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I think hiring A players is actually more complex than that even. To get A players, or even the best B players, the most important thing you can do is to make y

I think hiring A players is actually more complex than that even. To get A players, or even the best B players, the most important thing you can do is to make your company somewhere those people will want to work in terms of the work, the culture and the facilities. If you're doing that then it's possible they'll find you, if you're not then nothing you can do is going to help.

Retric 15y ago
It greatly depends on what you call an A player. Linus is extremely talented and well known, but in some tiny organisations his actual programming talent may not be above average. Most programmers working for the NSA are probably about what you would expect at a large organization, but I suspect they have a few people that would rock your world. And the thing is Google, Microsoft, and GM also have some amazing teams simply though blind luck. The kind of thing where a few friends all end up working for a manager they like on some interesting little problem. Some people have only worked on such teams and don't understand why so many projects fail, and others have never even seen them and wonder how complex software ever get's written. But, so few people have a truly understand the range from inspiring though dysfunctional people and teams out there that talk of A, B, and C coders / rock stars becomes almost meaningless. PS: One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day, he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/Humour/Real.Programmer.Stories.html http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/Humour/R... or the modern equivalent http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html

Retric 15y ago

It greatly depends on what you call an A player. Linus is extremely talented and well known, but in some tiny organisations his actual programming talent may not be above average. Most programmers working for the NSA are probably about what you would expect at a large organization, but I suspect they have a few people that would rock your world. And the thing is Google, Microsoft, and GM also have some amazing teams simply though blind luck. The kind of thing where a few friends all end up working for a manager they like on some interesting little problem. Some people have only worked on such teams and don't understand why so many projects fail, and others have never even seen them and wonder how complex software ever get's written. But, so few people have a truly understand the range from inspiring though dysfunctional people and teams out there that talk of A, B, and C coders / rock stars becomes almost meaningless. PS: One of my favorite Real Programmers was a systems programmer for Texas Instruments. One day, he got a long distance call from a user whose system had crashed in the middle of saving some important work. Jim was able to repair the damage over the phone, getting the user to toggle in disk I/O instructions at the front panel, repairing system tables in hex, reading register contents back over the phone. http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/Humour/Real.Programmer.Stories.html http://www-personal.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/Humour/R... or the modern equivalent http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html