Developer hiring and the market for lemons
<i>If it’s so easy to identify prospective “great” developers, why not try to recruit them?</i><p>Because they are not on the market, and they're very picky as to where and most importantly, with <i>whom</i> they will work. Does someone out there honestly believe that a guy like Keith Wesolowski, Dan Price, Jerry Jelinek, or Jeff Bonwick will just shop themselves on the open market? If so, it's time to do some extensive research on the subject, because nothing could be further from the truth.<p>Steve Jobs once put it like so: <i>A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn't take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.</i><p>And boy was he right; I've seen good companies and good, interesting jobs go down the toilet so fast, my head is still spinning from it all, years later.<p>I know how that is first hand: I don't shop myself around on the open market, people call me, and by people I mean people I have closely worked with in the past, people which I know exactly what they're capable of, what they know, what they don't know, and if I accept, the whole interview process is nothing but an empty formality. It's truly eye opening just how much of a sham-theater the entire inteview games are. The key takeaway is, if you're good, you'll have a renomee, and you're unlikely to be on the open market - you come to people and people come to you. You get the job long before any would be competitors have even had a chance to apply ("we must satisfy human resources policies"). Dan Luu's question is, by experience, an unlikely occurrence in this particular industry.