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There's no economic incentive to hire anyone below the top decile. Assuming you believe the "10x" rule (which says that there is a 10x productivity delta betwee

There's no economic incentive to hire anyone below the top decile. Assuming you believe the "10x" rule (which says that there is a 10x productivity delta between the best and worse developers), I get the best bang-for-the-buck by hiring the best developer I can find. Even if compensation did scale linearly with productivity, two programmers with productivity X are still worse than one programmer with productivity 2X since communication costs grow as the team size grows. I wouldn't be a prudent businessman if I didn't fight relentlessly for the best developers...

nir 14y ago
Of course you should hire the best dev you can find (though I seriously doubt its possible to tell who'll be the best for you - both in terms of skill and, as importantly, personality). Personally I don't believe in the x10 rule. It might have been true when you had to code your own servers in Lisp to build a website, not when you build a Django CRUD app. In any case, when you mentor someone, they may turn out to be that top %10 dev.