Selecting the best software engineers

At a particular level in software engineering what sets developers apart isn't what they know or years of experience, it's creativity. It's not how much one knows at that point, it's how much utility you can get from the little you know. There are developers that have taken simple concepts well beyond the realms of the ordinary, I've seen a developer write a video game demo with just html and css. Those languages aren't used to build games. It takes a special level of creativity to create interactive features that run by themselves.

This is also why it's rather difficult to make a list of the best programmers because there are so many factors to consider, the most popular or richest programmers you know aren't by extension the best, within the industry we laugh at lists that use vanity metrics because we know that deciding the best is something that you just don't do without making use of biased metrics.

There are software engineers who make use of programming languages and there are language engineers who specialize more in writing programming languages, most people don't know language engineers however these guys also play a very crucial role in the software engineering industry. The point of this article is to emphasize the need for you (as a developer) to stay focused and ignore vanity metrics, for employers it's also a wakeup call to ignore the pursuit of "the best" developers in favor of focusing on developers who understand their language/stack and are creative enough to use it to solve problems.