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Hiring (Superstar) Programmers
Ross Turk wrote, "We've been looking for senior engineers to work on SourceForge.net for a while now, and it's been a lot more difficult than it was a few years ago. Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent? Is everyone else running into the same problems, or is it just here in the Valley and other high-tech corridors?" This is a question that I've seen coming in a lot; the economy has not picked up everywhere — so how are other people handling this? Going outside the traditional Valley/Route 128 corridors? Outsourcing? And how do you find people — beyond just using job boards? (Full disclosure: That's our job board thingie, as you probably have figured out.) Or do job boards alone work? Some people have been swearing up and down that CraigsList works — and there's always something to be said for nepotism.
First is the wording. When I see terms like "superstar" in a job ad, the first thing I think is a dot-com startup that wants someone with every buzzword in the book, or they want someone with 20 years experience willing to work 80-hour weeks for an entry-level salary plus stock options (which may make you a millionaire 5 years down the road, assuming you haven't gone up a bell-tower with a rifle before then, or may be worth less than toilet paper, but definitely won't pay the bills in the meantime). Needless to say, this isn't something that instantly makes me think "I want to work for these people.". One of the problems is that the better a developer is, the less likely they are to think of themselves as a superstar. All too often I look at a job description and say "Well yes, but that's the minimum you should be expecting from someone with any sort of experience at all. Do I want to work for someone who considers that exceptional?".
Then there's the fact that, like I suspect most good developers, I'm already working. I'm not likely to leave a decent job on a whim. The last job change I had, it happened only because the headhunter was one a friend of mine gave a good reference on, the job was offering a 20% salary increase just after my current employer had announced 2% raises and the call came shortly after my then-current manager had pulled a particularly nasty and uncalled-for back-stabbing move on me. If people are in a comfortable position, you may have to go looking for them rather than having them come looking for you and you may have to catch them at just the right time to get them to consider changing jobs.