How to hire the "right developers"?

A very good and tough question dont you think ? Different organizations have adopted different ways of hiring developers however none of their hiring strategies are foolproof. Somehow developers who are not very productive or effective manage to get in. That brings us to the question of how do we solve this issue? I believe that the key to this answer is to hire smart people who can get the job done.

So how would you define Smart? Well thats a tough question!!! But here is my shot at it. Smart in my definition is anyone who can think practically about a problem in hand and provide a practical solution. Smart and getting the job done go hand in hand in fact they complement each other.

Smart but not productive or effective.

You could have someone who is a Phd who is extremely brilliant but all his solutions are practically impossible. People who are smart but don't get things done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical.

Does the job but not in the smartest way

A developer who get things done but are not smart will do stupid things without thinking about them and somebody else will have to clean up their mess later. This is really a pain because not only do they not contribute, but they take up a lot of time of the good developers time. They are the kind of people who copy big chunks of code around rather than writing a subroutine, because it gets the job done, just not in the smartest way.

Sometimes its the guys who interview the candidate, they may not be smart enough to conduct the interview in the first place which ends up in bringing more unproductive developers to the organization. On the other hand the recruitment process itself may not be good enough to find out if the candidate is the right one for the job.

Of all the interviews that I have attended so far in my career I rate Thoughtworks recuritment process very highly. They are very thorough in their recruitment process for a developer and they take their hiring very seriously. Every round in their recruitment process for a developer is justified and thats probably why the guys over there are really smart. I know a couple of them and they really know their stuff and they do their stuff really well. This is the best example I can think of when you want to hire the right developers who are smart and gets things done. However I am not saying that their recruitment process is foolproof but its the best I have seen and experienced so far personally. They have a good hiring process in place which brings in smart people who know their stuff and do it really well to the company and they in turn bring more smart people into the company.