If you were the boss, and recruiting PHP developers, what kind of person would be your ideal candidates?

For myself, a sincere love of programming is on top of the list. The reason is that it is much much easier for a person to learn actual programming skills than trying to change their love or hobbies.

Second of my list is the character of the candidates. If you take anybody on board, you are going to spend more time with them than with your wife and children. Therefore, if you cannot get on well with them, you just dig a big hole for yourself. So, don’t take anybody who lie, cheat and steal ideas.

The third item on my list is the ability to learn. In the web application developing industry, technologies change on a daily basis. It is no good to say that I spend 5 years on PHP, and I am an expert on that area now. It would be better to hear from the candidates that “you know what, I knew nothing about javascript before, spent 2 weeks on that, and got my work done properly.”

At the bottom of my list is the relevant knowledge and skills for the job itself. i.e. Ruby on Rail, AJAX, CSS, HTML, SVN, MySQL, Apache, blar, blar, blar. The reason is if you love programming, plus you are a responsible character, plus you got the ability to learn, a new technology is just a piece of cake.

Please tell me your ideas….