have certs? Well for one the company I worked for would not promote you if you didn’t attain a certian amount of knoweldge every year. And some waranty work would have to wait for a ‘Certified Tech’ to arrive on site to fix some components.
So over the years I was a ‘company man’ I picked up certs, never got promoted though. Must have been my magnetic personality…
And yes I have ran in to those wiz bang IT people that can memorize a book in ten minutes and regurgitate it verbatum but couldn’t chage out a hot swap hard drive even if you showed them how to pull the handle.
So in my opinion certs have their palce but what should go with the cert is what the Military does – OJT ‘On the JOB Training’ before getting the cert and it should be a 50/50 thing 50% cert, 50% profeciency with the hardware.
MHO…
David K.
Finally someone else sees how certifications are overrated. I’ll go even further than the author: they do NOT prove that they know whatever they are certified in, it only proves that they put in the time and effort to study/cram and obtain the cert. Is that a good thing? Maybe. But maybe they put in that effort because they knew their skills or resume wasn’t up to snuff without it.
I think I’m a good programmer, and I’ve never had any interest in them. If I want to learn something, I usually sit down and experiment with it myself in some at least pseudo practical application. I get a much faster and more complete understanding of it that way, IMO.
Jase
I know at least one person (he was on a course with me) who had passed his A+ and Net+ exams, yet he struggled to do anything with a computer apart from turning it on.