[bo_Olean]

My two cents.

When you are searching for quality developers, we assume that you are a quality coder yourself, the developer you hire would sure grasp these things from you and your work environment quickly - if he/she is passionate enough to convince you that you should hire him/her for the job.

As far as i believe quality coding is achieved over time, this is a ongoing learning process. Those who mastered this art are not available - they already have figured their own way to go along. If you went on searching for coders and "quality coder" is your first priority, most probably all of your 3 points will always restrict you from hiring coders and there's where the paycheck flow as @kirpekar outlined applies. Whoever you hire, you as a manager should trust your developer in term of quality and give them a environment to grow not in terms of performance only but in terms of quality coding too.

I don't think i am a quality coder, manager, i am myself learning each days from discussion like this. It cost me 1 month (of my business) to build self learning and growing charisma in a coder i hired recently, he asks me only few question in a while these days - "i solved it, how would you have done this ?" we then discuss for improvements.

Try searching for basic qualities that matters to you and your work ethos and focus on skill set that you are searching for rather than "quality coder", this will ease hiring decisions i think.