It seems programmers are taking a bit of a hammering this week!

Kris Kemper talks about the Net Negative Producing Programmer referring to a paper linked to by Jay Fields, concluding that the code submission is very important in helping to distinguish between good and bad candidates.

Now I probably haven’t done as many interviews at ThoughtWorks as Kris has but from what I’ve seen of the recruitment process it seems to be more focused on ensuring that potential hires culturally fit into the organisation rather than that they write the best code that anyone has ever seen. Clearly a level of ability in coding is important for a Developer but I believe that the ability to communicate and collaborate with your colleagues is even more important. It’s quite a rare situation in software development where you have to develop something completely on your own, and even if it were to happen you would still need to communicate with your customer even if the development effort was solo.

Bruce Eckel has an interesting post about hiring technical talent where he lists several criteria for hiring people, ending on the note that organisations should not hire people he terms as 'toxic'. A toxic person according to his description is someone who has some kind of quirk that causes destructive behaviour. In other words someone who is likely to destroy the morale of any team they are placed in by their actions.

I think ThoughtWorks are getting the balance right in hiring very talented people who are able to collaborate with each other to solve problems. One client even said to me that they did not understand how every single ThoughtWorks person they met was so nice. I think that is a glowing recommendation for looking at the overall personality of candidates and not just raw coding ability.