I like Jazz, and as a wanna-be bassist, I decide I need to meet a pianist and a drummer so we can form a trio and jam at my house. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to ride the subway and look for people who are listening to Jazz on their iPods. If they seem to be drumming while they groove, I will ask them if they are a drummer and if so, if they would like to get together and jam with me. If they appear to be comping a Sax solo, I ask if they're a pianist, if so, if they would like to get together and jam with me.

Got it? Subway, iPod, Jazz, drumming or keyboarding.

(This little strategy is probably no damn good for finding all, most, many, or possibly even one drummer and that goes double for pianists. I imagine that there are musicians who never take the subway, or never bump into me on the subway, or were listening to Andrew Davis instead of Miles Davis, or were reading sheet music instead of listening to music, or whatever... But hold on to that kind of objection for a moment and let's see where this example takes us.)

Quick check: Does the above say that people who don't ride the subway are terrible musicians?

Given a strategy for finding musicians, we can analyze it and give our opinion as to its likelihood of being successful. Even if it seems to work for the author, we might think it won't work for us. Perhaps we want to jam in the suburbs, so finding people on the subway will lead to heartache when we discover they won't come out to Pickering to play. 

The jam session strategy is easy to understand. And put in those words, it is a simple case of one man's search for a drummer and a pianist, nothing more. No over-arching philosophy about life or fulfillment or musical talent. Just a guy looking to jam.

But somehow, if we change a few words and turn this into a strategy for hiring one or two people to work on a team writing software, we will hear that the strategy is offensive because there are programmers who don't read blogs, or programmers who don't attend meetups, or programmers who are brilliant but don't write open source code, or programmers who refuse to write Fibonacci in an interview, or any number of other things.

All those objections include perfectly true statements. Given any mechanism for filtering people, I claim that there are smart, productive people who will be filtered out. These are called false negatives. It is impossible to create a repeatable hiring process that does away with false negatives. Call it Reginald's Rule Forty-Three: For every set of hiring criteria, there exists at least one worthy candidate who fails the criteria. This is probably obvious to everyone.

What doesn't seem to be obvious is that claiming that some set of hiring practices leads to hiring good people is not a claim that those practices are some sort of universal and that they are a metric for measuring whether someone is any good. Note the choice of words: A strategy is not a metric. Practices for locating candidates and interviewing them and selecting someone to receive an offer are a strategy, not a metric.

Case study: Some time ago, a fellow I will not name (not me) wrote that having Windows and Java in a start-up repelled certain types of good programmers, and that certain languages—he named Python as an example—attracted good people to you. That's a roundabout way of describing a hiring strategy: Use Python on *nix.

The chattering classes immediately set about explaining the error of his ways, noting how many smart people used .NET and hated Python's fascist significant whitespace, and so on. This is the strategy vs. metric confusion at work. He articulated a strategy. Some of his readers revolted, thinking he had measured them and found them wanting. That kind of reaction is predictable. It always happens when someone writes about hiring programmers.

I take it as a given that if you're arguing about someone's strategies for finding programmers, your are already in the top one tenth of one percent in our industry in some way, shape or form. And I get why it's easy to read a post about hiring and bristle with chagrin. I'm not trying to bludgeon you with logic and sneer that you fail at reading comprehension because you are arguing that you don't need to have a Github presence to be a productive programmer. What I am trying to do is urge you to see such posts as simply people explaining their strategy for getting a certain thing done. It's about them and their need to hire someone while simultaneously juggling a bunch of other priorities. 

It's a tremendous waste of energy to take a strategy personally. It isn't a metric. I get that Brad Mehldau and Dave Weckl don't ride the subway. I used to buttonhole people and complain about the time someone asked me a technical question and failed me for giving the right answer. With the benefit of hindsight, I now understand that he was using a strategy for hiring people, not a metric for measuring me. His strategy for hiring people worked for his purposes. Why take that personally?

Hiring strategies are not about you, so don't let them under your skin. Don't let them take over the reptilian, fight-or-flight part of your brain that seizes the keyboard whenever you think someone is explaining why they're a band leader and you aren't fit to carry their baggage to the next gig. Just relax and let them have their endless solos. There are a lot of venues and a lot of bands, you're better off reading something else that will engage your creativity and curiosity.

Pax.