PUBLIC MARKS with tag hiring

And when you do find those engineers who are a fit? Cherish them, because “every engineering hire is a miracle.”

The nature of corporations as they grow is to become glacial and bureaucratic because no one trusts anyone. You spend half the day reporting on what you do so execs higher up can keep an eye on you because they believe that some how, you're out to destroy the company. And probably, some number of employees are. Or at the very least, not working up to their potential. Here's an idea, do some careful hiring and recruiting, hire people who are excellent at their jobs AND have some moral fiber, and set them loose to do what you hired them for. No one gets hired to fill out status reports, but that's mostly what we all end up doing. So the good people leave for greener, entrepreneurial pastures, and the people happy about status reports stay, get promoted and the whole thing perpetuates itself until you have Yahoo, GM or any other number of glacial bureauracracies.

the only value of valleywag hides in the comments.

I personally enjoy and benefit a lot from pair programming. It’s not something I get to do all of the time, but a solid pairing session with a good developer gets me results. I love sharing tricks, and discussing code before it’s written. However, there might be more to it than that.

Hampton and I started to speculate that we work best if someone is just there, keeping you on your toes. Someone to chastise you if you check Facebook, even if they don’t know the first thing about programming. We joked about hiring people to just sit there and watch us code. I laughed!

Well, I’m not laughing any more. I tried it, and it worked.

Obviously fun coding projects aren't the only indicator of a rock star, but they're a good way to filter out programmers that just do it for a paycheck.

don't forget that those kind of employee are demanding, they know how to have fun at working (if they do that in their spare time). Give them good food.