Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent

When I got this book, I was quite surprised how small it is. But there is a lot of useful information in it and it's fun to read (as You can expect from Joel). It's well worth its 12 bucks. I wish more people, who are hiring or managing people, would read this book and follow at least some of ideas in it. It was fun to find out that Joel mentions Estonia (on page 75), a little beautiful country in Eastern Europe, where I'm living.

Another great book by Joel outlining his experience in hiring and building great software development teams. As with prior publications, a lot of the content is taken directly from his personal blog, but the book is well worth the investment. As a startup founder I found a lot of invaluable advice for hiring, screening and building the team culture. Both managers and software developers looking for a great job search strategy will definitely benefit from reading this book!

I started thumbing through this book at a local bookstore and then decided I had to read the rest. This book covers some great principles in finding the right people to get work done correctly. Joel focuses on programming exclusively, but the same methods he covers will certainly work in nearly any IT position, and probably most technical professions across the board. The author does a super job of making a dry subject very entertaining and offers very knowledgable methods, ideas and processes for finding the right people to make your company better. My wife even read part of it and enjoyed some of the humor and stories found within. I loved the idea of treating programmers like Rock Stars, and will quickly be showing a copy of this to my management team! The book also acts as a good benchmark for you and your company, even if you're not in a position to directly hire/fire someone. I was able to see what my company is doing right, and where there is certainly some room to improve.

Joel bases the entire book on one key premise: "The problem with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple great ones is that no matter how long they work, they never, ever produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce." He spends the first entire chapter building his case for this premise, and in my opinion hits some strong chords with his reasoning, showing that there are some facts to back up his assertion that mediocre talent, no matter how many of them there are, will never generate something like the iPod. The meat of the book is about how to find and ultimately capture this rare and elusive "great talent" he speaks so highly of in Chapter 1. To his credit, Joel takes the time to provide the reasoning behind each of his directives, in a way that allows the reader to walk away feeling enriched with new ideas and possibilities rather than feeling like a dope for having interviewed folks the "wrong way" for so many years. I found the last chunk of the book to be entertaining, though a bit choppy in spots. It seemed more like a quick add-on than a wrap-up. None the less, Joel comes through with some key "take away" points, as any good management books needs. Regarding a few of the other reviewer's comments, I will suggest that those questioning Joel's non-comment on outsourcing or that he is living in the Dot-Com era, have perhaps missed the entire point of the book. Outsourcing cannot succeed if the ultimate goal is the make shrink-wrapped software that makes money. Why? Because any short-term savings gained by hiring five mediocre programmers to replace one great programmer will quickly be consumed by the drop in sales when the mediocre talent fails to come up with the mind-blowing features the great programmer used to on a regular basis. And finally, Joel's recommended treatment of great programmers is only for great programmers. The idea is, if you only hire the best (not the really good ones, only the absolute BEST), then you can easily afford to treat them like royalty, a cost that will pay itself back many times over in the years to come.

I am not a recruiter and I don't really do much hiring. So why did I read this book? Well, I love Joel Spolsky's writing and I think that this book can be used as a retrospecttive device. You can use the advice given in this book to evaluate yourself as a develper, your development team, or even your orginization as a whole. There are some things in here that employers don't want to hear. Take care of your developers. Buy them nice equipment. Give them private offices. In the long run it will pay off. Want proof? Nobody has ever quit from Joel's own sofware company Fog Creek Software. That is amazing. That makes me want to pick up and move to New York just to be part of what sounds like an amazing development team.