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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?
...and be prepared to hire telecommuters, even in other countries. All of our software guys at Slim Devices (now Logitech) found us through our open source projects, and to this day every one of the telecommutes. The stratum of talent you gain access to when you are reaching the people who are so excited about the technology that they'll work on it on their own time.... unbelievable - forget about Monster.com, this is the way to do it!
I have to say that I've had some people hired away from me to go to Google, and they have been hiring the people who can quote chapter and verse of some coding standards doc. But they haven't been my superstars. They have been "A" players. But not "superstars". I'll qualify that in one second.
:)
The superstar is more than just somewhat hard to come by.
First, they are only going to be 1 out of every 100 programmers you work with. And that is only if you are lucky, and if you are good at hiring. If you hit job boards, you aren't good at hiring. (with apologies to the job board advertisement that is almost definitely above this post
Second, they can almost never identify themselves. Lots of people THINK they are the superstar. But then they get very little actually accomplished. These are the people I've lost to Google. But the superstar does much more than just know the tech details. They actually get stuff done. And their code really really works. And it is highly reusable. And they change others around them. The always make sure the best tools are in place, and they get others to use those tools, not just themselves. In this sense, they are also quite good leaders, although most do not want to manage large teams (and you'd be wise not to have them do so).
I've probably worked with 1000-2000 programmers in my lifetime, and I think I would give only about 10 of them the "superstar" status.
The superstars produce 2x to 10x what a very good programmers can produce in the same amount of time.
As far as finding and hiring them, the biggest problem is that they are very rarely on the market. So job boards are a bad place to start.
Just about all (maybe even 100%, actually) of the superprogrammers I've hired have come from friend referrals.
Go to your current employees, and give them very big checks if they can attract other programmers to your firm. Make sure this is worth their while (ie: $10,000 or more for bringing in someone). This will almost always be your best bet to find these guys.