Here’s another insight: let your developers grow. If you know they have potential, then hire them regardless if they have the appropriate experience you’re looking for. No-one is born a kernel developer, an experienced mod_perl developer, a Java developer with 5 years of experience, or a C/C++ systems programmer. But many people who are fresh out of college or even high school, and who like to program for fun, are capable of becoming that by being given an appropriate chance.
On the IRC, I’ve been talking to someone who graduated in Electrical Engineering from a British university. Since he doesn’t want to work for the defence industry, he became a system administrator at a high school. Now he knows Perl and uses it extensively, but he doesn’t think he can get a more lucrative job as a Perl programmer (of which there’s a lot of demand for in England) because he doesn’t have a lot of mod_perl experience.
The reason people want experience is not because the people with experience are more productive, but because they know how to handle problems they encounter better. I don’t claim experience is not important. However, if you’re using a platform which is both reliable and predictable (“it just works”), give your programmers access to the Internet (with the Web, search engines, and IRC), to good searchable books, and to fellow developers who are more experienced than them in that platform, you can make sure they overcome such problems easily.
A different programmer, also from the UK, testified that while he started working with Perl and liked it and was good, no one was willing to give him a chance to grow. What is important about great hackers is not their knowledge or experience but their potential, attitude and autodidacticism. Given proper conditions they will accumulate a lot of knowledge, and surpass “medium-level” techs with a small amount of experience.
So when hiring, don’t ask them highly specialised questions. Otherwise, not only you won’t find too many “experienced developers”, but you will also reject many great developers, who will be excellent for what you do. Training a great hacker is cheap. But hiring an experienced mediocre programmer, is a bad idea.