Choosing the Right Team - Phase II: Choose Your Programmer
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Once you have selected a designer, it’s time to choose your programmer. This task it is a little easier to do since there’s a much bigger population of good coders than good designers.
When I worked for a large media company, I had to interview and recruit many programmers. There are all kinds: the original coder, the copy-paste coder, the optimizer, the bypass coder, etc. I didn’t always recruit the wisest one of all.
If you need an extra hand and you really need a programmer, make sure he has the most important quality that can be found in a programmer: the ability to learn on his own.
For example, there was a time when a client had asked us for a Slot Machine game for a site they had in mind. The requirements they gave us consisted of a huge list of about eight pages, filled with rules and recommendations. After the meeting, I had a chat with the programmer I had assigned to the project, and even though neither one of us had been involved in a project of this kind, he immediately started doing his homework. One thing I loved about this guy was his ability to research. The following day he came to me with the result of his research and we discussed the many different approaches the project could take regarding the database to use, the language to use, whether there would be any use of Flash, etc. We were able to have that chat based completely on the information he had gathered because of his ability to search for information on his own.
So the next time you need to hire a new programmer, instead of just reading his CV, ask him about a couple of hypothetical projects and check out his approach towards the solution. This might reveal a lot about the programmer and his ability to solve problems. This will help you to decide whether to hire him or not.
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