Great... if you're hiring writers. Writing skill is uncorrelated with everything else. I'm a great writer. Many engineers I admire and respect are not. I've go

Great... if you're hiring writers. Writing skill is uncorrelated with everything else. I'm a great writer. Many engineers I admire and respect are not. I've got no magic bullet. Hiring people you know is good, and I strongly recommend informal face-to-face interviews. Two of the best interviews I've ever had (one where I was the interviewer, the other where I was the interviewee) were mostly about language design, which turns out to be a really revealing topic for discovering attitudes about process, standards, and software design generally. But how to screen people in the pipeline so you can avoid interviewing everyone who applies? No idea.