We all know that some programmers are much more effective than others. In one study, it was shown that the best programmers are ten times more efficient than the worse programmers. This degree of difference has not been observed in any other kind of industry, and this makes effective software development a unique challenge.

Now the question is: Why are some programmers much better than others? Can this difference be explained in terms of intellectual capacity, aptitude or experience?

In fact, it was observed that some programmers are much more effective than others even if they are very similar on all other aspects, such as IQ, problem solving capacity, math and logic orientation, and years of experience as a professional software developer.

I believe that the main difference is the enthusiasm! Some people simply love programming, more than any other intellectual activity. If these people weren’t assigned any coding task, they would just use their imagination and invent some new program to write, probably as challenging as possible.

I think this is the origin of all open-source projects, which are very successful and sometimes go against the intuition that complex software development requires centralized management. Actually, these passionate programmers are not only able to produce high-quality code in their free time, they are also able to organize themselves in very effective development teams.

So, do you want to find a real programmer? It’s easy: They can’t stay too long without writing a line of code. It’s kind of an addiction to programming!