How to hire a great programmer

“Hiring a great programmer does not require any rocket science methodology rather it can be done with little tricks and of course experience. If you don’t have any prior experience, you may take help from your friends or you can simply follow some thumb rules. Let’s find out those thumb rules that may help you in hiring a great programmer.”

Understand the understanding of the programmer: The most important asset of a programmer is his programming skill. He must be confident enough about his programming knowledge because, it will help him lot while handling any critical situation during the development process. So, it is the task of the interviewer to test the programming proficiency of the programmer; it can be done by asking few important pieces of codes to write and execute in the system. You can also ask some tricky modules to code and execute. The programmer may also be asked about few fundamental concepts of the language on which he is supposed to work on.

The programmer must possess some prior experience for your need: While hiring a good programmer, you must shortlist only those candidates who are quite close to your requirements i.e. they must have prior experience on the technology or domain in which you are going to work on. Suppose, you want to develop a web application in Java for a job portal; then you must consider those Java programmers having experience in any JSP web portal may or may not be in job portal but by some means related to that. This will help you in getting a better programmer who is not only resourceful but also productive for your requirements. Moreover, his past experience will help you in predicting all possible critical situations and accordingly you can prepare your assessment thoroughly to handle those situations in a smoother manner.

The programmers having keen interest to learn are better: Continuous learning is the beautiful nature of human being and it holds good for a great programmer as well. As a great programmer, he must be flexible enough to adopt with any change in environment, we are not talking about physical environment; it’s about industrial or technological environment. Many times, we need to work on a different or latest technology or domain as per the requirement of the client. In that situation, our programmer must learn the new domain knowledge so as to provide continuous quality service to our client. So, you must hire a programmer who is having a keen interest to learn new technologies and relate them in the application for better productivity. In present scenario, mobile app development and responsive web design are few such things to consider.

Communication skill must be tested: Communication is the process of exchanging our feelings with each other. In IT industry, there is a tremendous importance of communication skill to understand the feelings and requirements of a foreign body that looks for a quality business with us. So, a good programmer must possess better communication skill to understand the need, requirement and feelings of our client. He must be able to deal with the client by understanding and resolving his doubts with a smile on his face. He must not irritate upon the client at any point of time; because that may lead to hamper our business.

His adoptability to different circumstances should be considered: During the development process of a software application, there may be many uncertain and unexpected circumstances arise and we cannot forecast them all. But it is the duty of the programmer to handle them in a well-organized manner with an intention that our client will not feel disappointed. For the same, you must consider his prior experience in handling these types of critical situations. During the hiring process, you must ask him for some of his real time experience from his previous assignments and his role in those situations. Though we cannot guarantee that he can handle all upcoming challenges; but, at least you can trust him for similar situations.

Loyalty matters a lot in long run: A programmer can’t be great until unless we find him loyal enough. We are not talking about his loyalty for the organization; but for his job. He must be loyal for his responsibility and assignments. He must have understanding over the non-disclosure agreement of the client. He must not share any client information with others even the intellectual property of the client. You must check his background and track record from previous employer before you offer him the joining letter and entitle him as a great programmer!