Recruitment and Selection of high performing programmers August 26, 2023 by Eduardo Bellani

What could be more important for a technology company than great software? High performing software developers and their teams. After all, they are the ones who actually create and maintain that great software.

But do they really make a difference?

I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. Here are the typical variations in:(Steve 2014)

Individual performance

20 to 1,

Team performance

10 to 1,

Method performance

1.2 to 1.

One can find a compelling illustration of these data on (Oram and Wilson 2010). Two organizations, similar resources, similar goal, vastly different performance:

Microsoft excel 3

649000 Lines of Code (Loc) in 50 Man Years (MY) = 12980

Lotus 123

400000 LoC in 260 MY = 1538

Recruitment and selection

Recruitment is the process of finding potential candidates to apply for a job position, whereas selection is the process of identifying the best candidate to hire. (Team 2023)

To find high performing candidates, you need to find markers of belonging to some high performing culture. Usually something that is very hard to master and that the marketplace ignores is a good bet. As an exapmle, for backend developers, one might look for:

• Haskell or other functional programming language not in widespread use;

• Relational theory and other rigorous discipline misunderstood by the majority of the marketplace,

To filter them, I’d advise using a combination of the following methods (Schmidt 2016):

For instance, a (GMA + Integrity + Conscientiousness + Structured interview + Work Sample) combo should take at most 3 hours from the candidate and 1 from your team.

References