The importance of money and the size of a pay packet should not be overestimated when recruiting, according to the boss of a global online talent community.

“Everybody thinks money is a motivator in hiring talent, and it’s so much less important than people think,” Joel Spolsky, chief executive of programming Q&A site Stack Overflow, visited by 20m programmers worldwide monthly, and generates revenue through a job site, said last month.

“Right now we’re probably paying programmers more than we need,” he told attendees on the first day of the TRULondon recruiting unConference, pointing to a survey on the website in which 93.5% of users said that given the choice of two jobs, they would happily go for one with a 10% lower salary than another, if it was better in other ways.

“When you go to a workplace and people are complaining ‘we’re not paid enough’… there are five other things that are wrong”, he concluded.