(but also lists a fourth in the body of the posting)
4. Employee referrals
Obviously, Stack Overflow is based on building a community and now they are trying to leverage that community to generate money from matching companies with developers.
In his post, Joel states that "[t]he average great software developer will apply for, total, maybe, four jobs in their entire career." Paraphrasing the next two paragraphs, he asserts that the truly great (as opposed to average great) developers "...show up on the open job market once...".
Maybe I'm jaded, but I cannot think of a single truly great developer that got hired through the standard recruitment methods. Recruiters and, especially, HR departments filter out all the truly great developers when sieving resumes because the truly great developers tend to be modest and honest, not traits that get them through a buzzword filter. The truly great developers I've worked got in by bypassing the HR system via an inside person.
I would assert that truly great developers pick the companies they wish to work for. As a result, the only way to catch them is to have a great company so that they find you and you still need to get lucky. As Joel writes, "The great software developers, indeed, the best people in every field, are quite simply never on the market."
I'm sorry but this kind of rhetoric ("they're so good you never even see them..") smacks more of "rock star" mythology than realism.
The best programmers, say Ward Cunningham (to name one more name than you or Joel do), are methodology gurus. The best methodologies admit that all programmers make mistakes and are limited. Perhaps we could learn something...
The assertions (granted, unsubstantiated) were that the gurus aren't putting their CV on web sites for HR departments to find. They are targeting companies they want to work for.
Ward Cunningham is a good name. Lets look at some legendary software engineers...
From Ward Cunninghams's linkedin page, you will see he has held two jobs for a long time: Tektronix for 10 years and his own company for 18 years. Tek was his initial hire and he had two short stints at Microsoft and the Eclipse Foundation. He probably applied traditionally to Tek (first job). His titles at Microsoft and Eclipse Foundation make me wonder if he went through the HR department for those jobs. Ditto for AboutUs. Obviously, he did not interview for Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc.
Linus Torvalds worked at Transmeta for 6 years, OSDL for 3 1/2 years, and Linux Foundation for 6 1/2 years. I'm sure he never had a traditional job application/interview encounter.
Wikipedia lists Ken Thompson as working for Bell Labs, Entrisphere, Inc, and Google. I'm willing to bet he didn't have to run the standard Google gauntlet to get hired there.
Wikipedia lists Dennis Ritchie working for Lucent Technologies (currently) and Bell Labs. Not much resume shoveling going on there.
The Wikipedia page on Brian Kernighan is somewhat vague, but lists Bell Labs and the Computer Science Department of Princeton University.
Guido van Rossum went through more companies than the other gurus listed here. Again, I'm sure the Google interviewers were more nervous than he.
Yukihiro Matsumoto has only worked for NaCl according to LinkedIn and Wikipedia.
David Heinemeier Hansson is another example: he founded and built a Danish online gaming news website, which he ran until 2001. I believe he went from there to 37Signals. He did some contract work for them and was hired on the basis of his obvious talent. Again, non-traditional.
Point wasn't that famous programmer don't have an easy getting hired. Their fame, by itself, would allow this whatever else is happening.
My point is that a theory that bases itself of "the qualities of great programmers" when you mean famous "rock star" programmers, is fundamentally flawed. I think the ideas of the great programmers, at least their great ideas, support this.
