[chevman]

I think what you're filtering for here is 'initiative'.

I don't hire programmers, but have been a hiring manager, running fairly technical business teams now for 10+ years, and have found that initiative is often the deciding factor in any given employee's success.

There are other ways to select for it, and clues you start to pick up on over the years, but once you've figured out how to gauge relative levels of initiative across different people, I've found it makes hiring/resourcing questions quite a bit easier.