Smart and Gets Things Done

The book spans a broad field and it's obvious that many things, like the location of your company, are beyond the control of most managers and technical interviewers. Joel recognizes this and gives solid and honest no-nonsense advices. Like all of Joel's writings this book is humorous, interesting and a true joy to read. I tend to disagree quite often with Joel's technical opinions, but on the softer aspects of the business, he's brilliant. If you're involved in the hiring process, this book will give you a lot of ideas and advices.

This book is a must read for anyone that wants to hire people that will work on creative jobs, technical or not, but almost all examples are for software companies that build software products. You will not find much practical advice for hiring staff for you non-IT company IT department.

Despite some of my misgivings I think this book is worth the money especially if you don’t have any of the Joel on Software books already. There are many helpful tips including where to go looking for candidates, how to help employees feel at home in your organization, and how to turn around an existing team that is on the rocks.

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.