Joel Spolsky: On Recruiting Programmers

Chris Dixon supplies us with some cliff notes of a talk Joel Spolsky (founder of Stack Overflow) gave on recruiting programmers. It’s a worthwhile read if you have any interest whatsoever on working with programmers.

Here are my favorite bits of advice:

- Great programmers are 5-10x more productive than ok ones yet only get paid 2x or so more.  (Perhaps this is why many leave to start companies?)

- Bad yield at Stanford (too much competition) and MIT (too many go on to graduate school)

- GPA is really good predictor of good programmers (this surprised me).  You can have great programmers who have bad GPA but that often means they are great only when working on super interesting projects which won’t always be the case in real life.

- Wall street (and to lesser extent big tech companies) offer a very different “product” than startup:  Lots of money but crappy environment, dull projects etc.  You can’t compete on $ so differentiate your “product” even more by emphasizing what is different.

- Programmers with motivation problems:  Joel has rarely seen successful “turnarounds”.