The best hires are fresh CS/maths grads with little commercial experience and a burning desire to learn.
All you have to do is provide an environment in which they can, provide a raise as and when they "level up", provide infinite caffeine, interesting problems, and the rest, as they say, is history.
I assume you're basing that on your direct experience with twenty-five year veterans who have used their complete mastery of a popular toolchain to ship a couple of dozen production systems to customers who were in turn delighted by the quality of the work and the high level of professionalism.
I'm basing it on personal experience of having grown a company from nothing without funding to an enterprise carrying over £1bn of client commerce in 6 years. But what would I know.
Oh, and 100% client retention and no marketing except word of mouth. I'd say that's satisfaction.
This is called a fallacy of dramatic instance. Your problem domain and your company are satisfied with young programmers, but you cannot extrapolate that to all software enterprises.
Productivity, enthusiasm, willingness to learn new tricks (get 'em in knowing PHP, watch 'em learn C, Java, and ASM as they go deeper into our stack), and willing to take the risk of sticking their neck out with outlandish but brilliant ideas.
