Thumbs DownIf you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you know I tend to go on and on about the virtues of blogging and participating in Open Source projects.

You might even start to suspect that I think we could end wars, poverty, and hunger and sit around singing Cumbaya together in harmony if only everyone would blog and participate in Open Source.

Really now. I’m not that naïve. I’m sure we could pick a better song to sing around the campfire.

All kidding aside, I really have put my money where my mouth is.

Thumbs UpIn the past, I’ve talked about the challenges of hiring, as well as my belief that blogs are a great means to connect with good developers.

That’s how I met and hired Jon Galloway who is a tremendous technical leader, developer, and business partner.

I also think that judging potential hires on open source contributions (as 37Signals suggests) is a great way to find good developers, though I’m not so inclined to be as extreme as they are and only hire Open Source developers.

But rather than just talking about hiring Open Source developers, we recently hired Steve Harman. Steve was a Java developer at a large financial institution when he started contributing to Subtext so that he could cut his teeth with C# and .NET.

Over time, he really took on a lot of responsibility and impressed me with both his good judgment, and his work ethic. By actually working with him on a project and seeing the quality of his code, I got a really good sense of him as a developer and potential coworker that is impossible to get from a three hour or even three week interview.

I’ve been responsible for hiring as a development manager at three companies, with varying degrees of success. It turns out, that my best hiring has been at VelocIT.

Hiring is full of landmines. I’ve hired people who were great in interviews, but ended up not being able to code their way out of a Hello World program.

That is why I’m such a firm believer in the power of blogs and open source contributions to filter out the true gems among the lumps of coal.

Of course, another great way to hire good people, though draws upon a smaller pool of talent, is to hire the best people you’ve worked with in the past. A while back we hired Pat Gannon who is a fantastic software developer. The only reason he doesn’t get mentioned much here is because he doesn’t have a blog, and you know how I feel about blogs.

Maybe if we didn’t we keep him so busy building systems, he’d have time to write a blog post or two.