Douglas Crockford, well known because he was the first person who specified the JSON format was asked about the question of detect the talent in a programmer.

Seibel: When you’re hiring programmers, how do you recognize the good ones?

Crockford: The approach I’ve taken now is to do a code reading. I invite the candidate to bring in a piece of code he’s really proud of and walk us through it.

Seibel: And what are you looking for?

Crockford: I’m looking for quality of presentation. I want to see what he thinks is something he’s proud of. I want to see evidence that in fact he is the author of the thing that he’s defending. I find that is much more effective than asking them to solve puzzles or trivia questions. I see all that kind of stuff as useless. But how effectively they can communicate, that’s a skill that I’m hiring for.

Seibel: Do you have any advice for self-taught programmers?

Crockford: Yeah, read a lot. There are good books out there. Find the good ones and read those. And if you’re doing web development, find the best sites and look at their code. Although I’m a little reluctant to give that advice yet. Most web developers learned to do web development by doing “view source,” and until fairly recently, most of the source that was out there was very bad. So you had a generation of programmers who were raised on really bad examples, thinking bad code was the way to write. That’s getting better now, but there’s still so much bad stuff out there that I’m reluctant to give that advice yet.

Seibel: What about advice for someone who’s actually getting a C.S. degree who wants to work as a programmer?

Crockford: I would focus on the communication aspect. Learn to write; learn to read. My advice to everybody is pretty much the same, to read and write. I generally don’t hire for specific skills. Until very recently, you couldn’t hire good JavaScript programmers. They were extremely rare. There are a lot of
really good ones out there now, but that’s a fairly recent thing. So until that happened, I would just hire for quality. Are you a good Java programmer, a good C programmer, or whatever? I don’t care. I just want to know that you know how to put an algorithm together, you understand data structures, and you know how to document it. If you can do that, you should be able to figure out JavaScript.

Coders at work – Douglas Crockford