After all of the years of working together with developers across the country from companies big and small, I have gradually made a shift in the way I see my fellow developers. I did previously measure each developer by the years of experience and how well they might rattle off the answers to technological questions. Looking back now, it is amazing how much talent I was turning away when conducting interviews since they couldn't answer the questions which I thought were very basic to all C# developers. I convinced myself that a good developer should know all the particulars of the.NET platform, and should be able to answer all questions associated with the subject, but I discovered that I was wrong.
It occurred to me back in '06 when I was working on-site for a customer for around two years. Over the course of that time, I turned away about thirty interviewees for a mid level ASP.NET position and I gave the "thumbs up" for 2 which were both screened by the internal team before being hired. I believed that the ratio of two out of those thirty people that I've interviewed is a decent ratio. Within the first several months I could see trouble brewing from a mile away, however it took me a while to find out what went wrong - I was taking a look at each interview and applicant the wrong way. Long story short, they were both let go within a year and a half shortly after I left to jump onto another project.
What went wrong? What should I been looking for? I had to take a step back and check out all of the past colleagues over the course of my then eight year career. What does all of them have in common? What about the ones that I wish I didn't have to work with? When I matched all of them and compared them side by side the answer jumped out at me. The team members that I admired the most had tenacity. They had grit. They are very determined. They knew that they wouldn't fail, and couldn't fail. What else did they have in common? Those people were not the smartest people in the room. You read that right, they weren't.
Here's the moral of the story - I found out that the best team members are not the ones who hold the best college degrees or can be proficient in the most programming languages. The best team members you can find are the ones that never give up (I know that sounds cliche). They are the ones that will do whatever it takes to make a project succeed whether that means working extra hours or picking up the slack for someone that is behind. They are also the type that doesn't care about office politics, looking good to managers, promotions, etc. Their approach is that the work comes first and whatever happens after that is a result of their efforts. A simple rule, isn't it? However, that lesson took me more than 8 years to learn, and now, I'm using that lesson as my way of interviewing candidates for my project(s).
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