How to tell who your best programmer is

Smart people are not easy people to work with - enable them

Really smart people are hard to work with. They are quicker than everyone else, see, and have to exercise patience to slow down and explain things all day to regular people.

This is, in fact, how you can see who is good and who isn’t. The software developer that disagrees about even the smallest things while also putting their mark on everyone’s work must be smarter. The quieter developers that get along and collaborate can’t be that smart. Those that are truly great have to make a lot of noise, work on the parts of the system that seem to always break, and constantly get attention. The other developers must not be able to keep up, which is why they are so quiet.

While you can’t explicitly play favorites, it is natural to listen more to the people that are currently yelling and less to people that aren’t yelling, so forgive yourself for constantly siding with these mean geniuses. If they end up acting like a jerk sometimes, then later like a larger jerk, then later start being a terrible person, this is the cost of greatness. This internal expense report system requires the absolute best in the business, and if that means that people sometimes run crying from a conference room, then so be it. Software development is a talent-driven industry, you read once, and not collaborative like other types of engineering.

If you watch this dynamic play out in the long term, you will find that the super-smart-but-mean people end up being in charge of large chunks of the system, and they defend them with everything they have. Nobody else can work on them or even think about improving them. They stay around even when all others resign after about a year. What loyalty! What a sense of ownership! These geniuses are a rare group of people indeed.

If, after a few years, your best programmer seems to have driven off all other engineers and seems to think that they can say and do whatever they want, and make outrageous demands, then at least you are only having to pay one developer (whatever they want).