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How Do You Find Programming Superstars?
Joe Ganley writes "You are a programming superstar, and you are looking for work. I recognize this happens relatively rarely, which is part of my problem. But stipulating that it happens, how do I, as a company looking to hire such people, connect with them? Put another way, how do you the programming superstar go about looking for a company that seems like one you'd like to work for? The company I work for is a great place to work; we only hire really great people, we work on hard, interesting problems, and we treat our employees well. We aren't worried about retention or even about how to entice people to work here once we've found them. The problem is simply finding them. The signal-to-noise ratio of the big places like Monster and Dice is terrible. We've had much better luck with (for example) the Joel on Software job boards, but that still doesn't generate enough volume." What methods have other people used to find the truly elite?
The first thing to do is remove arbitrary barriers. IE, "must" have X years of experience, X degree, held X previous positions, must move to our area. That's the sum of major mistakes most operations make. The best programmers in the world don't typically get that way by being just another college / job drone (though some do... just don't slam the door based on mundane requirements - you want the problem solved, not a title you can be proud of.)
Secondly, market the job — make sure people can find out about it. That's perhaps obvious, but I know a lot of companies that try to stick to the back alleys of old boy's clubs, and it's no wonder they can't find anyone. Put an ad, a BIG one, somewhere programmers go a lot. Like slashdot. :-)
Third, salary, salary, salary, and benefits (particularly insurance and family coverage). Move 'em if you have to. We've even bought houses outright for our programming team members. You can't expect to hire a superstar by treating them like a drone.
The problem is almost always that really good programmers don't have to go looking, and if they do, they can - and will - turn their noses up at being treated like a commodity. Yet that's just what most companies do. Plus they throw up arbitrary and unrelated barriers to entry. Unfathomable, really.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Stop calling expert programmers "superstars".
End of lesson. You may press the button.
You can't have both quality and quantity. Searching for the best of the best is bound to return a small number of people.
My suggestion would be to use a headhunter, sure they are expensive but you get matched up with quality people that match your business philosophy. Also to you job seekers out there I would suggest finding and hitting up Head Hunters. I have had extrordinary success with em on both sides of the table.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Honestly - imo, you are incredibly fortunate to hire excellent experienced people based off interviews (our hit rate is about 25% good, 50% passable, 25% poor)
the 2 best strategies for having a high hit rate with your new hires:
1. hire young - bring people in as interns/coops and use their term as a 6 month interview - this can give you a great insight into their potential
2. poach - has anyone else in your organization worked somewhere else? find out if there are any excellent people from previous jobs looking for work
Seriously, why do you need a programming superstar, why not settle for a programmer with substantial experience in the area you need?
For example, universities do not look for supergenius professors (if not only for label "Nobel prize winner"), they are mostly looking for a person who will be able to get grants
Supergeniuses are good in the environment that does not require any results any soon. That's the way they work.
Normally people are looking for good workers with a good experience able to fit in the environment.
I am actually glad that in my line of work there is no obsession with top level performers, like it happens in showbiz. As a result a lot of people are paid quite well.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
believe me , nothing your business is doing is so god-damned special that it takes a "superstar" to accomplish. Just find some people with some programing background and give them the opportunity to learn and grow. Anyway, the person asking of this question, if _they_ were a "superstar" HR person/manager, would already know the answer. Since the company can get by with plain old average HR/management I think it can live with average normal programmers as well.
Great programmers work for who they want, on what they want. They take getting their personal needs met for granted, but they have grand ideas about things they want to see realized and not enough money of their own to do it.
So you advertise on the basis of the interesting work that you're doing, and aim for the ears of someone who has been itching to build such things rather than talking about the creature comfort and monetary perks.
Great people want strong leadership that will help them achieve beyond what they can do alone.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
You cannot HR the superstar. They are so rare, that you just cannot open a superstar position and expect it to be filled up. Instead, what people usually do is when they accidentally stumble upon one, they create a superstar position for him.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I've met very few superstars and this more than anything else set them apart as someone I would want on my payroll.
You want people who can lead by example, without even trying.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
You assume companies want the typical slashdot poster. The truth is that people here are often opinionated, brash, and hostile to ideas they dislike. While many of them may fit the role of "good coder," they often miss the bigger picture of what it is to be a "good programmer."
As you said, good programmers work well in teams. They're open to suggestions, and only butt heads on issues when not to do so would be negligent. What happens when the candidate being interviewed is told "we'll be working in windows vista, using visual studio 2008?" Do they throw a hissy fit, and constantly complain about how the shortcomings of the windows environment could be improved by moving to linux? This attitude, which seems to be fostered and even encouraged here at slashdot, would be devastating in the work environment.
I think the only real way to find superstar programmers is, realistically, to find good programmers and lots of them, through various recruiting drives (temp work, contractor work, college co-ops/interns). When the term of their employment is up, you'll have a much better idea of how they are as a programmer, something that is relatively hard to do during an interview. From here, you'll have a resource pool to say "look, you're awesome, we'd like to hire you." This avoids the problem of missing the amazing programmer because they only looked "good" on paper, and it also gives a pool to draw "great" programmers from (even if no superstars are found).
I'd take a step back on that one. Before they're "programmers superstars", they're usually college graduates. Start by trolling for college students. Lower your needs from "must be" to "can be" and take those who actually enjoy programming and build them up into superstars by putting them in your super company. They'll probably turn into Superstars in no time if your company is as good to work for as you describe.
Cheers,
Fozzy
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
Board position? Hopefully not programming?
Every superstar I've ever known would run at either of those two thoughts. Cash is nice, but superstars are superstars in part because they love programming. So yes, they do want to be programming in 10 years. They may want to be lead programmer and be paid more, but that's about it.
As for the religion part of your comment- well, it shows your bias, but its absolutely not true.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
Convey to the applicant that your company values *production* and *problem solving* over meetings, phone calls, "strategy" and any of the other abstract "big picture" bullsh*t that people with "soft skills" use to justify their positions at the expense of programmers. Bonus points if you can point to a programmer or two in your organization and demonstrate that they make more money and are more valued than the softies. Let the applicant know that "Yes, we expect you to function within our management framework, but that framework is here to help you be *more* productive"...every good programmer dreads the "Office Space" scenario where they are spending more time filling out TPS reports than doing the work that they love.
Every good programmer's worst nightmare is to step into a new job bright-eyed and ready to be creative, only to be told that their function will be to learn and maintain a piece-of-crap monstrosity that someone else created. Make it crystal clear that this is not the situation they are being hired into.
...as far as "where to find them"...The same principle that applies to "getting hired" (i.e. networking is always the best) also applies to hiring. Ask your five best programmers to give you the names of some of their friends and don't be afraid to aggressively go after them and lure them away from their current gig.
The place I work has some top people working there. It also had one of the strangest interviews I ever did. I was barely asked about programming or anything related to my job. Just pointed to an engineering diagram of a chemical plant and asked how I'd tackle it. I'd never done chemistry and didn't understand the diagram, so I figured I was probably failing the interview. Another poster mentioned the difference between top grade programmers, and the real superstars that actually get things done. I think this was the type of question that was really aimed at separating those types of people. It was a question you didn't have to get 'right' - it was just to find out what you'd do to figure out how to figure out the answer.
Looking for a job straight out of uni, I did a lot of interviews heavy on the technical side. Looking back, I'm not sure what the point was. They could already see how good I was at technical learning from my degree. The major difference between programming academically vs industry always seems to me to be that in industry you're programming for users other than yourself. In most academic situations you've got fairly clear user requirements of what the software must do. Most of the work I have done since then has begun with vague ideas about what the system needs to accomplish. Getting from there to coding a system that meets the requirements is very much like that question in the interview - 'how would you tackle it?'.
Any technical questions will allow any good programmer to just fall back into answers they know. You'll be swamped with applicants who look good but are only mediocre.
If anyone knows how to locate superstar programmers in the first place I'd love to hear it. Once I have one on the phone I have a fighting chance to hire him, but you certainly can't spot them from their resumes.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The first part of this is going to sound antagonistic, but its meant to be helpful.
Are you a superstar company? Really? What product do you work on? Is it cutting edge/interesting/socially minded? Is it going to present a new challenge every day for your programmers?
How top-heavy is your company? Are the salaries of the managers 3x more than the programmers? How about the top-level execs? Are they getting $1.5M bonuses every year while solving no problems themselves? Do their salaries go up 12% every year while programmers get 2% raises? Do the execs get their own parking spaces while the programmers have to park on the street? Is the disparity noticeable and constantly rubbed in the face of your programmers? Do the execs act snooty and drive $60,000 dollar cars? If these qualities apply to your company, there is no hope. If not, read on.
People who can really solve tough problems (i.e. "superstars") know who they are. Their minds don't work linearly and they see patterns in everything. They make suggestions and observations only to get ridiculed because the small minds around them can't understand what they are saying. But they usually get vindicated:
The unfortunate thing is that superstars, as you call them, experience this pattern again and again. You need to recognize that this pattern is common for them. You need to cater to their intellectual needs, make sure they are payed well, and, yes, appeal to their egos. This doesn't mean a constant suck-up, which is a common misconception. You need to give your damn best to understand what they are saying, to understand that their insight might be better than yours and to recognize that they have shown insight through a solid record of achievement. Superstars are players and not coaches (i.e. cheerleaders) and they can point to success, but you don't need to acknowledge it directly. If you want to employ them, you need to show that you can be student instead of master, because superstars are also teachers.
I know that that last one is going to hurt, especially in the hierarchical realm of corporate politics. However, your ability to be a student of your employees will separate you from mere mediocre employers and will get you those superstars you want so badly.
Just callin' it like I see it.
From the people that I have met (who have architected international specifications and written books on their area knowledge), the superstars are the laid-back and chilled out programmers, while the arrogant programmers are the wannabes - if they really knew as much as they thought they did, they wouldn't be so insecure.
The original poster of this disussion hasn't specified what the nature of the work is - is it user-interface - is his company designing the next killer application. Then they would need someone who knows how to design and implement really polished application UI's.
Are they looking for someone to implement highly computational intensive core libraries - then maybe a programmer with Matlab experience or someone with a mathematics background would be more suitable.
Or are they looking for someone to write general purpose libraries that can be reused - then someone with good object-oriented design experience would be best.
If they are just looking for a programmer to implement specifications, then looking a someone who has done similar ework in a final year project or thesis would be a good place to look.
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I disagree. Some of the best programmers I've ever met never had official training in a computer field.
No magical program manager can forge skills from programmers who don't have any. There's a large number of programmers who have no skills at all. No amount of working with them will ever resolve that. You can't forge a sword out of cotton. You can't forge a good programmer from somebody who just doesn't get it. You don't need to hire all superstars. But finding enough people who even have a clue how to program can often be huge challenge. There's so many people who want to be programmers, who just don't have it in them, that it's hard to sort through all the junk to find the good ones.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
"We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes." - Toyota
>I'd pose to you a give-a-man-a-fish metaphor. Why work on finding good programmers when you can find a good project manager - probably with a PhD - who can forge hard-working programmers into good and hard-working programmers.
.5-1% of the company and perhaps 10-20% more in base salary than you'd pay some one who's merely excellent, you'll get over 5X the output on product code (output would be higher if non-coding responsibilities didn't consume 1/2 - 2/3 of their time), build infrastructure, test infrastructure, an effective mentor for your junior engineering personnel, attention to system level interactions before the code is written instead of after it's integrated, and maybe a little management thrown in.
Because
1) You can't teach hard working programmers the creativity needed to come up with novel solutions to hard problems, where the right creative solution can net orders of magnitude better performance and/or reliability. The rough order here can be of a better PhD thesis or Digital labs paper (but with more attention to reliability).
2) Experience productizing solutions _well_ is needed to build reliable complex software. I know of distributed systems groups that had to flush their first products due to algorithmic bugs and others that needed heavy operator support to keep things running because inexperienced groups lacked sufficient practical background in simulation.
The best you can do is grow people towards their potential. Some engineers have a creative mindset and will solve problems when given a description, with the size of the problem dependant on experience and aptitude. You can get them working on bigger and bigger problems with more attention paid to practical concerns. Some engineers can implement something given a description (smells like a log structured file system, with a separate log for B+ tree nodes). You can teach them better engineering discipline.
>Why? Because if you hire savants, they'll do their work in 10 minutes and bill you for 2 hours because that's the time it takes for everyone else to build the same amount of code.
If you pick their brains on an as-needed basis on what you think is important, you'll be paying $500 for their 4 hour billable minimum and not getting fringe benefits.
If you actually hire them and they have interest in how the product and company go, they'll work 60-80 hours a week (it's not about the money) for options on
If you're solving the same problems over and over again, it doesn't matter and they wouldn't be interested.
If you have something that's too hard for other companies to pull off, the right handful of gurus can mean the difference between success and failure.
Being given nothing for 7 hours a day - and being prevented from filling that time with your own productive work - will make you want to scream out of simple boredom after only a few weeks. I would often struggle just to stay awake. It sounds great, but it was awful.
The firm that realizes that is golden in my book.
When it comes to any form of engineering I would take a good process over any amount of talent. Talent is what I want in an artist not someone building complex technical devices (including software). Yes it would be nice to have both, but if you have to give up one don't make it the process.
You touch on a piece that is often missed. It is a bad choice to only hire 'superstars'. Quite simply, not every problem is going to be interesting. There is very often going to be grunt work, or simple things that just need to get done. Your 'superstars' are going to get board really quick when they have to do grunt work. You would be much better off, hiring people of various skill levels, make sure that they know where they are, and match up really good developers with some that are not as good. Of course, to truly be a 'superstar', you have to be able to understand and appreciate the contributions that those with less coding skill often bring to a project.
At my work, I am teamed up with another developer that will simply never be a 'superstar'. She consistently needs help on code that is just not that difficult for me to write. That being said, she is immensely productive. She knows what level of code she can handle, and she does a LOT of work that, while I could do if need be, I would be far less interested in than the work I do. This would lead to lower quality code, and job dissatisfaction. Her presence on the team gives far more to the company than any 'superstar' could bring.
The key is that she knows what she does well, I know what I do well, and we appreciate each others contributions.
Now, maybe the question wasn't about 'superstar' coders, but in employees in general. If so, it didn't come off that way to me.
Indeed. However, replace "superstar programmer" with "competent programmer" and the question is still sadly relevant.
bite my glorious golden ass.
I'd pose to you a give-a-man-a-fish metaphor. Why work on finding good programmers when you can find a good project manager - probably with a PhD - who can forge hard-working programmers into good and hard-working programmers.
There's way too much mystique over "superstars" who bring their midas-touch of computation to a company.
Frederick Brooks, author of the Mythical Man Month, wrote that good programmers are 100 times more productive than average programmers. That accords with my experience; I've been working in this game for twenty years, both as programmer and as project manager; I've seen a lot of average programmers, and two or three good ones. The whole ethos that programmers are grunts who work for and are managed by project managers gets the whole pyramid upside down. Even the best project managers can do nothing to improve the work of a good programmer, but much to impede it.
Personally I'm still of the opinion that Frederick Brooks recommendation of the 'surgical programming' model is the best - you identify your star programmer, and everyone else works for them. Brooks recommended about five support staff for each programmer: a 'co-pilot', who worked in a sort of junior pair-programming role, essentially learning from the senior programmer; a librarian, who wrote up and managed documentation, looked after releases, and such like things; a tester, who just tested; a toolsmith, who built small scripts and utilities; an administrator, who handled business issues; and several other optional roles. Modern tools can automate some of these roles, but it's still the case that good programmers are so much more productive than ordinary ones that it makes economic sense to unload all the routine tasks off them to less able people.
Good programmers really do make or break technical companies - they add far more to the bottom line than anyone else. And if you don't recognise that, you won't be able to hire them, you won't keep them if you do hire them, and you won't get anything like the full potential out of them if you do hire them. Keep your programmers in the dark and feed them on shit, as most companies do, and in a very short time you'll have no-one left but shit programmers.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.