Recruiting Software Engineers

I have two posts for you today on the recruitment of Software Engineers. The first one was actually posted yesterday over at Coding Horror. Jeff Atwood talks about the “years of experience” myth and how requiring a developer to have X number of years doing Y is outright ridiculous. I think Jeff sums it up best by saying that “what software developers do best is learn” and that in the long run, the developer who is a great programmer but may have no experience doing a specific task will outperform the mediocre programmer with X number years of experience doing the same task.

Along those same lines, Martin Fowler posted a hypothesis today answering the question “Are more expensive programmers actually cheaper?“. He suggests that a group of more expensive (more talented) programmers can get a better system completed earlier than a group of cheap talent, and that the initial savings gained by hiring the cheaper talent is expended later in the cycle.