
Recruiting the Top 1 Percent - Joel Spolsky - danw
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20070501/column-guest.html
======
falsestprophet
I don't know much about Mr. Spolsky or Fog Creek, so perhaps I am entirely
incorrect. I understand he has a lot of respect in the software community, but
every time he writes about business it reeks of charlatanism. He seems to do
well enough; but, he hasn't quite built an empire.

Being kind to your employees and your customers is a laudable idea, but it is
not a business plan.

You also don't need world class intellect to build the software he is selling.
This is fortunate, because I doubt his $75,000 could buy the soul of someone
great who wanted to work on something important.

~~~
danw
That 'world class intellect' gets stuff done so much more efficiently that it
works out cheaper than several weaker coders.

~~~
Tichy
How do you get "world class intellect" to work on a proprietary bug tracking
software, though? I think it is written in ASP, too? (Could be mistaken,
though).

~~~
Elfan
"FogBugz is written in Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect
of Basic with closures and lambdas and Rails-like active records that can be
compiled down to VBScript, JavaScript, PHP4 or PHP5. Wasabi is a private, in-
house language written by one of our best developers that is optimized
specifically for developing FogBugz; the Wasabi compiler itself is written in
C#." <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html>

~~~
ido
Writing your main cash cow in a private, in-house language seems like one of
the riskier decisions you can make.

If they would have at least open sourced it and tried to get some sort of
community around it it would have at least start to become less dangerous as
the community grows.

But programming your main (only?) product in a language nobody except your
current employees knows? Employee turnover must be even more of a bitch over
there then it is in most companies.

I wouldn't want to work there when this "one of our best developers"
quits/dies/retires

~~~
shiro
It depends.

I've got an impression that Wasabi is highly-specialized domain-specific
language (just a wild guess from his article). If it is a general-purpose
language it's worth to build a community and get feedback, but if it's a niche
DSL, it's less likely that you get a growable community and it's more likely
that feedback tends to be feature requests that aren't necessary for the
original purpose of DSL.

And if it is designed well, the risk of the original developper's quitting is
just about the same as having in-house libraries or workflow, I think.

------
gyro_robo
This is a rehash of one of his earlier articles. He got rid of one of the
points of criticism -- complaining about no good resumes, while hiring people
who wouldn't have passed his resume criteria being that he goes after them
while they're still in school. Catch-22.

Resumes are a horrible way to screen people.

Also, these days the top 1% are probably doing start-ups, or if they're
employees, it's for Google or someplace exciting -- not hacking VB code in New
York.

------
zach
_"Then I pose a software development challenge. For example, how would you
implement a Web-based clone of PowerPoint? This gives me a feel for how smart
they are, and if they know the basics of software development."_

A trick question, of course. The correct answer is "you don't, since Google
will simply release their own which will make yours irrelevant."

------
vlad
If you need a job to motivate you and be told what to do and how to do it,
you're not in the top 1%. I think this is a way to pander to his future
employees. :)

Isn't the top one percent kind of a large number? Maybe you want the top
quarter of one percent? I mean, the majority of software developers probably
work in IT doing zero innovation, not in a company that creates software that
pushes boundaries.

I definitely think the number of developers who are creative, passionate,
smart, fast, adaptive, and good is less than 1% of all software developers.
Maybe that's accounted for because he's ignoring those who start their own
startups, as they are too good for his 1% formula?

~~~
erdos2
"Isn't the top one percent kind of a large number?"

It is. They want less than the bottom tenth of that. This is what would happen
if JS were to interview anyone further to the right on the Bell curve.

JS: How would you fit in here?

Candidate: I would simulate the internalization of the values of the corporate
workplace.

JS: When can you start?

------
Tichy
"A limousine meets them at the airport..." etc etc - I don't know, isn't that
cheating a bit? It's not like people will have the same grand life after being
employed by Fog Creek?

Then again, that's probably just life (any kind of deals, including dating).
But I would almost be a suspicious - if he is trying to sell the job this
hard, there might be something fishy about it? Of course Joel is not just
somebody, I am sure it would be very interesting to work with him, but I mean,
if it wasn't him...

~~~
inklesspen
Sure, it's cheating, if you think that life is basically fair. But it's not.
Making a good first impression is the smart thing to do, even if you stretch a
bit beyond "everyday life." Just so long as you don't actually lie.

~~~
Tichy
Maybe it just boils down to the benefits of advertising: we see the advertiser
can afford the advertising, so he can't be a total loser.

~~~
inklesspen
That's a good way of putting it!

------
ced
"think about what happens to the 99 people you turn away. They don't give up
and go into plumbing. They apply for another job."

I want to know if that applies to YC. Specifically, how many applicants keep
reapplying at every round?

People keep saying that there are "hundreds of great teams" and that your
chances of being chosen are correspondingly low, but it might not be really
true.

