Certatinly, but there's a correlation present, at least between the first two.
"Star programmers" are a completely separate problem, as Joel has mentioned before (e.g., are your stars really "Stars" if they're just the best 21-26 year olds your network knows of that are willing to live in your geographic region and not interested in graduate school?). But it's the horribly poorly managed firm that can't turn an A student from a top-fifteen CS school who did any Big Project at all succesfully into a very productive team member.
"Star programmers" are a completely separate problem, as Joel has mentioned before (e.g., are your stars really "Stars" if they're just the best 21-26 year olds your network knows of that are willing to live in your geographic region and not interested in graduate school?). But it's the horribly poorly managed firm that can't turn an A student from a top-fifteen CS school who did any Big Project at all succesfully into a very productive team member.