Smart and Gets Things Done

The title of the post describes, according to Joel Spolsky, the 2 qualities you should look for, when hiring technical people. He argues, quite successfully (in my humble opinion and based on my past experience), that we usually settle for the first ("smart") and end up being stuck with people who either can't nail their behind to a chair long enough to finish a project, are not challenged by the work you present them with, or do not work well in teams (a very loose subjective interpretation).

I can tell you I've had some very strange experiences in recruiting developers, QA engineers, graphic designers and consultants. If I could only had the title of this post on my office's wall then, I would have avoided certain choices...
Anyway, Joel summarized his entire "thesis" in a small pocket book with the same title. Highly recommended.

And while on the subject of hiring technical people, here's another book I highly recommend - even if you never intend to interview a single person in your life.
The book "How would you move mount Fuji?" describes the Microsoft culture of asking riddles during an interview, along with 70-something of those riddles and solutions. The writer, William Poundstone explains the pros and cons (mainly cons) of such an interviewing method.

Buy the books from Amazon (and I'd get a $0.40 gift certificate :)).