Really? Because that’s not what our data shows on it. It shows specifically that regardless of what we submit applicants to won’t matter. Maybe we’re just bad at hiring, but with 25 years of data from a very broad range of job types (public sector) we can at least be comfortable with the knowledge that everyone else sucks as much as us.

I get your point though. Some engineers are more valuable than others, but the thing is, that it’s not a constant and there are no real way to make sure you both attract and keep them.

We employ an engineer who just might be the countries leading techie on ADFS and how it plays into our national and EU vases strategies for NSIS certifiably authentication. With a background as a bouncer, I’m not sure how many places would have guess that when he was first hired.

I’m another such story though in a different manner. I used to be real rockstar developer, and a real workhorse. This was way before I got into management and long before I had children. Because when I did have children it turned out that may undiagnosed ADHD could no longer fit into the responsibilities of adult life and I worked myself into first a nice range of stress, then anxiety and then a depression. Now I never work more than 37 hours a week unless there is a big event, like elections, and when there is, I make sure to not-work the extra hours after wards. If you had hired me the year before my first daughter was born, you would have gotten the workhorse with a very high degree of both creativity and getting things to actually do something useful for the business end. A year later you would have been sitting with a depression stricken employee who was on partial sick-leave for 9 months.

I understand the dream of course, but unless you can show me some data on someone who figured out how to actually purposefully hire the dream employee, I’m personally going to consider it a dream. An unhealthy one even, because almost nobody is ever really irreplaceable in an enterprise organisation. Sure the loss of some employees are felt harder than others, but the truth is that IBM could stop selling consumer PCs and still trundle on. So in my opinion it’s much better to create a team of people who work well together and who have a good culture, because that means it’s also easier when someone moves on to other things. It also means that you’re not as effected by the life changes of your employees.

Ask yourself this when hiring: you genuinely have a series of actually-actionable tasks ready to go for the new hire? Do you have the right resources on hand who understand that a part of their job is to answer questions about those projects from the new hire (and it will probably be a whole lot of stuff)?

The answer is going to be that you probably don't, and so whoever you hire, no matter how good they are, your company will just never know.

In my experience, it's pretty simple. Pay them lots of $$$. My circle of friends is in their 40s now, and the ones we all generally consider really good make boatloads. It's hard for them to switch jobs because most places aren't willing to pay a "regular developer" nearly as much.