External article: How to recognize a good programmer

Here is an interesting article: How to recognise a good programmer.

It focus mainly on technical skills, characteristics of highly skilled programmers and how to recgonise them when hiring a programmer. However, who needs a just-programmer nowadays? Don't companies need more than that? Don't they need people capable of understanding their business, seing the big picture and understanding where their work fit?

The skills mentioned in the article might be good to find good coders, but it won't help in finding someone who is capable of helping on improving a company's system. As someone already said in a comment there, some of these bleeding edge programmers try to push a technology where it does not fit.

The Paul Graham article mentioned sounds strange, "what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. A lot of those companies were started by business guys who thought the way startups worked was that you had some clever idea and then hired programmers to implement it." The business guys don't know how to hire a programmer and the programmers are responsible for the startup failure? I mean, wasn't the business guys the ones who failed by hiring unqualified programmers? It seems to me that people are trying to assign blame and if the business guys where more focused in contracting programmers with better business skills instead of the technical skills mentioned on the article, they would probably have higher chances of success.

People who believe the best programmers develop programs at home, in their leisure time, for fun, probably believe that the best pathologist has a corpse at home.

On conclusion, I believe that what makes a great programmer are a set of soft skills, mainly, their ability to understand the business. As I mentioned here: The Importance of Soft Skills.

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