In this recent post to his blog Brandon Savage offers a few suggestions on how you can "sell" your company to developers and get their best work out of them (because they want to do their best).

Lots of marketing students and sales professionals each year are required to read the book How To Win Friends And Influence People and for good reason: the book stands alone as one of the greatest books on sales ever. I decided to co-opt the title of that great book for this entry, because I want to talk about how to sell your company to developers '" particularly, how to get the best developers to do the best work and make your company, well, the best at whatever it is that you do.

He suggests five things that you can do to help your developers and company along the path to success:

• Developers are not interchangeable
• Use the best tools, whether or not they're free
• Nothing can make up for bad managers
• Technical people should be led by technical managers
• Identifying a developer's skills and placing that developer properly is crucial