As a software development manager, I've hired dozens of developers over the past decade. For each one of those hires, I've interviewed somewhere between ten and twenty candidates before finding the right one. If that sounds like a lot of work, it is - interview fatigue has caused me to make the occasional bad choice.
The reason I've interviewed so many people is that I look for a developer with the right mix of attitude and talent. I want to work with people that have the drive to make themselves and those around them better. People that can create amazing software but also have the humility to realize that there's still books full of things that they don't know. People that have fun doing a geeky job that they also happen to do as a hobby.
Those people are incredibly hard to find. I've cut short interviews with lots of developers that had the right attitude but couldn't explain basic programming techniques. But dealing with these poor developers isn't as hard as struggling to maintain conversations with developers that were technically gifted but had no drive or personality.
Over the years, I've come to realize that there aren't enough of these "Renaissance developers" to staff all of the teams that I've needed to build. This scarcity has led to compromises. But that leads to the question of what is more valuable? Attitude or Talent?
When faced with huge questions like this, I like to reach out to legendary minds that have more wisdom and experience than I do. Enter Pat Quinn:
I've always been a believer that attitude is probably way more important than talent a lot of times...
Like Pat Quinn, I've chosen to place more value on attitude than talent. There still needs to be a good base of talent, but ultimately talent is easier to teach than attitude.