Characteristics of an effective programmer.

A lot has been written on what makes a great programmer.
I'd like to write about what makes an effective programmer. The two can be different.


I would say the characteristics of an effective programmer are as follows:

• 1) Do you know and care about how the application you are writing will be used, and do you have opinions about how to make it better?
• 2) Do you know about new technologies, can you recognise those that should be adopted in your current projects and can you explain them convincingly enough to get them adopted?
• 3) Can you maximise tha amout of code not written, through efficient design, reusing things that have been written before and eliminating unnecessary requirements?
• 4) Can you recognise your limitations and mitigate these, e.g. by understanding where you need to learn something new or code defensively, and where to get help from others?
• 5) Can you design and write code that can be maintained in 10 years time by someone of average ability, when tools and programming languages have moved on?
• 6) Do you understand more than just code, e.g. databases, infrastructure and can you use this understanding to make it more likely a project will be stable and reliable when it is live?

Do you agree?