Hiring great people is hard ...

Back in those days when I worked at IBM I did a lot of interviewing candidates for jobs we had available there. What I noticed back then is that pretty much all candidates sound reasonable on paper but very few were actually as good as the paper made me believe. It even appeared as if only mediocre people would apply for the jobs we posted. What's the problem there? Well, Joel's blog provides some good explanations for this and I encourage anyone who is hiring or interviewing people to read his post on finding great developers. I completely agree with him on the one point that truly great people never really send resumes out to job postings, heck, they never even enter the job market. Why? For one thing, good people carry a reputation and will go to new places through friends, former co-workers that now work for someone else. Or they get approached approached by the same circle of people. So who is left on the job market? Probably those who were rejected before or those who just start out. I for one think that is almost always better to take someone who is fairly junior with good basic skills over a medicore candidate who may have some (worthless) experience already. We are currently looking for someone in my group and I am interviewing again. Let's see how that goes and hopefully we will find someone great. But what makes someone great? Well, for one thing it is hard to find that out in 30-45 minutes. And anyone who is not a complete idiot and has worked on a topic will sound like an expert in that particular field. Unless the interviewer works in the same field it is somtimes hard to determine whether the candidate is phony or not. What matters to me? Well, when interview I look at how people approach problems. I don't expect anyone to know all the answers to my questions in the area of programming or algorithms. But I expect them to come up with a reasonable/feasible way of attacking the problem. Should someone be able to write the source code for QuickSort in an interview? I don't think so because I couldn't do that either and it does not really prove anything. What is more important to me that someone could tell me about its properties or where he would go to find out about it.