Paul Graham thinks you should only hire great hackers, Marc Andreesen thinks you should be very afraid of the law of crappy people, Joel Spolsky says only good programmers hit the high notes and while Jason Fried conservatively just want you to hire good writers Joe Krauss - like Marc Andreesen - worries more about avoiding false positives than hitting those high notes.
The best advice ever of course was given by Frank Zappa, whose band was, conveniently for this blogpost, called The Mothers of Invention. Frank Zappa knew just the right question to ask prospective band members: "What can you do that's fantastic?"
Add Erik Sink's view to this - never hire programmers, always hire developers. Works for him.
http://software.ericsink.com/No_Programmers.html
But it's much more important to get the right mix of people in your team. Some inspire, some love to be inspired. Some get dirty with the details and others keep an overview and need to be tethered once in a while. And nothing works if people get on each others' nerves all the time or mistrusts one another - or you.
Posted by: Jesper on December 23, 2005 4:21 PMAgain, the band is not such a bad metaphor - you need bass and drums too, not just a good guitarist.
Posted by: Claus on December 23, 2005 4:23 PM