How to Hire Hackers
DarkShikari: Here's my advice as a two-time former intern at two different places.As a small startup looking to hire hackers, you obviously want the best.  You want experienced hackers who already know how to code and perhaps have experience on a project before (e.g. open-source).  Of course, you want the brightest.But this is always a challenge because the smarter, more experienced, and more valuable a hacker is, the rarer they are and--odds are--the less likely they are willing to work for you because they're less desperate for an internship; they can afford to shop around, or may even just decide to do their own projects for a summer.So here's how you can try to attract those people.1.  Pay decently.  A lot of companies like to pay interns nearly nothing  these days (or in some particularly obnoxious cases, actually pay them nothing).  This of course doesn't mean pay them as much as a full employee, but it does mean they should not feel insulted by the amount of money you're offering.  If they could earn more than 5x your pay as an independent contractor, you're doing it wrong.  While not all hackers do internships for the money, it's definitely a huge plus.  And if you don't think you're going to get enough out of your intern to justify the pay, don't hire them; you should not hire an intern unless you have no doubts about their ability to produce significantly more value through their work than you're paying them.2.  Deal with the interns' practical issues with regards to working for you.  For example, if they're coming from out of town, deal with their housing and flights.  Hackers dislike dealing with bureaucracy--you'll save your intern's time and effort and sanity by dealing with these issues.3.  If your interns' time is so much less valuable than your employees' time that you cannot spare significant employee time to helping the intern with what he is doing (in the same way they would help another employee), don't hire an intern.In terms of picking an intern, often you have to actively seek them out to be successful, especially if you're looking for the kind of hacker that doesn't go around applying to every internship he sees.  For example, if your company makes very significant use of open source software, you can look through those open source projects for potential interns.