[Cantdog]

I think "almost impossible" is too harsh. Hiring a technical person off the street will be very difficult. However, a smart non-technical person should be able make reasonable decisions about people they know (personally or professionally) based on past achievement, other people's recommendations, previous interation, gut feel, ex.

Obviously there will still be false positives, but if you know someone is very smart, and is also in a technical field, there is a reasonable chance they will be good technically.

[runT1ME]

If this is true, why does it take so long to hire good programmers? Even startups with technical founders, who have an entire network to draw on, spend spend a lot time searching for and evaluating programmers.

>but if you know someone is very smart, and is also in a technical field, there is a reasonable chance they will be good technically

Why do you think this? Certainly you have to be smart to graduate from good University, but it's not secret that many programmers out of the University can't code their way out of a paper bag. Unfortunately, I've worked with a fair amount of intelligent people in a technical field who just weren't good at producing high quality software.