Economy Size Geek

Startup Developers: Telling Schmucks from Superstars (5 min quiz)

They developed this quiz to tell if someone is a startup super star.

The Startup Developer Superstar Detection Quiz

1. You’re more of a pragmatist than a perfectionist. [Yes/No]

2. You’ve muttered “I’m up anyways, might as well code” at 4:30 a.m. at least once in your life.

3. You understand why the above is misleading because time is continuous, not discrete and the probability of any individual having muttered anything at exactly 4:30 a.m. is near zero. But, you answered yes to #2 anyways, because you’re practical and know what was actually meant.

4. Your sense of satisfaction from software development is a function of how many users are delighted with what you’ve built.

5. You can argue both sides of a technical debate most of the time, if you had to. Some of the time, you actually do, just to better understand the tradeoffs.

6. You’ve been impressed with someone else’s code at some point in your life.

7. You’ve reused someone else’s code at some point in your life, and resisted the temptation to rewrite it.

8. Given a weekend, you could build and launch a trivial web application from start to finish in a language/platform of your choosing (C#,Java,PHP,Python,Ruby,etc.). And, since you’ve actually had weekends, you’ve actually gone ahead and done this.

9. You’re strangely comforted by the fact that the list of languages in #8 is alphabetical and not in descending or ascending order of quality/power/coolness/etc as you really don’t have the time for a religious war on languages and platforms.

10. Given a long weekend and some caffeine, you could do #8 with a popular language/platform that is not of your choosing.

11. You’ve developed something non-trivial before that nobody you know could recreate in a weekend (and you know more than two people that you’d consider great developers).

12. You’re going to start your own company someday. So, you’re interested in sales, marketing, operations and things other than figuring out how to make Ruby on Rails scale to large numbers of users when there are complicated database queries involved.

13. You read a lot, including things like Hacker News.

14. You’re not just an internet developer, you’re an internet participant. You actually use the stuff other people have built.

There doesn’t seem to be a mention of what happens when the person answers yes to lots of the questions - but is only a legend in their own mind.

I’ll probably end up giving this to the people who ask me advice on hiring programmers for their startup (since the people asking are generally not programmers and need all the help they can get) The real message seems to be - look for someone who is seriously technical with broader interests.