The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5)

What about recruiting?

Ok, so Joel took a shot at enumerating the rules for being considered (or un-considered) if you're a candidate for a job. What are the rules for being considered if you're a company trying to hire the best and brightest software minds?

schmoe
Monday, January 26, 2004

What's there to consider? You can be the worst company in the world right now and people will flock to you. There are 15 million people unemployed right now. Most people will put up with quite a bit in hopes of a better future.

This statement conveys what I mean.
Monday, January 26, 2004

Presuming you're talking about the US:

1. There aren't 15 million developers out of work;

2. 15 million people is 5% of the population, a number which is not overly high for unemployment.

While I may have agreed that there is a glut of available developer talent, your statistics didn't really prove your case.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Monday, January 26, 2004

"You can be the worst company in the world right now and people will flock to you. "

During the height of the .COM bubble I had friends who were desperately trying to get programming gigs and they couldn't. At the time they were industry losers that should consider a different career path. Now they can pretend that they're just the victims of Indians and poor economics.

The reality is that most firms want to hire the best talent, and the talent require wooing (look at some of the expenses Joel has incurred to get the best talent). While there are some talent unemployed because of bad luck, an ineffective personal network, or a bad region, overwhelmingly it is still the dregs that fill the online boards whining about how they can't get a job despite an illustrious career "programming" HTML for 4 years.

Anonymizer
Monday, January 26, 2004

Heh, said like a man who has always had enough connections not to worry about his job :).

When a company goes under, everyone is gone, talanted or not. And if you're not a schmoozer, you don't have the networking connections to just quickly get hired on again. Yes, your previous boss may think you're great, but he can't help you if he's unemployed or if his new company isn't hiring.

Chris Kessel
Monday, January 26, 2004

> What are the rules for being considered
> if you're a company trying to hire the
> best and brightest software minds?

Even with all of the unemployed software engineers in my area (Silicon Valley), my group found it very difficult to hire qualified people. We got plenty of applicants and interviewed dozens of people for one position. We never found anyone even close. We ended up changing the job description so we could hire someone who was an internal transfer that we at least knew was easy to work with. My simple criteria during an interview... do you know more about the subject than I do after I spent about one hour reading about it on the Internet? People claiming to be experts in the area couldn't answer my basic questions. My advice... if you claim to be an expert in an area, spend some time on the Internet reading about the topic so you can at least sound like you know what you are talking about.

Jethro
Monday, January 26, 2004

---" People claiming to be experts in the area couldn't answer my basic questions"-----

Perhaps your questions would be easier to answer if you spent two hours on the internet instead of one :)

Stephen Jones
Tuesday, January 27, 2004

"What are the rules for being considered if you're a company trying to hire the best and brightest software minds?"

Not posting stuff on your blog that offends a lot of people?

Tuesday, January 27, 2004