Books Recommended by Brendan Sterne

Spolsky articulates the “Smart and Get’s Things Done” hiring philosophy pretty well in this book, and gives practical advice on how to go about the business of hiring great people.

Personally, I’m a big fan of this philosophy – I think it’s worthwhile to recruit and retain top programming talent. However, I worry a little bit that this is a zero sum game playing out amongst the tech firms. Not every employer of software engineers can fill their ranks with A players. As an industry we also have to work on attracting talent from elsewhere (e.g. finance), and developing talent. I’ll leave the question of whether we can turn B players into A players for another time.