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4 Red Flags of Terrible Developer

Runaway from these people

Perhaps you know, that the IT market is growing like crazy these days. And I do not talk about some stocks or options. I talk about people, who make all the IT stuff work — developers. Even 20 years old Senior Developers

Companies move their services online. Communication with clients became remote. So everyone needs more applications, more websites, more automation processes. To create and maintain all that infrastructure you need a huge amount of developers. So, demand for developers is growing high.

A great developer can give you value and improve team performance. A bad one can decrease team efficiency dramatically. So it’s safer, not to hire a fantastic specialist than to hire an awful one. The price of mistakes is high. Now, it’s more actual than ever.

It’s difficult to analyze a person in 30 minutes interview. You can’t go deep. You can’t check real technical knowledge on every topic. But here are some red flags, that you should pay attention to.

1. Can’t say “I don’t know”

The simple thing you should always scan during the interview — ability to say “I don’t know”. It’s OK, not to know something. We are humans, we have limited brain capacity. You can’t know everything even in your own sphere, where you have been working for 20+ years. Don’t expect developers to know every single existing framework or tool. Developer is not an AI connected to the network. Yet…

So the good potential employee will tell you if he doesn’t know some stuff. The real expert understands his strong and weak sides and accepts them. He won’t lie to you about his knowledge and experience. Meanwhile, if the person keeps telling you “I know it” to every question, it sounds suspicious. Of course, you could get lucky to find a genius, that really knows everything possible. But let’s be realistic, chances are low.

More likely, when you constantly hear “I know it”, is that person trying to impress you at any cost. Take advantage of your limited time resource. Do you want someone, who’s lying to make a good impression? I don’t.

2. Toxic

Usually, the easiest way to check this quality is to ask candidate about a previous company. How did he manage team communication? Was his manager a great guy or a jerk? Also, why did he leave that company?

Answering these questions, the toxic candidate gonna reveal himself. Toxic people normally blame others. Feel underestimated. Try to make an impression, that they were the only intelligent there. Most likely they gonna talk about your company in the same manner later. Which can damage your reputation and team spirit. Is it worth it?

3. Arrogance aka God Mode

Demand for coders is high. Economics tells us, in this situation price of the required product is growing. But talking about senior developers not only price is reaching the moon.

Also does Pride.

It’s complex to keep yourself modest, receiving 5 invitations to change a job daily. Especially, when HR-specialist try to hunt good developers at any cost.

Still, you don’t want to add an arrogant specialist to your team. Arrogance destroys relationships. Anyone would be pissed off to work with a person with super-high self-esteem.

There are no special keys, how to detect an arrogant expert. It’s super obvious in the communication process.

4. Storyteller

This kind of fake expert gonna talks more than you. He gonna tell you about everything in his life. His blown-up startup (not his fault of course). Previous job. He was almost CTO but was too bored solving everyday issues. And other “cool” stories.

The issue here is that the word is at odds with the deed.

He is the best ever been born developer in this Universe. But only in his own dream world.

There are no proofs of his awesomeness. No code repositories. No feedback from his previous job. Sometimes even no social media pages, like LinkedIn.

Also, he refuses to pass the live coding interview. Or at least show some examples of his own code. In practice, these guys often are way worse than they were telling everyone.

These are the key 4 red flags of the awful developers. You should run away from candidates that fit them.

Part 2 of this article. If you enjoyed the first part — you gonna love the second one!

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