Under No Circumstances Believe That You Need To Hire Rock Stars

That's very well written, however there's a better way to put it: when hiring, neither side should be trying <i>too hard</i> to sell themselves. A candidate telling a company "I am a rockstar ninja" is a candidate selling themselves too hard. A company talking about "hiring the top C/C++/Java hackers, from a top-ten CS program" to create CRUD screens in PHP is selling themselves too hard as well. If you want top talent, give them top challenges. You can find plenty of people who are passionate about web development who would be interested in writing PHP for you. May be they can't implement a red-black tree on the white board (yes, I have literally heard of a PHP/Perl web developer being asked to do that), but they may have a great deal more knowledge when it comes to UI/UX, requirements gathering or people/project management.<p>I <i>do</i> think there is room for "top talent" in a start-up, but the key thing is that they will almost certainly be doing work that is "below them" at one point or another. As pg pointed out, YC presently has a tenured MIT professor as their Systems Administrator.<p>There's also a corollary to that: if you're coming straight out of college and are looking for serious technical career growth, you may want to hold-off joining an early stage start-up unless they're doing something truly uniquely challenging (e.g. Netscape in the early 90s, Google in 1998 or -- right now -- Directed Edge or the YC start-up making an alternative storage engine for MySQL).<p>It's also true that seemingly "simple" sites such as various social networks, e-commerce and media sites (Facebook/Ning/LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter) <i>do</i> grow to present many fascinating scalability and algorithmic challenges, these <i>do not</i> occur until the stage where these companies are no longer early-stage start-ups (particularly now, when powerful web frameworks abstract away any systems programming).<p>(EDIT: some start-ups do have many scaling and algorithmic challenges, but usually not in the early stages)

<i>It’s a very rare company where they can make the claim that their CEO is the recipe for success.</i><p>This seems to be the opposite of what most VCs tell. "We invest in people, not in ideas" is a common claim.<p><i>If you can’t trust the guy sitting in the cube next to you, you are in trouble. Hiring rock stars and ninjas is inviting trouble because they are likely to be glory seekers who are thinking about their own personal rewards, and less likely to be thinking about the team</i><p>I disagree with the stereotype he draws of "rockstars" (which is a retarded term anyways).<p>Overall this whole article is just based on a broken premise. The author suggests that a team of programmers is more than the sum of its individuals. This is false. A team of programmers is <i>less</i> than its sum. The larger the team, the more dramatic the impact of this inverse correlation. Cf. The mythical man month.<p>That's why a very small group of "rockstars", or even an individual, can run circles around mediocre teams of any size.

In programming, there is a VAST difference in productivity between great and mediocre programmers. That's because programmers create tools that do work. Bad programmers create shovels; great ones create fleets of bulldozers. Bad programmers create buggy, slow code; great programmers create fast, working, robust code and meet deadlines to do it.<p>I know this, because I'm a mediocre programmer. I struggle for a couple weeks to build something, and I talk to my Rock Star Programmer buddy, who immediately suggests a better solution. At his job, he creates stuff in a week that I couldn't create in my whole life (or at least it feels that way).<p>So yes, I think he'd definitely be a bargain at twice my salary, and probably he makes more than that, and should. If I were going to start a company, I would definitely want some rock stars like him.<p>The trick is, you almost have to be one to know one.

Further anti-joeltest hints:<p>You are only posting the job ad on craiglist for free<p>You ask for guru level C++,C# and Java in the ad but the app is in VB6/PHP<p>Programmers don't get a corner private office, they share a room with the call center and sales staff.<p>They don't get an aeron chair and height adjustable desk. They get something government surplus with at least one broken leg in the corner of shipping and receiving warehouse.<p>Your office doesn't have views of central park. It has views of a railyard and the police regularly raiding the junkyard next door<p>And finally, if you are paying $40,000 you are hiring RockBand playing programmers, not Rockstar programmers - there is a sublte difference.

If an actual rockstar ever becomes a programmer, they are going to be in very high demand.

If you advertise for rock stars and/or ninjas you deserve every candidate that you get.<p>If you really do need such talent, you are unlikely to find it through classifieds or job sites, but through the network of technical people you know.

To me, the author and commenters are missing the point of hiring "rock stars". The point is sort of the reverse. <i>If</i> your company was able to attract a "rock star", it probably makes something very interesting. This just -in the eyes of VCs and other companies- makes your company more interesting. The same applies to the times, where employees with PhDs made the company worth 70 mill$ more each (back in 2000).

<i>Most of the guys who I regarded as the very best developers were in Seattle and Silicon Valley.</i><p>Sorry you see it that way. I have found little correlation between developer quality and location. Great developers can be anywhere, with many reasons why they haven't relocated to a tech center. They may be right under your nose. Sounds like you found a few.