After years of being in the closet, I'm coming clean: I'm a technology profiler. In my never ending search for good engineers, I instinctively form opinions of the quality of someone's software talent based on nothing more than what I see in their profile. It's like a facial tic I can't get rid of. For example, you say: "I write ASP.NET code to SQL Server in a big company", and I think: "No freaking way can you build complex software in a fast moving startup." Or you say: "I'm writing the multi-threaded backend of a cloud-based distributed system in a startup using Haskell", and I think: "When can we talk?"
I'm not proud of being a technology profiler. I'll also admit to not always being right. Every technology has at least a few great engineers. But when it comes to software, some technologies / communities simply have a higher density of talented engineers than others.
So here it is: my personal map to technology profiling (note: subject to change over time).
