While this list does correlate highly with the list of good developers I've worked with, it makes me a little uncomfortable to use any of these as a filter - none of these are essential. There are probably other questions you could ask that are just as quick and actually are skill-related (how do you list the disk volumes on a unix machine? what's a good library to parse HTML?) - maybe it will still have some of the same biases (e.g. I don't know how .NET people parse HTML, their answer might not convince me), and maybe it will end up selecting the very same set of people - but it's just easier to defend as being about <i>technology</i> rather than about <i>fashion</i>.
I'm not a huge fan of this .net hate. It smacks of fashion. Yes, .net is used heavily in the enterprise and probably 90% of the time .net projects are CRUDdy big balls of mud, but C# is actually a great language, visual studio is an amazing environment and (from what I hear) ASP.NET MVC is pretty great too. A good hacker who made the informed choice to use windows and .net would get unfairly penalised here. Just because it isn't cool doesn't mean you should throw the baby out with the bathwater.<p>(I speak as an OS X/emacs/go/prolog/javascript/... hacker, who was up until recently using .net/C# a lot)
I'm struggling to respond to this post.<p>I've been reading and participating in HN for a couple months now. It's become clear, like in every social group, that HN has a "popular" crowd. It might not necessarily be specific people, but that there's an aura of an HN mainstream that bubbles to the surface on and off.<p>This post stinks of that popularity. For someone like me who is generally a contrarian, it puts me off. I don't have anything personally against the OP. I certainly don't want to insult him, and I'm not even sure that my feelings are correct or warranted. I don't know him and have only casual familiarity with his startup, but his list read like a list of "popular" topics on HN. PG! YC! ShowHN! git! Python! Ruby! OS X!<p>I apologize for being off topic like that, this post just brought it out of me.
I know these are your heuristics, but find it quite puzzling that you think the average web designer using ASP or Windows is an immediate rejection. What are you saying here?
lol "Windows is a deal breaker?"<p>I know quite a few RoR/Java/Linux/Unix sys admins who still use Windows on the desktop (inc. me).<p>OS choice shouldn't be a deal breaker.<p>Is having a Windows Phone also a deal breaker?<p>As a side point, is there really that much difference between OSX/Windows now a days? I've have Macbook Pro's, Imacs and Windows things as main machines and nowadays I don't see that much difference between them (esp if you're working on web dev). From Mac -> Windows or back seems like just a new novelty tech to learn not a deal breaker any more. From your article it seems unlikely that Mac OSX or Windows is running your servers anyway.<p>(Same with Android vs iPhone - both are so similar now)
I love the implication that working in PSD's isn't challenging because it's easy. Maybe not <i>interesting</i> to programmers, but by no means is designing a product a trivial task.
There are several hot-button issues that I can't help but think you drizzled over your posting to increase the likelihood of visceral reaction by the demographic this posting targets.<p>Either that, or I have to conclude that the Heuristics you mention are sullied by personal bias, and if so should be reviewed.<p>It may also be that your blog is part of the svbtle network that has triggered my personal biases.
These heuristics, if they have any validity at all, are industry specific. In AAA game development, everyone (with a few statistical outliers) is Windows based for their development environment. For that reason, it's not surprising that most of the good programmers I know personally use and prefer Windows. I'm the only one of my coworkers who uses OS X at home.