In search for developers - curious craftsmen wanted!

We looked at what a good manager is supposed to be about. Let's now try to figure out what makes developers write better quality code. Things like skills and brilliance may certainly help. But are those the core components? I don't think so.

If I was to choose perfect features of my team member I would go with curiosity, engagement, openness and thoroughness in no particular order (or maybe in alphabetical). All right - I can add that some programming experience would be a plus as well.

Let's start with openness - no software developer is an island, thus communication is everything in software business. I talked about it already but I can't emphasize it enough. Unless you don't need extensible maintainable software, its' creators have to communicate with their peers and the rest of external world. So they do have to have two following skills: being able to talk to others (and actually practicing it) and being likeable enough to be talked to. I'm not saying that they should be party stars or anything like that. Nerds with working I/O would do.

Now, what I found is that creating something of high value and high quality was always going in pair with having fun working on it (no matter whether I was a developer, architect or manager). I think that basically goes with the feeling that you are doing something right. Moreover, in these projects I had people who no matter what they were doing, they were always putting their 100% in it. It was somehow easy to get them engaged. At some point I figured out that they had engagement ingrained in them. And believe me you want to work with such people. People who don't give a damn, who are 'just earning money' are not fun to work with. They are inclined to take shortcuts, think short term and to look at you with 'what this has to do with me' face in the time of crisis. If you can - work with people who care about what they are doing.

As I mentioned earlier building up quality is all about incremental improvements, innovations which make your code better and better. And to innovate you have to stay up to date, learn and try new things. Think about your current quality as the status quo, comfort zone your developers live in. If you want them to get out of this cave they need to be curious enough to take action which would push them out. Given that they are wondering enough to see shadows and hear echoes in the first place. No progress without questioning, in short.

And finally thoroughness - this is the difficult one - most of the folks go into this business because of high payoffs for creative actions - you build up several routines and you are already running something which paints beautiful outputs to your screen, you change a bit of it and the outcomes are completely different and even better adjusted to what you wanted to get. This is what we all are for in this business. Unfortunately, if we want to make something more out of it than a creator's toy - after we have the prototype which works with input of our choice, we need to put ten times more work to make it work with all the inputs in all situations - and this is not so much fun any more. Ratio is different based on how you modeled domain in the first place, but still creative piece is always far shorter than the process of handling non-standard cases afterwards. To make things worse we know how to get next adrenaline fix - we just need to move on to creating next piece. It requires a lot of discipline to finish it up - I've been there - it took me many years to develop thoroughness and ingrain it into my character and I still have slips from time to time. Fortunately being able to do the task completely offers also good chemistry strike through your body and additionally good managers will be looking for you everywhere.

To sum this up - features commonly searched for like skills and creativity are for sure important, but at least my experience says that some character traits (which by the way would make you stand out in anything you put your hands to) are far more important than that.