...which is why you have a screening process.
When people are complaining that there are no good programmers (and this is a common complaint on HN; it's not just a straw man), there's at least one of two things going on:
1) Their screening process sucks.
2) They aren't attracting good programmers.
High salaries help with #2.
Also, if you have a stellar programmer in an interview, they tend to stick out more than their non stellar counterparts.
Of course it would be better to make them define a salary range, but until now I was never able to do this.
Edit: by 'we' I meant 'we as programmers'.
Find someone who doesn't actually want the job, but who has the skills to help you narrow things down. Trim out the people who obviously aren't qualified (or who didn't even read the job application properly). Pay him by the hour (his normal IT wage, $75-150/hr, whatever he's worth) to sift through the resumes you've narrowed it down to. Have him pick out the most qualified or most interesting candidates with little annotations as to why yes or why no. Doesn't have to be complex - notes like 'Only Microsoft experience listed', or 'lots of experience with web app development' or 'he lasted four years at BlahTech; if he weren't awesome they'd have fired him after three months', or 'he wrote half the code on the database system you're using'.
It's something he could probably do in his spare time, lounging at home on the couch with a stack of PDFs. If he spends five hours at $100/hr over the course of a week, that's $500 that went towards not wasting your time in useless interviews, or less risk of hiring the wrong person and wasting far, far more. That could be a dozen first-round phone interviews you've skipped over by narrowing the candidates down. If each interview is an hour long, that's a day and a half of everyone's time saved.
It's pretty easy to find someone with technical skill if you do your research; the hard part is finding someone who's looking for a job, or at least the one you're offering specifically. A 'clueless' manager won't know what to look for in a candidate, but if they can narrow things down and then hire someone else who can, it can save a lot of time and money.
Personally, I this kind of work terribly tedious, at best. One would have to pay me at least double my normal rate.
The traditional model might call this role an "in house" conteract recruiter, and I doubt the good ones get paid what a good programmer or sysadmin do, thoug perhaps they should.
