Everything I've ever heard about Fog Creek indicates that they take their people seriously. Which probably makes them more likely to take their work at Fog Creek seriously.
Funny how that works, huh? A lesson many, many other companies could profit from.
I agree with your point, but it requires that you hire correct right from the beginning. Spolsky (like pg, Atwood, Fried/DHH , etc.) has his pick of the litter because of well thought out essays and large base of followers. You can't simply take this attitude without having a large pipeline of people who (1) agree with you and (2) who are good.
Lesson learned - creating a community or following of people (i.e. talent marketing) is a very powerful thing.
The essays and followers surely helped, but there are lots of basic pragmatic things you can do to make yourself a desirable employer even if you aren't a great essayist. Just some obvious ones off the top of my head:
- Have sensible working hours (30 to 40 hours a week is optimal).
- Either let people work from home, or give them private offices.
- Don't have idiotic hiring criteria like buzzword matching or college degrees. (Meta: don't have the personnel department doing the hiring.)
- Get at least the basics of tools and process right. You don't have to let people code in Lisp or Haskell, but when a candidate asks you about version control, the answer better hadn't be "oh we don't have time for that here".
- If you are requiring people to work in the office, don't quibble about things like high-spec machines and good chairs that cost a small fraction of the cost of hiring people.
Hit everything on that checklist and even if you're still not quite as sought after as Fog Creek, you'll be well out in front of most of your competitors at little cost in either time or money (and infinitely far in front of Fog Creek for any candidates who won't or can't live in New York).
Having essays is not the only way to do it. The other way is to just be willing to wait for the right hire. At my company, we have a small engineering team so far, but we have taken a long time for each hire with the basic idea that they need to fit some key characteristics of our team. At the beginning this was actually harder to identify what was important, but now that we have a larger team there is more diversity (ideas, genders, backgrounds) and the core important tenants to us are more defined.
Well if you read what Joel says about working conditions and look at the office pics where you can see that in practice it just makes sense that fogcreek can attract the best people.
Look how everybody has is own office.
I still dont get it why people keep thinking that to cram puzzlers on a noisy heap with all possible (social, visual, audio) distractions saves money in the end.
If Joel can offer programmers sane working conditions in NY, so can every office around the world.
Funny how that works, huh? A lesson many, many other companies could profit from.