What I like about the concept of the mythical "top 1%" is that every company must hire only these cream-of-the-crop developers.
It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%: think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly great programmers who taught the rest of us everything we know. Let's be realistic -- your company may be innovative and fresh in the marketplace, but the technical challenges you're likely to face are hardly interesting to these sorts of programmers at the stratosphere of technical achievement.
My advice would be to forget about hiring the top 1%. What you're really looking for is someone who is serious about the job and has their head on straight. Someone with practical sensibilities and whose ambitions align with the goals of your company. It doesn't take a genius CS PhD to do good work.
Thank you for saying this. Sorry, but you don't need a rocket scientist to build your glorified CMS, no matter how neat and innovative you think it is. When you're building the fault-tolerant, highly optimized code to align a communications satellite with a ground station, or sharding code to handle a database dozens of terabytes in size, then you can make a case that you need the top 1%.
For the 99% of CRUD sites, mobile apps, and glorified accounting systems that most programmers will spend their careers on? Not so much.
Actually, building a CMS is pretty difficult and I'd say you want to only use CMSs written by about the top 10%. Not quite rocket science but they're actually very, very difficult. There's a lot of tradeoffs to be carefully made, increasing exponentially as the framework tries to do more (with a lowish exponential factor, but exponential nonetheless) and a lot of ways to make simple things difficult and difficult things impossible. There is no pain like trying to use a CMS written by a bottom-25%er.
Using an already-good CMS to build your site is trivial and you don't need a rocket scientist for that. Depending on your needs you may not even need to be a programmer per se.
Absolutely agree. Finding the right fit for a company, somebody who is dedicated and works well with a team, is probably more important than that top 1%.
It's quite presumptuous to believe that you could convince someone with a PhD in CS and probably at least a bachelors in Math to work on your web application. This is someone who could literally be considered in the top 1%: think Norvig, Sussman, etc. The truly great programmers who taught the rest of us everything we know. Let's be realistic -- your company may be innovative and fresh in the marketplace, but the technical challenges you're likely to face are hardly interesting to these sorts of programmers at the stratosphere of technical achievement.
My advice would be to forget about hiring the top 1%. What you're really looking for is someone who is serious about the job and has their head on straight. Someone with practical sensibilities and whose ambitions align with the goals of your company. It doesn't take a genius CS PhD to do good work.