Here's a fascinating (to me) blog entry contrasting Apple engineers and Microsoft's.
Data Structures As Culture [scifihifi]
I've long been interested in these sorts or correlations or indicators, as I see them too and heavily use them in my interviewing.
Beyond the correlations/indicators though is the just as interesting aspect of this which is to do with simplicity. Developers, architects, solution designers, and so on - are (mostly) terrific at creating far more technology complexity than is justified.
Developer Feature Creep
Amen to that. Simple = Good.
You see it all the time. Where all a developer needs to do is X, but that's not interesting so instead they manage to contrive a solution that's completely buzzword-compliant and really REALLY complex, with a bunch of Really Tricky algorithms hand-crafted from first principles thrown in for good measure. Instead of one method call to something in java.util or apache commons. And then rationalise it by trying to interpret the requirements in an "interesting" way.
I agree it's a great indicator. I think it ties in nicely with the experience curve and the notion of "collapsing of complexity" that comes with experience - it might be a good predictor in guessing how far along that curve they are.
Paul.