Joel Spolsky writes about finding great developers. Internships are a terrific way to scope out a candidate and also get them passionate about your company. Previous blog post about career aside, I do really like IBM and I *am* really curious to see how far we can take social software – and one of the reasons why I'm crazy about that company and all the cool people in it is because I've seen it from the inside, thanks to the IBM Toronto Centre for Advanced Studies.

Check out the essay.

More thoughts: One of the things that frustrates me about the
Philippines is that we've got this entire chicken-and-egg problem in
the schools. Few companies do on-campus recruitment for challenging
internships, so students don't get motivation or experience – which is
why few companies bother to do on-campus recruitment or R&D.
Programming competitions help, I guess, and we do still manage to find
a couple of geeks who learn about open source and end up teaching
themselves. Still…