[followben]

Yes!

I moved internationally in 2012 and, knowing no-one in my new city, promptly volunteered to organise the local chapter of a popular developer meetup. I met dozens of friends and future colleagues at those monthly meets. Almost immediately I got a job with the outgoing organiser, and a couple of years later I recruited the core of a greenfield team from the regular attendees. One of them wasn't even working professionally with the language, but it was clear from talking to them and seeing their code they had potential. Moreover they were a really decent yet introverted person who just needed a break. I loved working with them and was proud to watch them grow into a truly accomplished yet extremely humble engineer. I'd hire them again in a heartbeat.

Another: my department was made redundant in March (great timing), but I immediately picked up contract work with a friend I first worked alongside many years ago. I've hired him into multiple roles in the interim with great success... and now I get to help build his business. We trust each other to be candid and know each others strengths and weaknesses (technically and personally) and he pays me on time. It's great.

Another: we needed a QA for my last team and one of our senior devs recommended someone from an old workplace. Feels bad saying it now, but with no experience of our toolset or domain we'd never have given their resume a second look. But good QAs are hard to find and we were desperate, so after a promising interview we hired them on a trial. Couldn’t have gone better - obliging, a quick study, and a knack for surfacing esoteric bugs. They went on to lead QA for our company.

Referrals and “the network” can work to your advantage.

Yet... when growing my last team I’d exhausted that network, so we advertised on StackOverflow. Amongst many applications were from two "developer famous" people I knew by reputation (twitter, conference talks, blog posts, book authorship etc). Our whiteboard-free process was a friendly interview followed by a small take-home code challenge. One came was arrogant and dismissive and said had neither the time nor inclination for take-home projects. While the other was gregarious, gracious and completed the task without fuss. Guess who we hired? They were technical mentor to virtually everyone on the team (myself included) and were instrumental in laying a solid architectural foundation of our product.

While I’ve plenty of “war stories”, it really is nice to remember how many gracious, friendly and deeply competent people I’ve worked with over the years.