I just talked to my friend who's been running the MIT EECS undergraduate program for the last 3 decades and she says the breakdown in graduating students goes roughly like a quarter each in:
Postgraduate education (12% Ph.D., the rest law school, med school, etc.) Quite a few do some sort of postgraduate education some years later but MIT has no hard numbers on them.
Finance/consulting (their math skills will earn them a much higher salary on Wall Street than they can get anywhere else).
Established companies (e.g. as of a few years ago Oracle was the best for starting salaries, $95K then).
Startups.
So with the current per class enrollment of ~200 students that means Joel has a pool of 50 students who might want to work for him.
Maybe they don't work to work on .NET and/or in NYC???
Note that all the above are "official", public and current, straight from the source.
The problem is, you don't know which 50 it is. I mean, we're talking about 22 year olds here, they probably don't even know. You end up having to "advertise" to all of them, which then leads to you interviewing some of them who are 90% sure that they're going on to a PhD, but just want to do the interview [for experience|to make their parents happy|to see if it might change their minds].
Full disclosure: I work for Fog Creek, and went to Stanford.
Well, that certainly sucks, and I e.g. in 1997 worked for a new grad who had interned at Microsoft and either had an offer there or had accepted it before his elder brother convinced him to work full time at the brother's startup, for which he'd programmed their prototype. (The other guy they really wanted was in SV and still happy their, until his company went poof much later).
Anyway, what you're staying is that it's difficult to qualify your sales leads at MIT and that results in a lot of critical wasted effort. So much it's not worth trying (hard)?
Exactly; it just doesn't make sense for us to go to them and recruit. Of course, that doesn't mean we're going to ding them for having gone to MIT or Stanford if they come to us. We're a small company, so we need to focus our recruiting efforts where they'll be most effective.
I had a similar experience - I interned at a government organisation that only recruited at Oxford/Cambridge because they wanted "only the best".
But it was such a crap place to work they their actual hires were from 3rd rate institutions. They would have been better focussing their recruitment on them. But that would mean admitting there was a problem - so much better to convince yourself that the Oxbridge grads all went to do PhDs instead.
I wonder if those programmers typically do better on their own projects or in their own startups. I would suspect the answer is yes, and they're probably a similar class of people to those who are good programmers with mediocre GPAs in school.
It's interesting to tie that in with the 5-10x productivity claim - what about your working environment? If you're working in a negative environment motivation is staunched which inevitably affects motivation.
Another point about productivity - if you're working in an environment where people want crap shovelled out as soon as possible, then the people who care about maintainability are likely to take longer on software (though once you factor in support, something often shovelled under the carpet, you will often out-gun the 'put out crap then fix it up' approach), and thus appear less productive than mediocre colleagues.
Don't get me wrong, I do agree with Joel on most of these points, and I think he's probably talking about 9-5 developers who have little motivation to improve rather than passionate but burn-out or disillusioned developers.
Motivation to work on what Joel will pay them to work on.
I've known a few really bright developers who would be highly motivated if you were asking them to produce a streaming media server or debug a problem with the Linux TCP/IP stack (real examples) but who would probably die of boredom working on a bug tracker.
Yeah, we've all had times where we're just burnt out... That would look to an unenlightened observer like "motivation problems" and it is completely recoverable from.
