In this article, we will analyze the signs of weak developers that can be found in an interview, during a joint work, or even during an informal conversation in a smoking room. An important clarification – everything described in our article should not be considered as a checklist of formal rules. These are rather some patterns, each of which is not a guarantee that you have a “bad” developer in front of you. But, if several of them are combined in one person, then the probability of this greatly increases. Take a closer look at these signs in the dialogue if you want to get a wonderful quality of professional web development services.
Confused speech and inconsistency in the presentation of thoughts
A pattern that is not obvious at first glance is that as a person speaks, so he writes code. One of the highly respected experts who voiced such considerations back in the 80s was Edger Dijkstra, the author of the graph traversal algorithm of the same name, and today this is confirmed by scientific evidence.
TLDR: when writing code, the same areas of the brain are involved as in the perception and formation of oral speech, and the areas responsible for logic and mathematical tasks practically do not change their activity. This can be explained at an everyday level: the developer first comes up with an abstract solution in his head, just using the logical functions of the brain, and then this abstraction is translated into actual code. That is, a programming language is the same formalization of images from thinking into a specific system of symbols and rules, like any other human language.
Therefore, when meeting a developer, just pay attention to how he says:
- How big is his vocabulary?
- How often does he correct himself?
- How does it start and end phrases?
- How holistic and consistent his thoughts are;
- How fluent is his speech?
- Does he use a lot of parasitic words and “mooing” filling pauses;
- How much context is he able to hold in the dialogue.
This observation takes some practice, but if you pay attention to it, you will immediately notice the alarm bells. And, with a high probability, you will find all the same in his code. If a person is verbose, then his code will be redundant. If he jumps from topic to topic, then the code will lack consistency and elegance. If he can convey a deep thought in an understandable way in a few words, then in the code he will be simple and clear.
This is not a 100% universal or absolute rule, but the correlation is high enough to be useful. Tellingly, it does not depend on the language in which communication takes place.
Strong engineers often turn out to be good speakers – they are the ones you most often see speaking at thematic conferences. In addition, it is worth separately excluding from this rule cases when a person has organic or neurological speech disorders, such as stuttering or aphasia.
Abuse of jargon and buzzwords
Some developers in communication (or in the resume) often use professional terms. You should be especially attentive to people who change their morphology using diminutive forms, up to turning them into euphemisms.
It is highly likely that in this way a person is trying to impress the listener, disguise self-doubt, or hide a lack of experience and real knowledge. The same applies to buzzwords – “glamorous vocabulary”, words that deliberately try to create a false sensation, rather than convey information. For example, “exclusivity” or “elite” are words that are used to impress and appeal to emotions rather than convey information and appeal to reason.
If you notice such a line of behavior in a developer, ask him to clarify questions in depth and breadth. The irony here is that even if you yourself are not an expert in this topic, it will be quite easy to catch such a “specialist” in a lie. Therefore, a developer who can simply and without fuss answer the question “I don’t know” is already worth a lot, and this definitely should not be written off. But a programmer who will portray awareness by juggling technical jargon is definitely “weak”.
And if you don’t want to look closely, then just choose trusted companies, such as Fireart (https://fireart.studio/hybrid-app-development-services/).
