[collyw]

Nah, I am agreement with the poster that you replied to.

Our tech lead is a bit of a diva. He is smart but basically he just programs and doesn't bother with much else. He bangs out code quickly, but it can be buggy and its usually the rest of the team that fix the bugs, keep the infrastructure running, write the tests. He is good at tricky algorithmic stuff. His code is fairly well organised. I don't find his abstractions particularly good. The REST API he created is terrible (poor abstraction) and not RESTful a lot of it uses POST requests, 200 success contains errors. No tests. Terrible at explaining his work to other people. Poor at listening.

Give me a good team player with average ability over a good programmer that lacks the other skills any day.

[croh]

Agree absolutely. I think real problem is our interview process. More focus is given on solving tricky questions than overall craft. In day to day tasks, how many times you have to implement those algorithms ? (I am not against knowing algorithms though). Good code is which performs requirement perfectly and MAINTAINABLE.

Python's PEP 20/zen of python is one of the best guide for craft, imo. It works well for individual programmer as well as for teams.

https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0020/