team leader

How do you ‘rate’ a developer or team lead?

Matt Simner Development Process, IT Musings, Miscellaneous , ,

Just going through some old notepads from previous employment and found a table that I’d come up with to ‘rate’ all the developers in the department (I was a team lead there at the time – I also rated myself and the other team leads).  The purpose was to effectively work out who to put where – i.e. what teams.  It’s pretty a simple process, and is essentially a straw poll on some high-level KPI’s, but assumes you’re experienced, and ‘pretty good’ yourself, and can recognise/score people objectively and consistently.  If you let personal preference get in there then your results mean nothing.


Each person is scored on 4 categories as some may be stronger in different areas.  Each score is on a scale of 1-10, and the scores are simply added to get the overall rating ( out of 40).  You can obviously make this a percentage etc if you wish.  You could also apply an average to scores given by multiple people.


Developer Categories:



  1. Ability. Raw development ability.  Can they achieve a technical solution?
  2. Discipline. Their ‘normal’ work practice.  Do they take pride in their work?  Do they lead others in the processes they follow?  how do they work when unsupervised?
  3. Commercial Focus / flexibility,  When faced with a deadline or changing scope do they cope?  Do they think creatively and work with others to keep things on track, potentially adding commercial compromise into their original design?
  4. Control. How do they work under pressure? Do corners get cut, do they fall to pieces, or do they rise to the occasion? 

Team Lead (Technical) Categories:



  1. People leadership. How do they treat their team members?  Do they instil confidence and inspire their team to achieve?  Does their team ‘like’ them? You have to be careful with the last one, because on its own it shouldn’t give a big score.  It’s the icing on the cake rather than the meat in the sandwich!.
  2. Getting Stuff Done.  Do they get results?  Does their team get results?  Do they deliver regardless of obstacles and issues?
  3. Upward Management. How well do they communicate changes, issues etc to managers and stakeholders?  Do they ‘sit’ on issues and hope they’ll go away until they ‘blow up’?

  Team leads can obviously be rated as developers too…