One thing I use to determine if a developer is worth his/her salt is (especially in the web development field) their knowledge of related (but not necessarily used) technologies.
For example, lets say you have a "Server guy" on your team. Your web developer should already be familiar with IIS and ALL of it's inner workings. And I mean everything from SMTP and CDO to FTP and how Security works (Anonymous access, Integrated Access) and how ASP.NET executes and on which account.
For example, ASP.NET uses ASPNET user account in Windows XP/2000. But on Windows Server 2003 and Vista, it uses the Network Services user account.
It's not need to know, but if they have those basics (including managing SQL server, like creating backups, restoring backups, knowing how to restore MDF files without proper backups etc). Then you have a winner.
Because I've seen too many developers stuck into just their code. They can't think for themselves and I've noticed, if a person wasn't exposed to a specific technology or
wants to know more about relevant technologies as much as they can, they won't come up with the best solution.
And this is then where your "project manager" steps in. Your project manager should have a wide area of expertise. You get project managers, and then you get project managers that knows WTF they're doing in the relative field they're managing.
For example, take a vanilla project manager, and tell them to manage the rewrite of the application. Sure, they can apply the basics, but they won't know what technologies to use (other than the buzzwords) and possibly won't even take into the account the direction of where the company wants to go to by doing this rewrite.
They'll simply draw up steps. With stupid deadlines no sane programmer can keep, and expects them to keep it. Then the guys who you hired who knows their **** gets overworked because they have to stick by a ridiculous timeline.
So, for a project manager you're looking at getting a guy who has the knowledge of above developer you would hire, but would want to do the managing of the project. They should also have client facing experience whereby they're able to assess the needs of the client without the client having to go into detail about what they meant (this does take practice)
A perfect dream team of developers? I can currently list only maybe 5 guys that I know that would be perfect for this. And this is out of 23 odd developers I know.
You're also looking at R20k+ a month for each of them.
Sure. You can hire 15 developers for that price a month, but you won't make deadline and you won't have a solid piece of software at the end. Because, unfortunately, most of the programmers out there are idiots, possibly got into the job because it was "computers", could do a half assed job half right half of the time to get some worthy experience but will **** up each time on the simplest task.
Your choice. Hope I helped
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