There is power law distribution of programming skills as in every other field. I am a web developer, I have worked with both established companies and startups

There is power law distribution of programming skills as in every other field. I am a web developer, I have worked with both established companies and startups from every continent in the world. I was hired recently by a client from USA, whose previous programmer created mess of code base, they were about to go out of business, had they not hired me to fix that up. I was able to fix all critical issues within a week, and was able to start developing new features withing two weeks. Were they not hired me from outside of their geographic area, they would not have survived today. So, what should you do to be able to hire good developers- 1. Broaden your horizons, don't limit yourself to a geographic area. World is not limited to Silicon Valley. 2. Be willing to hire remotely. I myself working remotely from start of my carrier, it is really exciting. 3. Give freedom to developers, let them think out of the box. 4. Before hiring developers full time, give them some real work(may be a small contract), this is better than asking them to solve puzzles :) Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, sfix [at] outlook.com