How do you typically screen for such personality characteristics? I'm curious since my current role involves interviewing a lot of engineers. I too have noticed similar traits in others in the past and I shamefully admit that I myself was pedantic about silly semantics and syntax in code reviews. Sometimes criticism of someone's code was warranted, and sometimes it wasn't and it was just me being picky (I like clean, readable code).
Being picky is not the problem. Being picky and detail oriented is good quality to have as a developer.
We aren't artists, engineering is exacting field, more details you notice and remember better you can be.
The character trait you should look for how do they present that feedback, is it constructive , is it positive , the kind of language they use and how patient they are able to be.
One interview technique/tool that works for me is asking them to review some sample code mine or a junior devs.
It is easy to gauge how many kinds of issues, how many are actually important and how well they present feedback.
The other technique that worked for me is when I review their code in a interview, people who are agressively bad almost take it poorly and can't take feedback positively .
Interviewing is not 100% representative of on job behaviour, however this helps a lot in filtering out
