Assessing Developers

When hiring software engineers there are always two primary things to look for; skill and quality.  Skill being a measure of practical ability, here and now and quality being one of potential.

Skill is easy to pick, it’s quite an objective property and the world is full of tools to help you judge it.  You can apply all sorts of tests and peer reviews, study examples of previous work and of course there are many standard industry qualifications.  Being quite tangible and largely merit-based it’s also easy to benchmark and rank – conversely it’s much harder to say with certainty one individual is more imaginative than another.

Quality is harder to spot but of more long term importance.  Quality engineers are imaginative, passionate about technology, creative, active in the technical community and hungry for knowledge.  They’ll push you for training, challenge ‘how things are’ and go the extra mile.  They’re valuable employees no matter what level of skill they have when you take them on – as long as you can provide the framework for their personal development.  High quality people will always end up highly skilled people.

A good practice is to arrange your recruiting process so that you’re only ever selecting from people with, or close to, the skill level needed for the role.  If you’ve got efficient filters early in the process (and you trust the results!) that leaves you free to make a strategic hiring decision while still getting what you need today.

So are you better off with skill or quality?  Hopefully you won’t have to make that tradeoff but real life being what it is, my money’s always on quality.