
Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005) - niyazpk
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2005/01/27.html
======
agentultra
What I like about the concept of the mythical "top 1%" is that _every_ company
must hire _only_ these cream-of-the-crop developers.

It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD
in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web
application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%:
think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly _great_ programmers who taught the rest
of us everything we know. Let's be realistic -- your company may be innovative
and fresh in the marketplace, but the technical challenges you're likely to
face are hardly interesting to these sorts of programmers at the stratosphere
of technical achievement.

My advice would be to forget about hiring the top 1%. What you're really
looking for is someone who is serious about the job and has their head on
straight. Someone with practical sensibilities and whose ambitions align with
the goals of your company. It doesn't take a genius CS PhD to do good work.

~~~
grammaton
Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to
build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is.
When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a
communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a
database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need
the top 1%.

For the 99% of CRUD sites, mobile apps, and glorified accounting systems that
most programmers will spend their careers on? Not so much.

~~~
jerf
Actually, building a CMS _is_ pretty difficult and I'd say you want to only
use CMSs written by about the top 10%. Not quite rocket science but they're
actually very, very difficult. There's a lot of tradeoffs to be carefully
made, increasing exponentially as the framework tries to do more (with a
lowish exponential factor, but exponential nonetheless) and a lot of ways to
make simple things difficult and difficult things impossible. There is no pain
like trying to use a CMS written by a bottom-25%er.

 _Using_ an already-good CMS to build your site is trivial and you don't need
a rocket scientist for that. Depending on your needs you may not even need to
be a programmer per se.

------
edw519
_In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be
good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all._

Good point. The best developers I ever hired were (a) already working, (b) not
looking, (c) referred, and (d) without a current resume.

Therefore, the people who I consider to be good software developers probably
don't have a current resume.

Therefore, the top 1% of good software developers probably don't have a
current resume.

Therefore, if you have a pile of current resumes, it probably includes none of
the top 1% of good software developers.

Therefore, if you're hiring from current resumes, your probably _not_ hiring
the top 1%.

[The only thing worse than sloppy probability and statistics is sloppy logic.
But that's OK, because I'm not in the top 1% of either.]

~~~
bartonfink
Just to play devil's advocate, doesn't that rest on the assumption that the
top 1% of software developers are also strong enough networkers that they can
get a job pretty much anywhere without using the formal channels which would
require item (d)? I'm not at all convinced that's the case, even though I
understand that there's some truth to the conclusion.

~~~
danohuiginn
The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be
networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try
to get them into appropriate jobs.

I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to
spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed
by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation
more than a couple of years.

The exception is somebody who is excellent, but stuck inside one company and
not producing any publicly-available code. If she isn't actively promoting
herself, it's possible nobody will ever notice her talent.

~~~
moomba
There are some real smart people that don't have business savvy or street
smarts. Its easy to get locked into a big dumb corporation that doesn't
recognize talent. You could spend a long time in a place like that and not
realize your potential. After all, most kids still go through college and work
at "safe" jobs.

~~~
dpritchett
There's an inherent information asymmetry in the job market too. Think of
great coders who grow up in the middle of nowhere and get a job in the nearest
city. They don't know what the vets at their company in Birmingham, AL are
making. All they know is that the coders on HN all say "at least $100k for a
dev in the bay area".

You need to do a lot of footwork _and_ networking to build an accurate picture
of the employment market in a region.

------
joe_the_user
One great take-down of this kind of thing.

Another point to consider is that there's more to people than just good or
bad. Sure, some people just don't have the skills they need. But there are a
lot of situations where someone can be great at one job and terrible at
another _depending on the fit_.

The posturing about "the 1%", "A-players" and so-forth misses the idea that
you want an optimal _team_ , not magic people guaranteed to give you results.

Of course, to build an optimal team, you need a skilled organizer. So, for
example, you can take someone who's otherwise low-skill, low-motivation and
give them what they need to improve.

~~~
Tycho
The guy who started programming Facebook with Zuckerbeg apparently had _just_
finished 'Perl for Dummies' and never coded before in his life...

(the For Dummies books _are_ really good, mind you)

~~~
zasz
Just because it was Facebook doesn't mean the initial code was very good.
Twitter's suffering a lot of technical debt from some bad initial decisions in
the codebase.

~~~
herdrick
Those weren't bad decisions, they were technical debt - a very useful thing in
early stage startups.

------
patio11
This is one of my favorite Joel articles. The conclusion is relevant to us
both as business owners and job seekers: any publicly available job will get
spammed to death with offal, accordingly, the best jobs and the best
candidates for jobs will both be placed privately.

I literally have not had a resume since I read this, with the exception of a
pro-forma one to give my ex-job so that they could pretend I was hired on the
basis of what was written on my resume as opposed to, say, hired as a favor to
a vendor who owed me a favor. We brought the resume to the job interview that
happened after the decision had been made to employ me.

~~~
azanar
_The best jobs and the best candidates for jobs will both be placed
privately._

I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you aren't arguing
the contrapositive. But I have a couple of data-points from the last few years
that make me believe both directions are not necessarily tautological.

In the direction of placed privately -> best candidate: a company I worked for
some time ago had a developer who was placed privately. Specifically, the
developer already knew another one of the developers at the company, and came
with a glowing recommendation. This person was hired somewhat before the time
I was brought on, and as a result, they were well-entrenched by the time I
arrived. This would not have been a problem, if this person weren't one of the
_worst_ developers I have ever worked with. I wish I could provide more
evidence, but it would probably result in both a breech of NDA, and also
enough detail that someone on here might know who I was talking about. I've
known other people who have had similar experiences of incompetence brought in
by some insider repaying a favor of work done earlier. Suffice it to say that
there is plenty of offal out there that find themselves insided into companies
assuming roles they ought _never_ have been employed doing.

In the direction of best candidate -> placed privately: there is always the
story of paul on here joining Google. I'm sure plenty of other stories have
been recounted of talented people throwing resumes over the transom, and
managing to get someone's attention on the other side. For my own anecdote,
one of the best sysadmins I've known in my life managed to find his way into
the company I was working at on the basis of a cold resume submission. Nobody
knew him, and he was just another name in a pile of resumes; but, it was a
pile of resumes that a couple people with a reasonable degree of cluefulness
were given to read through, and this sysadmin stood out even on paper. Had we
punted him in favor of someone privately placed, I'm suspicious that we'd have
been in a much better place.

I realize that you are plenty talented, and am not casting aspersions your
way. But there are plenty of hires that are the product of favors of favors,
where the biggest favor the middle-party could've done is to never have
introduced the company to the candidate in the first place. That's the trouble
with favors, though; it is difficult to not be willing to make the connection,
because it can bear a heavy social cost to have to say no to a friend.

I'll admit I might be a bit more sensitive to this now because I'm at a small
company. A bad hire who was brought in on a favor could send the place into
financial pain with maybe a day or two's worth of misguided exuberance. I
don't know of someone internally earning social capital for themselves with
that as a potential expense is a worthwhile trade-off. I'd rather keep the
roadblocks up regardless of how the candidate is sourced.

TLDR summary: Sure, listen to and harvest from your connections, but realize
that they have their own interests which may not necessarily align with yours
or your corporations, and vet the people you find from them accordingly. The
candidate you find or are pressured to hire through the grapevine or a favor
may not be nearly as talented as patio11.

~~~
scottkduncan
Great comment, and from my perspective a view that is perfectly complementary
to Joel's post. It could very well be that the same people who are firing off
hundreds of resumes are also hitting up dozens of their connections to try to
find work. As you mention, hiring even one of these people into a role for
which they are not qualified, whether through resumes or private placement,
could really damage a small company.

When people make a statement like "xx% of all hires are made through private
placement," my first thought isn't "wow, networks are such an effective hiring
mechanism!" Rather, it's that our other alternatives are frequently so lacking
that we rely on "known-unknowns" in the absence of a better method.

Networks are both a strength and a limitation. When you rely on them for
hiring you might be able to attract the best candidate from within your set of
connections, but if there are 100 people outside your network who are
objectively better then you will have missed out. Unfortunately, limitations
in our current tools make it very difficult to determine whether those 100
other people are actually out there and, if they are, how to find them.

------
nailer
Last year I was interviewed by a company that frequently proclaims they hire
the top 1% of candidates. The role was working on infrastructure apps using
Python, as a Site Reliability Engineer...

The interviewer proclaimed he knew Python. Later, during a programming
question, after he didn't quite understand the code presented as an answer, I
reconfirmed this.

His response, quoting: 'I do know Python, but I'm not familiar with the curly
brace style of creating a dictionary'.

~~~
potatolicious
If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not _paying_ at top-1%
levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%.

That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary
compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.

~~~
mooism2
I'm not sure how true this is.

Paying high wages to knowledge workers causes them in general to be less
productive. The top 1% might rather go for the money anyway. But the top 1%
also care about working conditions (more screen space, faster computers, fewer
interruptions, etc). Perhaps more than money, after they're being paid enough
not to have to worry about money.

~~~
swombat
Nah, that's not how it works. You're misunderstanding the research in
question.

What they found was that paying larger performance-related bonuses caused bad
performance. I don't think the finding applies to base pay.

That said, you're probably right that working conditions will be more
important past a certain salary level.

~~~
wisty
I think older workers are less likely to be fooled by "cool toys", but _all_
geeks want a system that they can be productive on.

As a Python programmer, I care more about hard drive speed and a nice monitor,
but if I had to compile C++ I would kill for a faster CPU, and more RAM.

Some things boost moral _and_ make workers more productive, so the employer
benefits twice.

------
Peroni
The top 1% don't actively look for work. They are already working.

The top 1% is the gold dust that every head hunter in the country wants to get
their hands on but how do you quantify it? As an earlier commenter stated, the
top 1% is entirely subjective. If you asked ten different companies to select
the top 1% of candidates, all ten would produce different results.

Those reading this article hoping to discover how to include themselves in
this illustrious 1% will once again be left dissapointed because the final
decision is always made by a human and humans are fickle, contradictory beings
meaning that the golden formula just doesn't exist.

I work in the recruitment industry and I hear people say all the time that
recruitment is a science. Whilst the process may have a scientific element in
theory, when it comes to hirirng managers perception of candidates
suitability, all science goes out the window and is overruled by ego, emotion
and greed.

------
singular
Though I agree with Joel on this central point here, I think it's important to
take into account the randomness that applies to technical recruiting - it's
hardly perfect (full disclosure: I am a lower-tier member of the 99%, having
interviewed at 5-6 [internal, so not even as challenging as top tier software
house] places and being rejected every time), the proliferation of 'puzzle'
questions of the crossing-the-bridge-with-a-flashlight-and-some-pals ilk is a
pretty good indication; I doubt many people would now agree that those kind of
questions are a good means of hiring good engineers.

Steve Yegge writes at length about how tech hiring sucks, pretty much (cf.
[1]), and how random chance plays a big role, and that's based on a great deal
of hiring he's done himself.

I hate to be negative; I just think it's important to accept that hiring good
engineers is _hard_. There are great people out there who interview terribly,
and average people out there who interview wonderfully.

[1]:[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-
goog...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

------
grammaton
One assumption I never see questioned is the assumption that you actually
_need_ the top 1%. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases, you
don't.

~~~
kefeizhou
Top companies, especially in competitive industries like technology, need to
constantly innovate and solve problems better and more efficiently than their
competitors. And to do this they need those top 1% because problem solving
skills and IQs are not completely stackable - the top 1% can solve problems
that no teams of average developers can solve. Most companies need those top
1% if they want to keep up with the lead and not fall behind in the long run.

~~~
grammaton
But this runs right back into Joel's supposition. If only 1% of developers are
capable of doing this well enough, then why do we still have a booming
software industry?

------
praptak
Remember this article when you hear the "hundreds of resumes per job opening"
argument in a debate on immigration laws.

~~~
anonymoushn
What is this argument, and which side is it on?

~~~
kemayo
I'd suspect he means the argument that goes like:

"There are hundreds of resumes submitted for every job opening in Industry X.
Why, then, are we STEALING AMERICAN JOBS by allowing H-1B visa holders to
enter the country and take this opening?"

------
sliverstorm
_They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives._

Does nobody work in high school or college anymore?

~~~
krakensden
scholarships are pretty plentiful, if you're willing to do the application
hustle.

~~~
quizbiz
If you are a member of a minority or have notable merit achievements.

~~~
anonymoushn
I'm not sure why this would get downvoted. As a middle class white male in my
major I was ineligible for a great many scholarships at my state university,
and I was ineligible for most of the remaining ones because I had attended a
concurrent high school and college program that did not publish class rank or
inflate GPAs well beyond 4.0 as is common practice in normal high schools. As
a result I could not get scholarships that required "(X on SAT or Y on ACT)
and (Z GPA in high school or W percentile in high school) and *," in spite of
my 800/710 SAT and 3.8+ GPA at the concurrent high school and college program.

------
goldmab
Is there a top 1%? It's hard to really tell, but I think software development
isn't a single rankable skill but a bunch of different ones, sometimes skills
that are directly opposed to each other. The best person for a job depends on
what kind of job it is.

------
kaerast
If you're hiring then this may hold true, but it doesn't fit with my
experience of contracting. Whilst the best organisations are looking to
contract out to the best people, there are many companies looking for the
cheapest subcontractor for short-term gains.

~~~
notahacker
Companies hiring for many roles will discard most or all candidates that fall
into the _top >20%_ bracket at the earliest possible stage because they're
obviously going to be more expensive, likely to move on to another role
earlier and/or likely to prove a "poor cultural fit" if they start debating
decisions made by a less capable and experienced lead or manager. Some people
are looking for session musicians rather than rockstars.

------
joelmichael
Even amongst those available on the job market, the "top 1%" is highly
subjective based on an employer's interpretation of employee virtues.

------
mduerksen
For similar reasons, every programmer thinks he _is_ the top 1% - including me
;)

~~~
billybob
I sure don't. Personally, my outlook swings between "I'm so awesome, look at
what I made" to "I am an idiot - why am I in this field?" The latter comes
when I'm 2 hours into a debugging session and still stumped, or when I'm
looking at code written by somebody famous, or when I get an explanation of
some concept or piece of code and I still don't understand. (Rebuttals:
debugging is actually hard sometimes, and that coder is famous for a reason,
and maybe the explainer isn't doing a god job.)

In my rational moments, I figure that 1) I'm smart enough, but not the
smartest, 2) I can always improve, and 3) I should focus more on doing my best
and less on comparing myself to others.

~~~
angelbob
I try hard not to assume "top 1%" == "smartest 1%". I tried being very smart
for awhile, and I'm really pretty good at it.

Turns out that "dedicated" and "hardworking" trump "smart" nine times out of
ten. So now I'm trying for that. It's taking longer.

------
tuhin
Besides the obvious brilliance in every single word in that article, Joel;s
strongest advice is the part about hiring summer interns and also begging for
people to intern with them. Of course the underlying assumption is that you
are not giving offers to people who are too qualified for your job and that
you/your company/company culture are/is not trash.

------
hessenwolf
Relying only on employers/employees through connections is like only finding a
partner through friends - you are really limiting your sample space. Is the
best of what you know really the best there is? If so, how do you know?

------
goombastic
Hiring is such a huge shot in the dark. I've seen HR guys and hiring managers
give elaborate reasons about a profile they want, more often the person they
are looking for doesn't exist. More like wanting people with 30 yrs of Java
exp. The thing about today's hiring is that companies aren't willing to allow
people to learn anything on a job since it's a cost.

------
moomba
This phenomenon isn't something only present in tech companies. I think the
stat was, the congressional approval rating floats between 10-20% while the
reelection rate floats around 80-90%. Humans have evolved to trust those fewer
edges separating them in their social graph more than those with more edges.

------
snippyhollow
All my friends that are really good "never went on the job market" and got
hired following to their summer internship, and a few others (good ones) and I
went forward to a Ph.D. This proves nothing, but brings some evidence.

~~~
crocowhile
Bad for them. Going onto the job market is not an opportunity only for those
who hire but also for those who are looking for a job: if they are SO good,
thew will have to chance to interview in many good places and pick the one
they like the best.

Settle down after a stage means taking the easy way. not a sign of excellence,
if you ask me.

~~~
noamsml
Then again, chances are that for people like that, going back to the market
wouldn't mean looking up postings on Monster.com anyways.

------
palewery
I would recommended hiring people that are the best fit for the position.
There are plenty of reasons to hire someone that will do a good job, rather
than a code ninja that finishes projects in 15 minutes.

------
Murkin
This article might of sounded a bit less of a "WHAM" if the real quote was put
it:

 _Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%_ of developers currently on the
market.

But still, valid point

~~~
praptak
I think that it is still a delusion, even if you add the "currently on the
market". The best people currently on the market won't probably bother sending
you an application - they will probably just take advantage of their networks.

~~~
bad_user
I don't consider myself to be in the top percent of anything; but I'm not even
taking advantage of my network, it's the other way around - my network takes
advantage of me :)

I.e. every couple of months I receive a really good job offer (discounting the
shitty ones), just because someone knows somebody who knows me. It's getting
really hard to say NO too.

~~~
praptak
Companies do take advantage of their employees' networks. Some pay well for a
successful referral.

------
trustfundbaby
This explains why recruiters become even more aggressive in trying to contact
you when you actually have a job ... never understood that.

~~~
salemh
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408813> "The unemployed will not be
considered"

------
supervillain
The top 1% programmers are drop-outs, who spend all their college years
hacking/programming.

Some of them are oversees who can't acquire H1B visa's due to lack of diploma.

With those circumstances, do you think they hired them? can they go abroad to
work? No.

They are not even close on getting those guys.

------
ulf
Another way to look at it: If all companies only hire the top 1% of software
developers (as a lot say), and in total employ 100,000 developers, this would
have to result in 10,000,000 unemployed developers. Sounds a little
unrealistic, doesn't it?

------
cldwalker
Why are we submitting 5+ year old content?

~~~
jasonlotito
For a few reasons, probably.

1\. It's directly related to the startup world. Startups hire people, and this
is advice for that. 2\. Not everyone would have read it. Things come up. Being
5-years-old in this context isn't bad. 3\. It's far better than some of the
other articles here dealing with body image and piracy

------
damoncali
There is no such thing as the top 1%.

------
georgieporgie
My theory is that people have absolutely no idea how to evaluate job
candidates whatsoever. Interviewing trends come and go (e.g. Microsoft puzzle
questions of the 90's), but I think people just latch onto whatever they hear
as 'the' way to discern good developers. Along with that comes the
superstition that if you're not rejecting _x_ percent of applicants, you're
not hiring the top _y_ percent of talent.

~~~
jonnathanson
The puzzle-givers _were_ onto something, though. They were trying to test for
intellectual agility and creative problem solving. There is some merit in
asking these sorts of questions if you're interviewing younger kids for entry-
level jobs. At that stage in the game, you're really just trying to find smart
and hard-working people who can be trained. You're not overly concerned with
years of experience, or crystallized knowledge base. So puzzles make sense
(again, to a degree).

Puzzles for more experienced hires? Probably not.

~~~
dpritchett
Puzzles can be so easily misused. If the interviewer(s) all know the answer to
the puzzle they'll have trouble being objective when it comes to measuring the
responses of an interviewee who hasn't seen the puzzle before.

Worse still is that an underinformed interviewer might simply tune out until
the candidate returns an answer to the puzzle rather than actively
participating in the candidate's problem-solving process. Two engineers and a
whiteboard is how all the best work gets done, right?

~~~
jbae29
Maybe a good approach would be to give a puzzle that the interviewer doesn't
know the answer to. That way, they work through the problem together and the
interviewer can see what it's like to work with them.

I know this will never happen but it sounds kinda nice.

