The “Worst” coder anyone should hire

The CRY above is something we hear from almost every entrepreneur we meet whether in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Singapore, London, Malaysia, Indonesia, China — just about almost everyone.

Our natural reaction would be to ask what developer they are looking for and they would dish out all the latest “buzz words” like IonicJS, Angular JS, Rails, Backbone, etc they hear about even though they don’t really know the exact pros and cons of it.

Here’s the deal. The people who are good in the latest in-demand technologies, would naturally know that they are in-demand and hence be charging high prices — oftentimes out of your own budget unless you’re a pretty well-funded startup.

If you cast your net wider to include older technologies like PHP, MySQL, plain Javascript, you’d find way more developers (and who are more affordable as well). We’re not saying developers who know in-demand or old technologies are competent, as that’d be highly dependent on each individual’s programming aptitude and capabilities. However, a developer of old technology with programming aptitude, would be competent enough to learn most new technologies, when given proper documentations.

So, how do we go about finding a developer with aptitude?

We’re not saying this is a surefire formula but so far it has worked for us and over 150 startups at MomoCentral. We define a developer with aptitude a.k.a competent developer, as one who:

1. Has algorithmic thinking

• Description: Developers who, when posed with a problem, would be able to come up with a sequence of steps and a function that solves it. These are not developers who just try to make things work by limiting themselves to what plugins can do, but can actually write the plugins themselves.
• How to test: These can be done by giving them programming problems or small tasks that would require them to actually write a program or function to solve it. P.S: Hello World programs do not count.
• Note: Technical skills would be needed to come up with such a test.

2. Knows how to “Google” and apply things they read from there

• Description: Developers who are independent and proactive enough to conduct research on possible solutions explored by other developers on their own, learn from it and apply it to their own programs. You do not want developers who copy and paste code exactly what’s googled, or who ask someone else to write the code for them on some forum
• How to test: E.g: By giving them a project that they are not familiar with, and monitoring how they arrive at the solution by navigating around obstacles and gaps in their knowledge.
• Note: This is just one of many ways to test this.

3. Pick up new languages/frameworks by reading documentation

• Description: If Apple announces a new framework tomorrow and releases the documentation for it, a competent developer should be able to pick up the documentation, read it and get started developing on the new platform according to the proper, recommended practices and standards.
• How to test: One way is to get them to complete a task or write a mini program in a language or involving a library or API that is not one they already know

And there you have it! Hope you found these tips that have worked for us above helpful.

Do share in the comments below if you have other methods that have worked for you.

Note: Thank you @triplez and @moofang for the edits!