Many companies state they wish to hire only the best, most talented programmers. I imagine there are not enough of these to go around. So, where do all the other programmers go? Surely the market can not be 90% brilliant programmers.
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It's not, and a lot of people couldn't afford them anyway I would say, and even some companies that say that they want to hire the best aren't as keen when they see the price tag that comes along with that.
Every one can afford different amounts, but I'd say that's ok because there are programmers of differing skill levels all over the place, I don't know how evenly it works out, but I'm sure it does to some degree.
railsninja
2009-02-20 05:09:19
Can I work for you?
Dortz
2009-02-20 05:13:26
Over 99% of people living in China speak Chinese, therefore if you move to China, you'll also speak Chinese? :)
cletus
2009-02-20 06:07:30
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There is a difference between saying you want to hire the best or you have hired the best versus having actually hired the best.
Many people will pay lip service to the idea of hiring the "best" but in practice they don't know what the best is, their definition of best differs from what programmers might view as the best or they simply hire the best that come through their doors and you may find the best may never walk through their doors.
On the first point, you can only judge based on your experience, particularly for non-technical people. On one job I had the guy had had a succession of awful programmers. Self-taught, no discipline, no structure to their code, lots of copying and pasting, etc.
He once told me that "anyone can do what you do", which frankly I found a little offensive. Thing is, based on his experience, that was true. After 2-3 months of rewriting nearly 300,000 lines of code to under 15,000 (that worked better, looked better, was more performant and secure, etc) when his previous programmers had failed to do that in 3+ years, I think he changed his mind somewhat.
A lot of people simply don't know what good programmers are, let alone how to find them, entice them to work for you and manage them in a way that doesn't make them run for the hills.
Studies have shown that people in the same team with roughly equivalent levels of experience can vary in productivity by an order of magnitude or more.
It should also be noted that "best" is also a subjective definition. A programmer may view best in terms of code produced. A manage may view "best' as reliable estimates, no surprises, high bugfix success rate, quality of documentation and so on. Those skills are more important than programming in the vast majority of organisations so they have a point.
cletus
2009-02-20 05:17:22
"you can only judge based on your experience, particularly for non-technical people" ... I can't believe people are still sold on the idea of generic management skills. It always seems to work better when they have experience in the field.
cdv
2009-02-20 05:29:26
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and this begs the questions...
who is the best?
How do you know they are the best?
Best at what? Coding? Compiling? Fixing bad code? Best at C++, Delphi, Python, etc?
Fender
2009-02-20 05:20:25
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Most companies se the ad as a commersial spot where they without shame can say how good they are and what an exelent group of people working there.
I read ads as commersials, read between the lines.
Stefan
2009-02-20 05:21:56
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Companies do not want to hire the best programmers, they want to hire the programmer that will give them the best return for their investment in hiring them.
Chris Ballance
2009-02-20 05:39:28
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This reminds me of a nice blog posted by Joel sometime ago. Simply everyone think they're hiring the best, therefore there really is no average programmers even if they give keyboards to monkeys :P
melaos
2009-02-20 05:49:13
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almost all companies want to hire the best, but very few are willing to actually pay for them - so they end up with:
the best they can afford, from the pool of people available at the time that they were able to reach with their recruiting effort.
Which means that quite often the job goes to anyone that remembers to wear pants to the interview ;-)
[as a side note, the very, very best programmers quite often run their own companies and/or consulting businesses, so you cannot hire them as employees in the first place - you can only rent them]
Steven A. Lowe
2009-02-20 06:18:18
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See, here's the issue. Programmers are like the kids in Lake Wobegon. They're all above average, and if you think otherwise, you're just mistaken.
All the bad code that you see out there is made by code monkeys that have no understanding of programming whatsoever.
supercheetah
2009-02-20 09:37:19
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Many companies just have no idea of what is means to be a best developer. They've never had any and they have no means to know. So they can say whatever they want to say and then they hire whoever they manage to hire.
sharptooth
2009-02-20 10:17:43