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Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% (2005)

286 points by niyazpk 16y ago

foljs 16y ago
> In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all. And if they did they sure wouldn't apply for a company that makes a shitty web publishing app and a mediocre bug tracking system, uses a monstrosity of a custom-built language that spits PHP and VBScript, and is run by the man responsible (and wanted) for the creation of Visual Basic for Applications and a god-awful UI design book. Joel has written some good essays, I give him that. There is nothing on his other endeavors though to make me think it worthy to listen to his hiring advice...
patio11 16y ago
This is one of my favorite Joel articles. The conclusion is relevant to us both as business owners and job seekers: any publicly available job will get spammed to death with offal, accordingly, the best jobs and the best candidates for jobs will both be placed privately. I literally have not had a resume since I read this, with the exception of a pro-forma one to give my ex-job so that they could pretend I was hired on the basis of what was written on my resume as opposed to, say, hired as a favor to a vendor who owed me a favor. We brought the resume to the job interview that happened after the decision had been made to employ me.
- scottkduncan 16y ago
  I agree this is great insight. The majority of the "top 1%" are not applying to jobs; they are already working and producing. Hiring from the top 1% means shaking them loose from another good opportunity, not posting a job and waiting for them to come to you.
- azanar 16y ago
  The best jobs and the best candidates for jobs will both be placed privately. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you aren't arguing the contrapositive. But I have a couple of data-points from the last few years that make me believe both directions are not necessarily tautological. In the direction of placed privately -> best candidate: a company I worked for some time ago had a developer who was placed privately. Specifically, the developer already knew another one of the developers at the company, and came with a glowing recommendation. This person was hired somewhat before the time I was brought on, and as a result, they were well-entrenched by the time I arrived. This would not have been a problem, if this person weren't one of the worst developers I have ever worked with. I wish I could provide more evidence, but it would probably result in both a breech of NDA, and also enough detail that someone on here might know who I was talking about. I've known other people who have had similar experiences of incompetence brought in by some insider repaying a favor of work done earlier. Suffice it to say that there is plenty of offal out there that find themselves insided into companies assuming roles they ought never have been employed doing. In the direction of best candidate -> placed privately: there is always the story of paul on here joining Google. I'm sure plenty of other stories have been recounted of talented people throwing resumes over the transom, and managing to get someone's attention on the other side. For my own anecdote, one of the best sysadmins I've known in my life managed to find his way into the company I was working at on the basis of a cold resume submission. Nobody knew him, and he was just another name in a pile of resumes; but, it was a pile of resumes that a couple people with a reasonable degree of cluefulness were given to read through, and this sysadmin stood out even on paper. Had we punted him in favor of someone privately placed, I'm suspicious that we'd have been in a much better place. I realize that you are plenty talented, and am not casting aspersions your way. But there are plenty of hires that are the product of favors of favors, where the biggest favor the middle-party could've done is to never have introduced the company to the candidate in the first place. That's the trouble with favors, though; it is difficult to not be willing to make the connection, because it can bear a heavy social cost to have to say no to a friend. I'll admit I might be a bit more sensitive to this now because I'm at a small company. A bad hire who was brought in on a favor could send the place into financial pain with maybe a day or two's worth of misguided exuberance. I don't know of someone internally earning social capital for themselves with that as a potential expense is a worthwhile trade-off. I'd rather keep the roadblocks up regardless of how the candidate is sourced. TLDR summary: Sure, listen to and harvest from your connections, but realize that they have their own interests which may not necessarily align with yours or your corporations, and vet the people you find from them accordingly. The candidate you find or are pressured to hire through the grapevine or a favor may not be nearly as talented as patio11.
  - scottkduncan 16y ago
    Great comment, and from my perspective a view that is perfectly complementary to Joel's post. It could very well be that the same people who are firing off hundreds of resumes are also hitting up dozens of their connections to try to find work. As you mention, hiring even one of these people into a role for which they are not qualified, whether through resumes or private placement, could really damage a small company. When people make a statement like "xx% of all hires are made through private placement," my first thought isn't "wow, networks are such an effective hiring mechanism!" Rather, it's that our other alternatives are frequently so lacking that we rely on "known-unknowns" in the absence of a better method. Networks are both a strength and a limitation. When you rely on them for hiring you might be able to attract the best candidate from within your set of connections, but if there are 100 people outside your network who are objectively better then you will have missed out. Unfortunately, limitations in our current tools make it very difficult to determine whether those 100 other people are actually out there and, if they are, how to find them.
- psykotic 16y ago
  > I literally have not had a resume since I read this Every job I've had has been through personal connections and recommendations. That doesn't mean a resume isn't useful. You will likely be interviewed by at least some people who don't know much about you. A one-page summary of your experience and background is a good way for them to prepare. It means you can spend your interview time with each person more effectively, and you don't have to keep repeating the same ten-minute spiel over and over.
- tom_b 16y ago
  I think you do have a resume and it's a rather extensive one. Your comments here and back on JoelOnSoftware forums are extensive and you keep a very active presence visible with your blog. Better yet, you document work/business and results extensively and then submit to the interwebs for consumption by the masses. You have a resume to the nth degree - your portfolio of work and thoughts are huge compared to the average sw engineer.
joe_the_user 16y ago
One great take-down of this kind of thing. Another point to consider is that there's more to people than just good or bad. Sure, some people just don't have the skills they need. But there are a lot of situations where someone can be great at one job and terrible at another depending on the fit. The posturing about "the 1%", "A-players" and so-forth misses the idea that you want an optimal team, not magic people guaranteed to give you results. Of course, to build an optimal team, you need a skilled organizer. So, for example, you can take someone who's otherwise low-skill, low-motivation and give them what they need to improve.
- rapind 16y ago
  I couldn't agree more. It's all about the fit with the team and their interest in the work you're hiring for. IMO 99% of the time you hear someone say 1%, they're intentionally exaggerating (marketing) or they're clueless on the topic. I'm a mediocre developer at best, and yet I still have a decent sized ego. I can only imagine how big my head would be if I were top 1%. You definitely wouldn't want to work with me.
- Tycho 16y ago
  The guy who started programming Facebook with Zuckerbeg apparently had just finished 'Perl for Dummies' and never coded before in his life... (the For Dummies books are really good, mind you)
  - zasz 16y ago
    Just because it was Facebook doesn't mean the initial code was very good. Twitter's suffering a lot of technical debt from some bad initial decisions in the codebase.
    - herdrick 16y ago
      Those weren't bad decisions, they were technical debt - a very useful thing in early stage startups.
Murkin 16y ago
This article might of sounded a bit less of a "WHAM" if the real quote was put it: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% of developers currently on the market. But still, valid point
- praptak 16y ago
  I think that it is still a delusion, even if you add the "currently on the market". The best people currently on the market won't probably bother sending you an application - they will probably just take advantage of their networks.
  - bad_user 16y ago
    I don't consider myself to be in the top percent of anything; but I'm not even taking advantage of my network, it's the other way around - my network takes advantage of me :) I.e. every couple of months I receive a really good job offer (discounting the shitty ones), just because someone knows somebody who knows me. It's getting really hard to say NO too.
    - praptak 16y ago
      Companies do take advantage of their employees' networks. Some pay well for a successful referral.
raymondhome 16y ago
What Joel doesn't mention is that the top talent when considering a job opening is always looking at the following : 1) prestige employer (think Google, Facebook) 2) money 3) is the job interesting? To paraphrase Joel, don't fixate on your acceptance rate, instead worry whether your job opening is attracting top-tier job applicants.
praptak 16y ago
Remember this article when you hear the "hundreds of resumes per job opening" argument in a debate on immigration laws.
- anonymoushn 16y ago
  What is this argument, and which side is it on?
  - kemayo 16y ago
    I'd suspect he means the argument that goes like: "There are hundreds of resumes submitted for every job opening in Industry X. Why, then, are we STEALING AMERICAN JOBS by allowing H-1B visa holders to enter the country and take this opening?"
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
- capstone 16y ago
  You presume that the 199 bad developers are american and adding immigrants to the mix will improve overall quality. But if we follow the article's logic, we would be adding 199 bad immigrants to the 199 bad americans already here. So instead of 199 bad developers and 1 good one, we end up with 398 bad developers and 2 good ones. The end result is, 199 more americans unemployed, decreased pay for the 199 H1-B's, and no overall improvement of quality. (I am not necessarily arguing against more H1-B visas, I am simply saying the article applies equally to all developers regardless of origin so it really doesn't speak for looser immigration laws - if anything, once you apply the math to the immigration issue, the logical conclusion is negative).
joelmichael 16y ago
Even amongst those available on the job market, the "top 1%" is highly subjective based on an employer's interpretation of employee virtues.
sliverstorm 16y ago
They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives. Does nobody work in high school or college anymore?
- btmorex 16y ago
  It's not clear what he means by apply. I assume he means that they only ever applied for one or two jobs without having been recruited/having a connection to the company already. Of course in another sense, everyone applies for every job they've ever had, because there's always some sort of approval process for hiring. I don't think he means that top 1% only ever worked at one or two companies because that's certainly not true (that or he and I have very different ideas about what kind of people the top 1% are).
- rmc 16y ago
  I would suspect Joel is discounting the summer work that young people do. i.e. he probably means: *They only ever applied for one or two [programming] jobs in their lives."
- krakensden 16y ago
  scholarships are pretty plentiful, if you're willing to do the application hustle.
  - quizbiz 16y ago
    If you are a member of a minority or have notable merit achievements.
    - anonymoushn 16y ago
      I'm not sure why this would get downvoted. As a middle class white male in my major I was ineligible for a great many scholarships at my state university, and I was ineligible for most of the remaining ones because I had attended a concurrent high school and college program that did not publish class rank or inflate GPAs well beyond 4.0 as is common practice in normal high schools. As a result I could not get scholarships that required "(X on SAT or Y on ACT) and (Z GPA in high school or W percentile in high school) and *," in spite of my 800/710 SAT and 3.8+ GPA at the concurrent high school and college program.
snippyhollow 16y ago
All my friends that are really good "never went on the job market" and got hired following to their summer internship, and a few others (good ones) and I went forward to a Ph.D. This proves nothing, but brings some evidence.
- crocowhile 16y ago
  Bad for them. Going onto the job market is not an opportunity only for those who hire but also for those who are looking for a job: if they are SO good, thew will have to chance to interview in many good places and pick the one they like the best. Settle down after a stage means taking the easy way. not a sign of excellence, if you ask me.
  - noamsml 16y ago
    Then again, chances are that for people like that, going back to the market wouldn't mean looking up postings on Monster.com anyways.
  - snippyhollow 16y ago
    It totally depends on _where_ you settle down. They were and are all very happy with their jobs. They were all in their dream jobs! And one did startup->Google directly without being back on the job market.
tuhin 16y ago
Besides the obvious brilliance in every single word in that article, Joel;s strongest advice is the part about hiring summer interns and also begging for people to intern with them. Of course the underlying assumption is that you are not giving offers to people who are too qualified for your job and that you/your company/company culture are/is not trash.
Peroni 16y ago
The top 1% don't actively look for work. They are already working. The top 1% is the gold dust that every head hunter in the country wants to get their hands on but how do you quantify it? As an earlier commenter stated, the top 1% is entirely subjective. If you asked ten different companies to select the top 1% of candidates, all ten would produce different results. Those reading this article hoping to discover how to include themselves in this illustrious 1% will once again be left dissapointed because the final decision is always made by a human and humans are fickle, contradictory beings meaning that the golden formula just doesn't exist. I work in the recruitment industry and I hear people say all the time that recruitment is a science. Whilst the process may have a scientific element in theory, when it comes to hirirng managers perception of candidates suitability, all science goes out the window and is overruled by ego, emotion and greed.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
mduerksen 16y ago
For similar reasons, every programmer thinks he is the top 1% - including me ;)
- billybob 16y ago
  I sure don't. Personally, my outlook swings between "I'm so awesome, look at what I made" to "I am an idiot - why am I in this field?" The latter comes when I'm 2 hours into a debugging session and still stumped, or when I'm looking at code written by somebody famous, or when I get an explanation of some concept or piece of code and I still don't understand. (Rebuttals: debugging is actually hard sometimes, and that coder is famous for a reason, and maybe the explainer isn't doing a god job.) In my rational moments, I figure that 1) I'm smart enough, but not the smartest, 2) I can always improve, and 3) I should focus more on doing my best and less on comparing myself to others.
  - angelbob 16y ago
    I try hard not to assume "top 1%" == "smartest 1%". I tried being very smart for awhile, and I'm really pretty good at it. Turns out that "dedicated" and "hardworking" trump "smart" nine times out of ten. So now I'm trying for that. It's taking longer.
kaerast 16y ago
If you're hiring then this may hold true, but it doesn't fit with my experience of contracting. Whilst the best organisations are looking to contract out to the best people, there are many companies looking for the cheapest subcontractor for short-term gains.
- notahacker 16y ago
  Companies hiring for many roles will discard most or all candidates that fall into the top >20% bracket at the earliest possible stage because they're obviously going to be more expensive, likely to move on to another role earlier and/or likely to prove a "poor cultural fit" if they start debating decisions made by a less capable and experienced lead or manager. Some people are looking for session musicians rather than rockstars.
georgieporgie 16y ago
My theory is that people have absolutely no idea how to evaluate job candidates whatsoever. Interviewing trends come and go (e.g. Microsoft puzzle questions of the 90's), but I think people just latch onto whatever they hear as 'the' way to discern good developers. Along with that comes the superstition that if you're not rejecting x percent of applicants, you're not hiring the top y percent of talent.
- jonnathanson 16y ago
  The puzzle-givers were onto something, though. They were trying to test for intellectual agility and creative problem solving. There is some merit in asking these sorts of questions if you're interviewing younger kids for entry-level jobs. At that stage in the game, you're really just trying to find smart and hard-working people who can be trained. You're not overly concerned with years of experience, or crystallized knowledge base. So puzzles make sense (again, to a degree). Puzzles for more experienced hires? Probably not.
  - dpritchett 16y ago
    Puzzles can be so easily misused. If the interviewer(s) all know the answer to the puzzle they'll have trouble being objective when it comes to measuring the responses of an interviewee who hasn't seen the puzzle before. Worse still is that an underinformed interviewer might simply tune out until the candidate returns an answer to the puzzle rather than actively participating in the candidate's problem-solving process. Two engineers and a whiteboard is how all the best work gets done, right?
    - jbae29 16y ago
      Maybe a good approach would be to give a puzzle that the interviewer doesn't know the answer to. That way, they work through the problem together and the interviewer can see what it's like to work with them. I know this will never happen but it sounds kinda nice.
singular 16y ago
Though I agree with Joel on this central point here, I think it's important to take into account the randomness that applies to technical recruiting - it's hardly perfect (full disclosure: I am a lower-tier member of the 99%, having interviewed at 5-6 [internal, so not even as challenging as top tier software house] places and being rejected every time), the proliferation of 'puzzle' questions of the crossing-the-bridge-with-a-flashlight-and-some-pals ilk is a pretty good indication; I doubt many people would now agree that those kind of questions are a good means of hiring good engineers. Steve Yegge writes at length about how tech hiring sucks, pretty much (cf. [1]), and how random chance plays a big role, and that's based on a great deal of hiring he's done himself. I hate to be negative; I just think it's important to accept that hiring good engineers is hard. There are great people out there who interview terribly, and average people out there who interview wonderfully. [1]:http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...
nailer 16y ago
Last year I was interviewed by a company that frequently proclaims they hire the top 1% of candidates. The role was working on infrastructure apps using Python, as a Site Reliability Engineer... The interviewer proclaimed he knew Python. Later, during a programming question, after he didn't quite understand the code presented as an answer, I reconfirmed this. His response, quoting: 'I do know Python, but I'm not familiar with the curly brace style of creating a dictionary'.
- potatolicious 16y ago
  If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not paying at top-1% levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%. That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.
  - mooism2 16y ago
    I'm not sure how true this is. Paying high wages to knowledge workers causes them in general to be less productive. The top 1% might rather go for the money anyway. But the top 1% also care about working conditions (more screen space, faster computers, fewer interruptions, etc). Perhaps more than money, after they're being paid enough not to have to worry about money.
    - swombat 16y ago
      Nah, that's not how it works. You're misunderstanding the research in question. What they found was that paying larger performance-related bonuses caused bad performance. I don't think the finding applies to base pay. That said, you're probably right that working conditions will be more important past a certain salary level.
      - wisty 16y ago
        I think older workers are less likely to be fooled by "cool toys", but all geeks want a system that they can be productive on. As a Python programmer, I care more about hard drive speed and a nice monitor, but if I had to compile C++ I would kill for a faster CPU, and more RAM. Some things boost moral and make workers more productive, so the employer benefits twice.
hessenwolf 16y ago
Relying only on employers/employees through connections is like only finding a partner through friends - you are really limiting your sample space. Is the best of what you know really the best there is? If so, how do you know?
ulf 16y ago
Another way to look at it: If all companies only hire the top 1% of software developers (as a lot say), and in total employ 100,000 developers, this would have to result in 10,000,000 unemployed developers. Sounds a little unrealistic, doesn't it?
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edw519 16y ago
In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all. Good point. The best developers I ever hired were (a) already working, (b) not looking, (c) referred, and (d) without a current resume. Therefore, the people who I consider to be good software developers probably don't have a current resume. Therefore, the top 1% of good software developers probably don't have a current resume. Therefore, if you have a pile of current resumes, it probably includes none of the top 1% of good software developers. Therefore, if you're hiring from current resumes, your probably not hiring the top 1%. [The only thing worse than sloppy probability and statistics is sloppy logic. But that's OK, because I'm not in the top 1% of either.]
- bartonfink 16y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate, doesn't that rest on the assumption that the top 1% of software developers are also strong enough networkers that they can get a job pretty much anywhere without using the formal channels which would require item (d)? I'm not at all convinced that's the case, even though I understand that there's some truth to the conclusion.
  - danohuiginn 16y ago
    The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try to get them into appropriate jobs. I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation more than a couple of years. The exception is somebody who is excellent, but stuck inside one company and not producing any publicly-available code. If she isn't actively promoting herself, it's possible nobody will ever notice her talent.
    - aoschadlin 16y ago
      I agree whole heartedly with this point. I currently work for a large bay area company and I noticed a new intern come on board who just has the 'X' factor, and could well turn into that top 1% or close to it. Needless to say I'll most likely approach him as my first hire when I get to that stage with my own startup.
goombastic 16y ago
Hiring is such a huge shot in the dark. I've seen HR guys and hiring managers give elaborate reasons about a profile they want, more often the person they are looking for doesn't exist. More like wanting people with 30 yrs of Java exp. The thing about today's hiring is that companies aren't willing to allow people to learn anything on a job since it's a cost.
cldwalker 16y ago
Why are we submitting 5+ year old content?
- jasonlotito 16y ago
  For a few reasons, probably. 1. It's directly related to the startup world. Startups hire people, and this is advice for that. 2. Not everyone would have read it. Things come up. Being 5-years-old in this context isn't bad. 3. It's far better than some of the other articles here dealing with body image and piracy
- summitpush 16y ago
  It's good to revisit the classics once in a while
grammaton 16y ago
One assumption I never see questioned is the assumption that you actually need the top 1%. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases, you don't.
- kefeizhou 16y ago
  Top companies, especially in competitive industries like technology, need to constantly innovate and solve problems better and more efficiently than their competitors. And to do this they need those top 1% because problem solving skills and IQs are not completely stackable - the top 1% can solve problems that no teams of average developers can solve. Most companies need those top 1% if they want to keep up with the lead and not fall behind in the long run.
  - grammaton 16y ago
    But this runs right back into Joel's supposition. If only 1% of developers are capable of doing this well enough, then why do we still have a booming software industry?
- forensic 16y ago
  Trying to get the top 1% to maintain your CRUD webapp is swatting a fly with a bazooka anyway
goldmab 16y ago
Is there a top 1%? It's hard to really tell, but I think software development isn't a single rankable skill but a bunch of different ones, sometimes skills that are directly opposed to each other. The best person for a job depends on what kind of job it is.
agentultra 16y ago
What I like about the concept of the mythical "top 1%" is that every company must hire only these cream-of-the-crop developers. It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%: think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly great programmers who taught the rest of us everything we know. Let's be realistic -- your company may be innovative and fresh in the marketplace, but the technical challenges you're likely to face are hardly interesting to these sorts of programmers at the stratosphere of technical achievement. My advice would be to forget about hiring the top 1%. What you're really looking for is someone who is serious about the job and has their head on straight. Someone with practical sensibilities and whose ambitions align with the goals of your company. It doesn't take a genius CS PhD to do good work.
- grammaton 16y ago
  Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is. When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need the top 1%. For the 99% of CRUD sites, mobile apps, and glorified accounting systems that most programmers will spend their careers on? Not so much.
  - jerf 16y ago
    Actually, building a CMS is pretty difficult and I'd say you want to only use CMSs written by about the top 10%. Not quite rocket science but they're actually very, very difficult. There's a lot of tradeoffs to be carefully made, increasing exponentially as the framework tries to do more (with a lowish exponential factor, but exponential nonetheless) and a lot of ways to make simple things difficult and difficult things impossible. There is no pain like trying to use a CMS written by a bottom-25%er. Using an already-good CMS to build your site is trivial and you don't need a rocket scientist for that. Depending on your needs you may not even need to be a programmer per se.
- deleted 16y ago
palewery 16y ago
I would recommended hiring people that are the best fit for the position. There are plenty of reasons to hire someone that will do a good job, rather than a code ninja that finishes projects in 15 minutes.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
damoncali 16y ago
There is no such thing as the top 1%.
moomba 16y ago
This phenomenon isn't something only present in tech companies. I think the stat was, the congressional approval rating floats between 10-20% while the reelection rate floats around 80-90%. Humans have evolved to trust those fewer edges separating them in their social graph more than those with more edges.
trustfundbaby 16y ago
This explains why recruiters become even more aggressive in trying to contact you when you actually have a job ... never understood that.
- salemh 16y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408813 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408813 "The unemployed will not be considered"
supervillain 16y ago
The top 1% programmers are drop-outs, who spend all their college years hacking/programming. Some of them are oversees who can't acquire H1B visa's due to lack of diploma. With those circumstances, do you think they hired them? can they go abroad to work? No. They are not even close on getting those guys.

286 points by niyazpk 16y ago

foljs 16y ago

> In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all. And if they did they sure wouldn't apply for a company that makes a shitty web publishing app and a mediocre bug tracking system, uses a monstrosity of a custom-built language that spits PHP and VBScript, and is run by the man responsible (and wanted) for the creation of Visual Basic for Applications and a god-awful UI design book. Joel has written some good essays, I give him that. There is nothing on his other endeavors though to make me think it worthy to listen to his hiring advice...

patio11 16y ago

This is one of my favorite Joel articles. The conclusion is relevant to us both as business owners and job seekers: any publicly available job will get spammed to death with offal, accordingly, the best jobs and the best candidates for jobs will both be placed privately. I literally have not had a resume since I read this, with the exception of a pro-forma one to give my ex-job so that they could pretend I was hired on the basis of what was written on my resume as opposed to, say, hired as a favor to a vendor who owed me a favor. We brought the resume to the job interview that happened after the decision had been made to employ me.

scottkduncan 16y ago
I agree this is great insight. The majority of the "top 1%" are not applying to jobs; they are already working and producing. Hiring from the top 1% means shaking them loose from another good opportunity, not posting a job and waiting for them to come to you.
azanar 16y ago
The best jobs and the best candidates for jobs will both be placed privately. I realize that the plural of anecdote is not data, and that you aren't arguing the contrapositive. But I have a couple of data-points from the last few years that make me believe both directions are not necessarily tautological. In the direction of placed privately -> best candidate: a company I worked for some time ago had a developer who was placed privately. Specifically, the developer already knew another one of the developers at the company, and came with a glowing recommendation. This person was hired somewhat before the time I was brought on, and as a result, they were well-entrenched by the time I arrived. This would not have been a problem, if this person weren't one of the worst developers I have ever worked with. I wish I could provide more evidence, but it would probably result in both a breech of NDA, and also enough detail that someone on here might know who I was talking about. I've known other people who have had similar experiences of incompetence brought in by some insider repaying a favor of work done earlier. Suffice it to say that there is plenty of offal out there that find themselves insided into companies assuming roles they ought never have been employed doing. In the direction of best candidate -> placed privately: there is always the story of paul on here joining Google. I'm sure plenty of other stories have been recounted of talented people throwing resumes over the transom, and managing to get someone's attention on the other side. For my own anecdote, one of the best sysadmins I've known in my life managed to find his way into the company I was working at on the basis of a cold resume submission. Nobody knew him, and he was just another name in a pile of resumes; but, it was a pile of resumes that a couple people with a reasonable degree of cluefulness were given to read through, and this sysadmin stood out even on paper. Had we punted him in favor of someone privately placed, I'm suspicious that we'd have been in a much better place. I realize that you are plenty talented, and am not casting aspersions your way. But there are plenty of hires that are the product of favors of favors, where the biggest favor the middle-party could've done is to never have introduced the company to the candidate in the first place. That's the trouble with favors, though; it is difficult to not be willing to make the connection, because it can bear a heavy social cost to have to say no to a friend. I'll admit I might be a bit more sensitive to this now because I'm at a small company. A bad hire who was brought in on a favor could send the place into financial pain with maybe a day or two's worth of misguided exuberance. I don't know of someone internally earning social capital for themselves with that as a potential expense is a worthwhile trade-off. I'd rather keep the roadblocks up regardless of how the candidate is sourced. TLDR summary: Sure, listen to and harvest from your connections, but realize that they have their own interests which may not necessarily align with yours or your corporations, and vet the people you find from them accordingly. The candidate you find or are pressured to hire through the grapevine or a favor may not be nearly as talented as patio11.
- scottkduncan 16y ago
  Great comment, and from my perspective a view that is perfectly complementary to Joel's post. It could very well be that the same people who are firing off hundreds of resumes are also hitting up dozens of their connections to try to find work. As you mention, hiring even one of these people into a role for which they are not qualified, whether through resumes or private placement, could really damage a small company. When people make a statement like "xx% of all hires are made through private placement," my first thought isn't "wow, networks are such an effective hiring mechanism!" Rather, it's that our other alternatives are frequently so lacking that we rely on "known-unknowns" in the absence of a better method. Networks are both a strength and a limitation. When you rely on them for hiring you might be able to attract the best candidate from within your set of connections, but if there are 100 people outside your network who are objectively better then you will have missed out. Unfortunately, limitations in our current tools make it very difficult to determine whether those 100 other people are actually out there and, if they are, how to find them.
psykotic 16y ago
> I literally have not had a resume since I read this Every job I've had has been through personal connections and recommendations. That doesn't mean a resume isn't useful. You will likely be interviewed by at least some people who don't know much about you. A one-page summary of your experience and background is a good way for them to prepare. It means you can spend your interview time with each person more effectively, and you don't have to keep repeating the same ten-minute spiel over and over.
tom_b 16y ago
I think you do have a resume and it's a rather extensive one. Your comments here and back on JoelOnSoftware forums are extensive and you keep a very active presence visible with your blog. Better yet, you document work/business and results extensively and then submit to the interwebs for consumption by the masses. You have a resume to the nth degree - your portfolio of work and thoughts are huge compared to the average sw engineer.

joe_the_user 16y ago

One great take-down of this kind of thing. Another point to consider is that there's more to people than just good or bad. Sure, some people just don't have the skills they need. But there are a lot of situations where someone can be great at one job and terrible at another depending on the fit. The posturing about "the 1%", "A-players" and so-forth misses the idea that you want an optimal team, not magic people guaranteed to give you results. Of course, to build an optimal team, you need a skilled organizer. So, for example, you can take someone who's otherwise low-skill, low-motivation and give them what they need to improve.

rapind 16y ago
I couldn't agree more. It's all about the fit with the team and their interest in the work you're hiring for. IMO 99% of the time you hear someone say 1%, they're intentionally exaggerating (marketing) or they're clueless on the topic. I'm a mediocre developer at best, and yet I still have a decent sized ego. I can only imagine how big my head would be if I were top 1%. You definitely wouldn't want to work with me.
Tycho 16y ago
The guy who started programming Facebook with Zuckerbeg apparently had just finished 'Perl for Dummies' and never coded before in his life... (the For Dummies books are really good, mind you)
- zasz 16y ago
  Just because it was Facebook doesn't mean the initial code was very good. Twitter's suffering a lot of technical debt from some bad initial decisions in the codebase.
  - herdrick 16y ago
    Those weren't bad decisions, they were technical debt - a very useful thing in early stage startups.

Murkin 16y ago

This article might of sounded a bit less of a "WHAM" if the real quote was put it: Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1% of developers currently on the market. But still, valid point

praptak 16y ago
I think that it is still a delusion, even if you add the "currently on the market". The best people currently on the market won't probably bother sending you an application - they will probably just take advantage of their networks.
- bad_user 16y ago
  I don't consider myself to be in the top percent of anything; but I'm not even taking advantage of my network, it's the other way around - my network takes advantage of me :) I.e. every couple of months I receive a really good job offer (discounting the shitty ones), just because someone knows somebody who knows me. It's getting really hard to say NO too.
  - praptak 16y ago
    Companies do take advantage of their employees' networks. Some pay well for a successful referral.

raymondhome 16y ago

What Joel doesn't mention is that the top talent when considering a job opening is always looking at the following : 1) prestige employer (think Google, Facebook) 2) money 3) is the job interesting? To paraphrase Joel, don't fixate on your acceptance rate, instead worry whether your job opening is attracting top-tier job applicants.

praptak 16y ago

Remember this article when you hear the "hundreds of resumes per job opening" argument in a debate on immigration laws.

anonymoushn 16y ago
What is this argument, and which side is it on?
- kemayo 16y ago
  I'd suspect he means the argument that goes like: "There are hundreds of resumes submitted for every job opening in Industry X. Why, then, are we STEALING AMERICAN JOBS by allowing H-1B visa holders to enter the country and take this opening?"
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
capstone 16y ago
You presume that the 199 bad developers are american and adding immigrants to the mix will improve overall quality. But if we follow the article's logic, we would be adding 199 bad immigrants to the 199 bad americans already here. So instead of 199 bad developers and 1 good one, we end up with 398 bad developers and 2 good ones. The end result is, 199 more americans unemployed, decreased pay for the 199 H1-B's, and no overall improvement of quality. (I am not necessarily arguing against more H1-B visas, I am simply saying the article applies equally to all developers regardless of origin so it really doesn't speak for looser immigration laws - if anything, once you apply the math to the immigration issue, the logical conclusion is negative).

joelmichael 16y ago

Even amongst those available on the job market, the "top 1%" is highly subjective based on an employer's interpretation of employee virtues.

sliverstorm 16y ago

They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives. Does nobody work in high school or college anymore?

btmorex 16y ago
It's not clear what he means by apply. I assume he means that they only ever applied for one or two jobs without having been recruited/having a connection to the company already. Of course in another sense, everyone applies for every job they've ever had, because there's always some sort of approval process for hiring. I don't think he means that top 1% only ever worked at one or two companies because that's certainly not true (that or he and I have very different ideas about what kind of people the top 1% are).
rmc 16y ago
I would suspect Joel is discounting the summer work that young people do. i.e. he probably means: *They only ever applied for one or two [programming] jobs in their lives."
krakensden 16y ago
scholarships are pretty plentiful, if you're willing to do the application hustle.
- quizbiz 16y ago
  If you are a member of a minority or have notable merit achievements.
  - anonymoushn 16y ago
    I'm not sure why this would get downvoted. As a middle class white male in my major I was ineligible for a great many scholarships at my state university, and I was ineligible for most of the remaining ones because I had attended a concurrent high school and college program that did not publish class rank or inflate GPAs well beyond 4.0 as is common practice in normal high schools. As a result I could not get scholarships that required "(X on SAT or Y on ACT) and (Z GPA in high school or W percentile in high school) and *," in spite of my 800/710 SAT and 3.8+ GPA at the concurrent high school and college program.

snippyhollow 16y ago

All my friends that are really good "never went on the job market" and got hired following to their summer internship, and a few others (good ones) and I went forward to a Ph.D. This proves nothing, but brings some evidence.

crocowhile 16y ago
Bad for them. Going onto the job market is not an opportunity only for those who hire but also for those who are looking for a job: if they are SO good, thew will have to chance to interview in many good places and pick the one they like the best. Settle down after a stage means taking the easy way. not a sign of excellence, if you ask me.
- noamsml 16y ago
  Then again, chances are that for people like that, going back to the market wouldn't mean looking up postings on Monster.com anyways.
- snippyhollow 16y ago
  It totally depends on _where_ you settle down. They were and are all very happy with their jobs. They were all in their dream jobs! And one did startup->Google directly without being back on the job market.

tuhin 16y ago

Besides the obvious brilliance in every single word in that article, Joel;s strongest advice is the part about hiring summer interns and also begging for people to intern with them. Of course the underlying assumption is that you are not giving offers to people who are too qualified for your job and that you/your company/company culture are/is not trash.

Peroni 16y ago

The top 1% don't actively look for work. They are already working. The top 1% is the gold dust that every head hunter in the country wants to get their hands on but how do you quantify it? As an earlier commenter stated, the top 1% is entirely subjective. If you asked ten different companies to select the top 1% of candidates, all ten would produce different results. Those reading this article hoping to discover how to include themselves in this illustrious 1% will once again be left dissapointed because the final decision is always made by a human and humans are fickle, contradictory beings meaning that the golden formula just doesn't exist. I work in the recruitment industry and I hear people say all the time that recruitment is a science. Whilst the process may have a scientific element in theory, when it comes to hirirng managers perception of candidates suitability, all science goes out the window and is overruled by ego, emotion and greed.

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mduerksen 16y ago

For similar reasons, every programmer thinks he is the top 1% - including me ;)

billybob 16y ago
I sure don't. Personally, my outlook swings between "I'm so awesome, look at what I made" to "I am an idiot - why am I in this field?" The latter comes when I'm 2 hours into a debugging session and still stumped, or when I'm looking at code written by somebody famous, or when I get an explanation of some concept or piece of code and I still don't understand. (Rebuttals: debugging is actually hard sometimes, and that coder is famous for a reason, and maybe the explainer isn't doing a god job.) In my rational moments, I figure that 1) I'm smart enough, but not the smartest, 2) I can always improve, and 3) I should focus more on doing my best and less on comparing myself to others.
- angelbob 16y ago
  I try hard not to assume "top 1%" == "smartest 1%". I tried being very smart for awhile, and I'm really pretty good at it. Turns out that "dedicated" and "hardworking" trump "smart" nine times out of ten. So now I'm trying for that. It's taking longer.

kaerast 16y ago

If you're hiring then this may hold true, but it doesn't fit with my experience of contracting. Whilst the best organisations are looking to contract out to the best people, there are many companies looking for the cheapest subcontractor for short-term gains.

notahacker 16y ago
Companies hiring for many roles will discard most or all candidates that fall into the top >20% bracket at the earliest possible stage because they're obviously going to be more expensive, likely to move on to another role earlier and/or likely to prove a "poor cultural fit" if they start debating decisions made by a less capable and experienced lead or manager. Some people are looking for session musicians rather than rockstars.

georgieporgie 16y ago

My theory is that people have absolutely no idea how to evaluate job candidates whatsoever. Interviewing trends come and go (e.g. Microsoft puzzle questions of the 90's), but I think people just latch onto whatever they hear as 'the' way to discern good developers. Along with that comes the superstition that if you're not rejecting x percent of applicants, you're not hiring the top y percent of talent.

jonnathanson 16y ago
The puzzle-givers were onto something, though. They were trying to test for intellectual agility and creative problem solving. There is some merit in asking these sorts of questions if you're interviewing younger kids for entry-level jobs. At that stage in the game, you're really just trying to find smart and hard-working people who can be trained. You're not overly concerned with years of experience, or crystallized knowledge base. So puzzles make sense (again, to a degree). Puzzles for more experienced hires? Probably not.
- dpritchett 16y ago
  Puzzles can be so easily misused. If the interviewer(s) all know the answer to the puzzle they'll have trouble being objective when it comes to measuring the responses of an interviewee who hasn't seen the puzzle before. Worse still is that an underinformed interviewer might simply tune out until the candidate returns an answer to the puzzle rather than actively participating in the candidate's problem-solving process. Two engineers and a whiteboard is how all the best work gets done, right?
  - jbae29 16y ago
    Maybe a good approach would be to give a puzzle that the interviewer doesn't know the answer to. That way, they work through the problem together and the interviewer can see what it's like to work with them. I know this will never happen but it sounds kinda nice.

singular 16y ago

Though I agree with Joel on this central point here, I think it's important to take into account the randomness that applies to technical recruiting - it's hardly perfect (full disclosure: I am a lower-tier member of the 99%, having interviewed at 5-6 [internal, so not even as challenging as top tier software house] places and being rejected every time), the proliferation of 'puzzle' questions of the crossing-the-bridge-with-a-flashlight-and-some-pals ilk is a pretty good indication; I doubt many people would now agree that those kind of questions are a good means of hiring good engineers. Steve Yegge writes at length about how tech hiring sucks, pretty much (cf. [1]), and how random chance plays a big role, and that's based on a great deal of hiring he's done himself. I hate to be negative; I just think it's important to accept that hiring good engineers is hard. There are great people out there who interview terribly, and average people out there who interview wonderfully. [1]:http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog...

nailer 16y ago

Last year I was interviewed by a company that frequently proclaims they hire the top 1% of candidates. The role was working on infrastructure apps using Python, as a Site Reliability Engineer... The interviewer proclaimed he knew Python. Later, during a programming question, after he didn't quite understand the code presented as an answer, I reconfirmed this. His response, quoting: 'I do know Python, but I'm not familiar with the curly brace style of creating a dictionary'.

potatolicious 16y ago
If you think you're hiring the top 1%, but you're not paying at top-1% levels, you're probably not actually hiring the top 1%. That's my main takeaway anyhow. Extraordinary people command extraordinary compensation - if you can't cough up the cash you're not going to get to play.
- mooism2 16y ago
  I'm not sure how true this is. Paying high wages to knowledge workers causes them in general to be less productive. The top 1% might rather go for the money anyway. But the top 1% also care about working conditions (more screen space, faster computers, fewer interruptions, etc). Perhaps more than money, after they're being paid enough not to have to worry about money.
  - swombat 16y ago
    Nah, that's not how it works. You're misunderstanding the research in question. What they found was that paying larger performance-related bonuses caused bad performance. I don't think the finding applies to base pay. That said, you're probably right that working conditions will be more important past a certain salary level.
    - wisty 16y ago
      I think older workers are less likely to be fooled by "cool toys", but all geeks want a system that they can be productive on. As a Python programmer, I care more about hard drive speed and a nice monitor, but if I had to compile C++ I would kill for a faster CPU, and more RAM. Some things boost moral and make workers more productive, so the employer benefits twice.

hessenwolf 16y ago

Relying only on employers/employees through connections is like only finding a partner through friends - you are really limiting your sample space. Is the best of what you know really the best there is? If so, how do you know?

ulf 16y ago

Another way to look at it: If all companies only hire the top 1% of software developers (as a lot say), and in total employ 100,000 developers, this would have to result in 10,000,000 unemployed developers. Sounds a little unrealistic, doesn't it?

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edw519 16y ago

In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all. Good point. The best developers I ever hired were (a) already working, (b) not looking, (c) referred, and (d) without a current resume. Therefore, the people who I consider to be good software developers probably don't have a current resume. Therefore, the top 1% of good software developers probably don't have a current resume. Therefore, if you have a pile of current resumes, it probably includes none of the top 1% of good software developers. Therefore, if you're hiring from current resumes, your probably not hiring the top 1%. [The only thing worse than sloppy probability and statistics is sloppy logic. But that's OK, because I'm not in the top 1% of either.]

bartonfink 16y ago
Just to play devil's advocate, doesn't that rest on the assumption that the top 1% of software developers are also strong enough networkers that they can get a job pretty much anywhere without using the formal channels which would require item (d)? I'm not at all convinced that's the case, even though I understand that there's some truth to the conclusion.
- danohuiginn 16y ago
  The point is that they don't need to be networkers, because they will be networkees. i.e. other people will notice how good they are, and actively try to get them into appropriate jobs. I think this is largely true, though it takes a while for reputation to spread. There are some brilliant young developers who haven't yet been noticed by anybody in a position to hire them -- but they won't stay in that situation more than a couple of years. The exception is somebody who is excellent, but stuck inside one company and not producing any publicly-available code. If she isn't actively promoting herself, it's possible nobody will ever notice her talent.
  - aoschadlin 16y ago
    I agree whole heartedly with this point. I currently work for a large bay area company and I noticed a new intern come on board who just has the 'X' factor, and could well turn into that top 1% or close to it. Needless to say I'll most likely approach him as my first hire when I get to that stage with my own startup.

goombastic 16y ago

Hiring is such a huge shot in the dark. I've seen HR guys and hiring managers give elaborate reasons about a profile they want, more often the person they are looking for doesn't exist. More like wanting people with 30 yrs of Java exp. The thing about today's hiring is that companies aren't willing to allow people to learn anything on a job since it's a cost.

cldwalker 16y ago

Why are we submitting 5+ year old content?

jasonlotito 16y ago
For a few reasons, probably. 1. It's directly related to the startup world. Startups hire people, and this is advice for that. 2. Not everyone would have read it. Things come up. Being 5-years-old in this context isn't bad. 3. It's far better than some of the other articles here dealing with body image and piracy
summitpush 16y ago
It's good to revisit the classics once in a while

grammaton 16y ago

One assumption I never see questioned is the assumption that you actually need the top 1%. I would argue that in the vast majority of cases, you don't.

kefeizhou 16y ago
Top companies, especially in competitive industries like technology, need to constantly innovate and solve problems better and more efficiently than their competitors. And to do this they need those top 1% because problem solving skills and IQs are not completely stackable - the top 1% can solve problems that no teams of average developers can solve. Most companies need those top 1% if they want to keep up with the lead and not fall behind in the long run.
- grammaton 16y ago
  But this runs right back into Joel's supposition. If only 1% of developers are capable of doing this well enough, then why do we still have a booming software industry?
forensic 16y ago
Trying to get the top 1% to maintain your CRUD webapp is swatting a fly with a bazooka anyway

goldmab 16y ago

Is there a top 1%? It's hard to really tell, but I think software development isn't a single rankable skill but a bunch of different ones, sometimes skills that are directly opposed to each other. The best person for a job depends on what kind of job it is.

agentultra 16y ago

What I like about the concept of the mythical "top 1%" is that every company must hire only these cream-of-the-crop developers. It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%: think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly great programmers who taught the rest of us everything we know. Let's be realistic -- your company may be innovative and fresh in the marketplace, but the technical challenges you're likely to face are hardly interesting to these sorts of programmers at the stratosphere of technical achievement. My advice would be to forget about hiring the top 1%. What you're really looking for is someone who is serious about the job and has their head on straight. Someone with practical sensibilities and whose ambitions align with the goals of your company. It doesn't take a genius CS PhD to do good work.

grammaton 16y ago
Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is. When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need the top 1%. For the 99% of CRUD sites, mobile apps, and glorified accounting systems that most programmers will spend their careers on? Not so much.
- jerf 16y ago
  Actually, building a CMS is pretty difficult and I'd say you want to only use CMSs written by about the top 10%. Not quite rocket science but they're actually very, very difficult. There's a lot of tradeoffs to be carefully made, increasing exponentially as the framework tries to do more (with a lowish exponential factor, but exponential nonetheless) and a lot of ways to make simple things difficult and difficult things impossible. There is no pain like trying to use a CMS written by a bottom-25%er. Using an already-good CMS to build your site is trivial and you don't need a rocket scientist for that. Depending on your needs you may not even need to be a programmer per se.
deleted 16y ago

palewery 16y ago

I would recommended hiring people that are the best fit for the position. There are plenty of reasons to hire someone that will do a good job, rather than a code ninja that finishes projects in 15 minutes.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

damoncali 16y ago

There is no such thing as the top 1%.

moomba 16y ago

This phenomenon isn't something only present in tech companies. I think the stat was, the congressional approval rating floats between 10-20% while the reelection rate floats around 80-90%. Humans have evolved to trust those fewer edges separating them in their social graph more than those with more edges.

trustfundbaby 16y ago

This explains why recruiters become even more aggressive in trying to contact you when you actually have a job ... never understood that.

salemh 16y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408813 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408813 "The unemployed will not be considered"

supervillain 16y ago

The top 1% programmers are drop-outs, who spend all their college years hacking/programming. Some of them are oversees who can't acquire H1B visa's due to lack of diploma. With those circumstances, do you think they hired them? can they go abroad to work? No. They are not even close on getting those guys.