I didn't even read the article because I know there is no secret.
We don't hire the best people. We hire average people, some good people, some great people, some mediocre people, and some people who aren't very good at their jobs. Some of those mediocre and average people turn out to be great people after all. There's no secret to it. We like telling ourselves there is a secret because everyone likes to feel special and we think if we can mirror other companies that we think are successful then we can be successful just like they were.
In the end, you have people working with people. If you're fortunate, you get the right people interviewing the right person at the right time, and you get a great hire. At best, you can filter out the obviously bad ones. The rest, you'll find out about as you go. Some will surprise you, some will meet your expectations, and some will be disasters. Fire the bad ones; coach and mentor the average ones; keep track of the great ones.
Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.
I'd like to believe that both paxunix and andrewsteward wrote those comments after having read the article, but pretended like they didn't for the Internet points. Actually makes the comments a bit funnier.
> Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.
Yes you can. It's quite easy, make people build something small to get hired, that eliminates 99% of submissions who are just lying about their skills and posing and with code in hand, it's quite easy to decide who's full of shit and who isn't. Resume's are useless, demand code, real programmers program.
This is a good summary
"Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't."
We don't hire the best people. We hire average people, some good people, some great people, some mediocre people, and some people who aren't very good at their jobs. Some of those mediocre and average people turn out to be great people after all. There's no secret to it. We like telling ourselves there is a secret because everyone likes to feel special and we think if we can mirror other companies that we think are successful then we can be successful just like they were.
In the end, you have people working with people. If you're fortunate, you get the right people interviewing the right person at the right time, and you get a great hire. At best, you can filter out the obviously bad ones. The rest, you'll find out about as you go. Some will surprise you, some will meet your expectations, and some will be disasters. Fire the bad ones; coach and mentor the average ones; keep track of the great ones.
Go build some shit with people you like building shit with and stop trying to figure out how to make hiring objective. You can't.