proper software engineering, design, knowledgable (Score 1)

You should get a very good idea of how the programmer ticks by first looking at their design practices. If they're a good object oriented programmer, their objects should make sense and the relationships should be easy to understand, (keeping it simple and stupid). Nothing should be hard-coded, it should be easy for another programmer to take over and change things as needed. They should probably be able to use almost any OOP language. If a database is involved, the objects should carry through into the table design using about the same number of fields/variables as the object for each table. My experience using stored procedures is use only as necessary; it gets messy quick in my opinion when you have stored procedures scattered around the database. Security should be covered almost 100%. They should be up to date on current malicious techniques. It's hard to get even close to 99% when you're trying to be rapid, such as most webapps. Personally I consider myself to be a very 'neat' programmer. One thing that drives me crazy is when people don't follow a naming scheme in the database, and with the object classes. Doing a table join is much cleaner when there's a strict naming scheme in place. Just take a glance at the design and structure of wordpress and tell me you don't wanna just re-write it from scratch. I have an organized set of tools that I use on a regualar basis, such as my php class creator that accepts an insert query as input. Also, my ajax script I wrote from scratch along with all my javascript form utilities. A lot of things make a good programmer. It's funny how I'll always be able to look at the code I did 3 months ago and laugh to/at myself at all the things I could do better.