4 ms·

You're technical. And watching them day to day, like if you were their (technical) manager

• greenyoda 12y ago
  If I were their manager, I'd be talking to them regularly about their work and how they intended to approach their assignments. I'd probably be spending time pair programming with them if they had problems they couldn't solve on their own. I wouldn't need to try to figure out how good they were just by watching them. (I was a technical manager in my previous job.) If I absolutely had to evaluate somebody just by watching them code, I'd use this heuristic: People who repeatedly try random solutions that don't work are probably poor programmers - they don't understand their own code, and are not in control of the process. People who spend a lot of time thinking, reading the code or tracing execution methodically in their debuggers - and then do something that quickly works - are probably good programmers. If you want to have a chance at solving difficult problems, you have to spend more time thinking and less time typing. Also, people who spend a lot of time fighting with syntax errors are either bad programmers or don't know the language they're using very well.