Joel is right on. Hiring the best developers is crucial.

I was reading through Slashdot and I found a link to Joel Spolsky’s article on why hiring the best developers is crucial. We had the relatively recent discussion about this a few postings back, in the comments of my post about Shelley’s article.

Well, Joel did quite some analysis, and even brought out the hard numbers to justify his case. Here’s what I got out of his analysis:

• There’s a huge deviation between the amount of time it takes someone to code a solution.
• After hitting the min bar, there is little correlation between the amount of time spent and the quality of the output.
• No matter how long a bunch of mediocre programmers work, they’ll never achieve the same output as a few extremely talented ones.

IMHO, Joel is right on target.