That doesn't really matter if in the PHP and .NET world you have to filter through 10,000 people to find somebody of the same median grade as you'd find in haskell/python/ruby/clojure.
I'm exaggerating for effect, but the take-home here is that if you don't have unlimited resources you need to have some way to differentiate and filter from the guys offering the sweet vacation packages and steady career options.
How exactly are you differentiating and filtering for higher quality people if not by technologies and developer freedom?
Do you have nice offices ala 37signals?
Are you an advocate of developer 'rights' such as Joel has been known to enumerate?
Why exactly should a dev tolerate using VisualStudio and Windows for the sake of working on your company?
Exactly. I know a recent startup that did their initial build-out in Lisp. Then the CTO left, for whatever reason, and then the remaining leadership team seemed to decide to rewrite the stack in Java. They probably thought, "Hey it will be easier to find people." Yes, it will be easier to find bad people. Are their great Java people? Of course. But the total number of resumes you're going to have to wade through, and the ratio of bad to good, is going to be much higher with Java than with Lisp.
Lots of things that you or I think are unique and special can be modeled as commodities. VCs model startups as commodities when they're preparing forecasts. Recruiters model high powered executives as commodities when they're preparing an interview pipeline. Like all abstractions, it's sometimes useful, and sometimes misleading. Certainly it's nothing worth getting excited about as a passing comment by the author.
I'm not quite sure that VCs model startups as commodities, considering that you get these huge pile-ons where everyone wants to invest in Twitter or Zynga but nobody wants to invest in the random startup your roommate founded. If startups actually behaved as commodities, brand names wouldn't matter so much.
Ditto high-powered executives - if they were actually commodities, executive pay wouldn't skyrocket through the roof.
You're missing the point. There are times when it's useful to model things as commodities, and times when it's not. Here, you see Union Square Ventures modeling startups as commodities:
but they would be the first to tell you that their investments are not treated as commodities when they're deciding on whether to provide follow-on investment.
Even traditional commodities - say, apples - are treated as commodities when they're being bought and sold in bushels. But when you go to pack your lunch, suddenly, you're inspecting for ripeness, bruises, etc.
Uh oh. "Programmers are a commodity" again.