The Top Attributes of a Great Programmer

programmingmatters.com

12 points·jedwhite··3 comments

I think that point #3 should be higher on the list, perhaps it should even be first. It is the hallmark of a professional software engineer that s/he can sit down and quickly be productive in the environment of a legacy code base.

Yes, reading code is important, but there's no such thing as being "quickly" productive on a new code base. Anyone who makes changes quickly is probably being careless.

Some, and perhaps most, legacy code bases belong in a top 10 on TheDailyWTF. The last thing you want is for someone to start tinkering with a fragile code base and breaking things that seemed unrelated. A code base of any significant size could take weeks to understand properly, and very few changes should be made until it is understood properly. Managers of new engineers need to be cognizant of this lead time.

When working with a new code base, the only thing that's "productive" is spending the first month just studying code, asking questions of colleagues, writing tests and documentation, and making sure that the effects of various potential changes are fully understood. Any time spent on new features at this stage is just expanding the bloat and adding risk to the project.

Number one on any of these lists should be empathy for users. If you don't care about and understand those using your code, you will never be great, only good.

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