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Why Your Startup Can’t Find Developers
- dschiptsov 13y agoBecause bright people will never end up in a sweatshop?)
- grantlmiller 13y agoI would add that the low barriers to entry to become a startup founder (and to raise several hundred thousand dollars) leaves us with few great people to be employees (this goes for engineers & business folks alike).
- greenyoda 13y agoNot all great developers want to run a startup. The founder of a startup has to do all sorts of stuff that most developers don't like doing: management, marketing, endless meetings with investors, etc.
- seiji 13y agoplus getting 90% of the exit money while the employees who built the company get to split 10% 200 ways (all of the non-funding allotments).
- edwinnathaniel 13y ago$100k-$120k for undergrad? that's crazy. I guess this is one of the reasons why Facebook and Twitter decided to open offices in Vancouver _specifically_ to hire undergrad. Undergrad salary here can be half of that.
- quaffapint 13y agoIt does say 'In silicon valley'. But even after price adjust, that does seem WAY too high for a junior developer.
- terramars 13y agoi can vouch that facebook was recently hiring people from Cornell for ~$100-$120 starting + $30 signing bonus ($50 if you interned) that admittedly you had to return if you quit in less than a year for any reason that wasn't explicitly their fault.
- onedev 13y agoYep FB offers undergrads from some universities 100-120k, plus 50-100k signing bonus, plus $100-125k in stocks from what I've heard.
- michaelochurch 13y agoThose numbers, in general, are high. You might get that if you get them into a bidding war. In general, a publicly traded company is not going to give that kind of package to an undergrad. Maybe $110-120k in salary, but the stock amount is more likely to be around $80k vesting over 4 years.
- onedev 13y agoI don't think anyone else gives $100k signing bonus, so yes the numbers aren't representative of the whole but it hints at what an undergraduate can command out of college. I'd say $100k salary is very typical, as are the RSUs (vesting over 4 years as you said).
- buckbova 13y ago> Why Your Startup Can’t Find Developers Relying on recruiters. Recruiters are notorious for buzzword searching and resume stacking. And Googler's probably don't respond to interview requests because they don't trust or respect recruiters (just a hunch). Find other ways to advertise your jobs, like old fashoined networking, message boards, social media, etc.
- takrupp 13y agoI've found that start up founders try to rely on themselves too much for recruiting (really sourcing) and marketing. Just hire someone and take it off your plate - you are more useful raising money, building product and getting users. Recruiting is important but can by very time intensive. Define clear goals, values and process and then Hire someone to do it. Let them fill the funnel through boards, social media, recruiters or other marketplaces (cough Hired.com cough). You and your team can then evaluate and hire.
- JakeStone 13y agoI'll second that one. I'm actively searching to get me and my family out of TX back to the SF Bay area. I'm a .NET guy, so I know the deck's a little stacked against me, but dealing with recruiters is rapidly becoming mind numbing. "Must have 2 years of T-SQL." Ok, I've written my share of SQL for ASP.NET and desktop apps on MSSQL Server. Add it up and it's about 4 years, plus the last year or so with EF. Here's my resume. "We can't send this to our client, you don't have T-SQL." Umm... SQL on MSSQL Server _is_ T-SQL. "Now you're lying to me." Ok, this is where our professional relationship ends. Thanks for your time. Then there's that job where I pitched in on some Java stuff that needed doing. Similar to C#, I can grok. We got that code out the door, and it's still working. Yay. "Hello! I want to tell you about an opportunity requiring 10 years of J2EE and [insert other Java tech buzzwords]." <sigh> I'm not a Java guru anywhere near that level. Let me rewrite that project so Java isn't on there anymore. Doesn't matter. My resume is now in some resume bank that farms it out to non-perceiving headhunting companies. Yeah, I'm getting a little cranky now. I'll stop.
- Romoku 13y ago
- michaelochurch 13y agoFind, or entice to join after an offer is made? Two different processes. The first can be solved by getting one's name out there: writing a tech blog, hosting meetups, coming up with novel perks. The second is harder and more objective. Most startups give mediocre salaries, but people know that. There are two things about startups that damage them, though. 1. Low equity. Once the VCs get involved, equity allotments become so low that their motivational effect is pretty much nil. I feel like the current culture of startup mediocrity has a lot to do with the fact that seriously skilled people aren't interested in the laughable equity amounts they get in post-A startups, unless they can treat it as a 9-to-5 day job and have almost unlimited autonomy. 2. Low autonomy, which surprises people. You're more able to have a global effect on the company in a startup-- that's pretty much impossible for a big corporation-- but the amount of day-to-day personal autonomy people have over their own work and careers is often less in the startups. Big companies can't compete on options and usually pay market (because they set the market rate) so the good ones give their good people decent projects. A lot of startups have micromanagement and, worse yet, an increasing number that have that MBA douchebag culture are popping up (and if you work for a startup with MBA douchebag culture, you get the worst of both worlds between big and small companies; the risk and division-of-labor uncertainty of a small company, usually run by someone too unstable and arrogant to last more than 6 months-- which isn't even that hard to do-- in a large one). New York is full of startups run by MBA types who couldn't hack it in real finance but made enough contacts to raise VC. I'm pretty sure I'd have no trouble hiring good developers. I'd run open allocation as far as possible, and I wouldn't give out any equity, but replace that with a far more generous profit-sharing program. There wouldn't be far-off payouts with messy tax implications as with options, but bonuses would be 200-500% in good years.
- yid 13y ago> I'm pretty sure I'd have no trouble hiring good developers. Honest question -- you have a bit of a reputation, I'd say mainly from your Hacker News rants. Do you think that those will help or hurt your recruitment prospects?
- michaelochurch 13y ago
- tunesmith 13y agoIs that really the salary structure in the bay area these days? It used to be that a senior developer's salary was easily 2x a junior developer's salary, but I thought senior and lead developer salaries were in the $130-$150k range in the bay area, at least for java developers.
- michaelochurch 13y agoThe senior:junior salary ratio is higher, I think, elsewhere. In New York, for example, junior developers tend be around $75-95k while senior (5-10 years) are $140-200k (wide range). In the Valley, I'd guess that those numbers are $90-110k and $130-150k. The low end is higher and the high end is lower, in the Valley. One thing New York has that the Valley doesn't (unless you're a nationally-known entity, like Jeff Dean) is people making $250k+ just writing code. That does mean you're probably in finance, but it's better than having to go into management if that's not what you want to do.
- seanmcdirmid 13y agoThere are plenty of people (beyond Jeff Dean), who make $200k+ writing code in the bay area. I'm not really sure where you are getting your data from, but $150k is actually a bit low for a senior developer.
- lportion 13y agoIs anyone in the UK earning anywhere near this amount of money? I'm coming up to ten years as a senior dev and I earn way less than the lower band of that Junior salary.
- randlet 13y agoI am always a little bit flabbergasted by the developer salary numbers that get thrown around on HN but I think that the cost of living in NY & SF may skew the numbers higher than they are in the rest of the world. edit: I am Canadian for reference and just Googling around a bit suggests anecdotaly that salaries are in the $50k-$100k range for most developers.
- Cookingboy 13y agoThe author raised the point that very often young founders only want to hire someone in their own image. I believe it's more of a problem of those young founders have never worked with anyone who are NOT of similar backgrounds than they are. In some cases just spending a couple years at a bigger company with a more diverse workforce would completely shatter the "most productive engineers are 20 something CS grads who can code 80 hours a week on Red Bull" stereotype. Sure those people may be motivated by different things in life at that point, but one quality of being a good leader is the ability to gather different people with different backgrounds and motivations and still utilize them to the max and achieve the common goal. A company that's run purely on Kool-aid may have the short-term "enthusiasm" but is not going to survive the ups and downs of a long journey.
- mratzloff 13y agoEfficiency is not lines of code produced, it's the experience to choose the right technologies and approach the first time: when to choose a stable, behind-the-curve technology and when to take a calculated risk; when to do something that's good enough and when to do spend more time to make it robust.
- drakaal 13y agoHere I thought the problem was we were in Phoenix, and we had hired all the Python Developers in the area. (with a few exceptions for those who work at NASA)
- diek 13y agoPhoenix has a pretty thriving tech community. I'm in Chandler, and in the last week I have gone to a Cassandra meetup at GoDaddy and am going to an Amazon cloud meetup at the Amazon offices in downtown Tempe tonight. I run into Ruby and Python devs all over the place. The problem is, like this article touches on, the jobs advertisements I've seen for Python seem to be written for the "hipster" crowd (I've even seen some with "ninja", etc in the title). Then they end up wanting to pay $30k less than the competition, so most people I know chose to go work at Intel, Freescale, Microchip, one of the aerospace companies... somewhere that has a professional atmosphere, pays well, and you get to work on interesting tech.
- drakaal 13y agoAt the risk of getting flamed as an arrogant bastard. Which I am. The python talent in Phoenix is for the most part not talent. The guys who want $75K would not fetch $50k in San Jose, and the guys who want $100K would not fetch $70k in San Jose. I have been lucky to get some really great guys, but most of the guys are script kiddies who have never done anything hard, and are too high and mighty to learn to do the hard stuff. We aren't competing with LimeLight very often for tech talent. We are competing with Silicon Valley. Because unless you have roots in Phoenix, if you are talented you aren't staying here. I am very aware that if my guys wanted to leave Phoenix they would do well in Silicon Valley, and I'm very glad they choose to live here.
- rrouse 13y agoDoes the type of work you have not allow you to go outside of Phoenix, e.g. remote work?
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- vosper 13y ago> On the other hand startup CEOs tends to be prejudiced against developers who work for less cutting-edge large companies like Dell, Accenture, or Salesforce. Mickiewicz points out that Uber’s CTO was hired from VMware. In what world is VMWare not cutting edge? Sure, they're a big successful company, but that's because they solve a complex problem. Also, hiring a CTO from a large tech company is nothing like hiring an ground-level engineer - there's no way VMware's CTO spent his days coding before he went to Uber.
- Patrick_Devine 13y agoI'm not really sure what the point the author was trying to make. vCenter is not a cutting edge piece of software when you compare it to modern cloud offerings like AWS or even OpenStack. vCenter is, however, very good at what it does, and in many ways does a lot of things that new cloudy offerings will probably never do. One thing I can say about Thuan, having worked for him at VMware for a long time, he always tried pushing things. My guess is Uber saw that and figured he'd make a good fit.
- kjackson2012 13y agoHaving actually worked on vCenter, I can tell you that it is at best adequate for what it does, but the code is amongst the shittiest I have ever worked on.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 13y ago"I know one well-known startup who has been trying to fill a role for over four months, and has gone through two dozen candidates, simply because the founder mandates 80-hour workweeks.” I'm rather surprised that this wasn't a heading topic on its own: Don't Expect People To Work 80-Hour Workweeks. Bleary, burned-out, sleep-deprived, stimulant-addled engineers do not produce decent code no matter how many hours you make them stay at their desks. Obviously. You bloody idiot. (...The startup founder, I mean, not the article writer.) Although really this folds into "You’ve Got To Pay If You Want To Play" to make a larger point: If You Want Good Employees, Don't Treat Them Like Shit. Another of those blindingly obvious things that employers all over the world just can't seem to wrap their little heads around.
- Swizec 13y agoLeading to people like me writing books explaining these painfully obvious things that nobody seems to know. (https://leanpub.com/nightowls https://leanpub.com/nightowls) Most of my readers who write in say something to the effect of "Oh mai god, my <superior>[1] needs to read this!" I'm not sure if they ever do pass it on, but that's the feedback I get :) [1] <superior> is usually a mother, a wife/girlfriend, or boss.
- mratzloff 13y ago> How you can help: > Programmer? I want to buy you a drink! > Especially if you don't work at night My brain seems to prefer the afternoon, and as I've gotten older I can't work much at night anymore. After my brain has been fully engaged in a problem for hours at night it can be really difficult to shut it off and go to sleep, even if I'm exhausted.
- pseut 13y agoGive meditation a try for falling asleep. But if you decide to look into it, try guided meditation first (i.e. a recording). Otherwise, you'll just sit there, with your eyes closed, thinking about work.
- 13y ago
- bithive123 13y agoWhile I was reading this I kept thinking that although the points are sound it fails to point out the upside -- that making these kinds of mistakes also effectively signals the presence of undesirable traits in the leadership.
- kps 13y agoAnd consequently, the author is doing developers a disservice by telling employers how to pretend not to suck. Or would be, if there were the slightest possibility of them listening.
- toddmorey 13y agoDevelopers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause. They want believe that their work will have real meaning; real impact. This is not instead of a good salary, this is in addition to. But it's an important addition and often overlooked. It's why among all of the food delivery service startups recently, I have my eye on SpoonRocket. They are on a passionate mission to provide healthy meals at the same price and speed of fast food. That is something to get fired up about. That could have a huge impact. That could change the diet of millions of people. Please, don't settle for a mission statement. Please don't stop at the point of a good idea and early revenue. Have a mission—a real one. It's not just to romance investors or customers. The biggest impact you'll see is in your people.
- eli_gottlieb 13y agoSemi-agree. On the one hand, Working for a Cause is probably the most fundamental motivating factor behind work-ethic and one of the most powerful motivating factors for people in general. On the other hand, you often need to take a step back and ask if your project really is a capital-C Cause. The vast majority of economically necessary work, after all, simply is not. Even double-digit percentage improvements in the reliability of cloud computing nodes, for instance, are not a Cause. They are a very economically significant piece of technological development that can make anyone who develops them a bunch of revenue. They are advantageous work that makes the world run a little bit better. But they're not actually Saving the World or Bringing X to the Masses or anything emotional and epic like that. Worse, attempting to invoke big, epic emotional motivations when your work doesn't really have a Cause to justify those feelings just cheapens the entire trope of Causes, makes it come off as a nasty fiction told to unwitting dupes to make them allow further exploitation than ever before. Fly your flag if you've got one, but don't feel ashamed to admit you might not have one.
- michaelochurch 13y agoDevelopers—the good ones—don't want to work for you. They want to work for a cause. Disagree strongly. Solving interesting problems, improving my skill set and my career, and doing good work for the people immediately around me is enough for me. Negative cause (e.g. working for an unethical company, or in the war industry) would be a problem; but the difference between neutral and positive means little to me. I'm older, though (30). When I get to ownership level, perhaps starting my own thing, I'll care a lot about macroscopics. However, most of us start out as employees and there's more than enough rewarding in mastering the micro-scale stuff. As long as I'm not being asked to do anything wrong, I'm not going to get emotionally involved in how a company affects the world until I'm an owner; until that point, it's just a distraction. Macroscopics, in my observation, just mean more Kool-aid; and there are just as many good people at companies doing less sexy (macroscopically speaking) but still important things. In fact, I worked (briefly) for one of those "change the world" startups-- a New York ed-tech that's devolved into being a sidekick to mainstream publishers-- and it was all marketing bullshit; the rank-and-file believed in it, but the executives were the most unethical people I've ever met (and that includes drug dealers).
- lzecon 13y agoHiring people that come from a similar background as founders is the biggest problem on that list. It's part of the reason there's a serious lack of diversity in tech and startups today. Truly recognizing that people unsimilar to you are capable, smart, and successful is a learned view. One that founders may not have had time to develop because they have to be so focused on themselves to start a company. Once you develop bad hiring habits they become part of a start-up's culture, making a lot of people very resistant to doing something differently. For instance, if all you're doing is interviewing and not looking at the bigger picture, you may not even realize you're doing something wrong.
- tnuc 13y agoI've had interviews where I basically get asked "Are you fun to drink beer with?", but with more words. And all I can think is "What a fucking waste of time this is." Hire the people that you need to get the job done, not because they have the latest in hipster underwear. My Requirements for hiring; 1. They can do the job well. 2. I can understand what they are saying. 3. They have a bath/shower at least once a week whether they need it or not. The amount of people who fit into categories two and three is surprising high. These are the people I desperately want to hire but I can't.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- LordHumungous 13y ago>not because they have the latest in hipster underwear. Lol
- CmonDev 13y ago"These are the people I desperately want to hire but I can't." I desperately want to buy a 3-bedroom in London for £20k but I can't.
- greenyoda 13y ago"New graduates can command $100,000 a year in Silicon Valley. Hired has found that bumping the offer up to $120,000 gives you access to 30% more candidates." This is something many people on HN have been saying for a long time in response to the question of whether the US needs to create more H-1B visas: companies have a hard time finding qualified employees because they don't want to pay enough. It's nice to see the numbers quantified in this way (even though this is only anecdotal evidence from a single recruiting firm).
- JeffJenkins 13y agoPlaying devil's advocate: those people are taking some job. If a Startup A hires an engineer for more money preventing Startup B from hiring them they needs to fill their position and may not be able to find a person. Of course, one of the signs of a real domestic skills shortage is rapidly increasing salaries as companies fight for too few people, so the fact that that isn't happening means there probably isn't a shortage.
- rhizome 13y agoMaybe the execs are having trouble raising the money required to hire these people. Another thought is that the VCs are putting arbitrary limits on $/head.
- greenyoda 13y agoIf they're setting arbitrary caps on salary, then they're not playing by the rules of the free market, and they shouldn't be whining about a "shortage". (I can't find someone who is willing to sell me a new luxury car for $10,000. Is that a problem? Is there a shortage of BMWs?)
- rhizome 13y agoThat's exactly what they're doing. It's a lie of omission regarding the execs' price sensitivity.
- danso 13y ago> “Hiring Google engineers is generally a really bad idea. If you work at Google you have access to an entire set of tools and technologies that you won't have in a smaller startup environment.” This seems like a sensible and underrated assertion. I have no idea if it's more true for Google than other large startups...but yeah, great companies have great toolsets...that's in part why they're great. But that infrastructure isn't available elsewhere and an engineer's reliance on that isn't easily tested. It seems akin to my experience in journalism, that some very accomplished reporters have had very accomplished support staff (researchers, fact-checkers, handlers), but may flounder when forced to do that work themselves.
- rgbrgb 13y agoI wouldn't go so far as to say that large companies have great toolsets, but they're definitely pretty different from what's on the outside. I've spent a ton of time learning internal tools and that knowledge won't transfer when I leave my company. Frameworks are different, infrastructure is different, and the process and scope of responsibilities is different. Building something inside a large company is a pretty different skill from making it from scratch. That's my experience anyway.
- megaframe 13y agoI had this problem when I switched jobs... so I built the tools I needed from my last job (roughly from memory) fixing the things that had annoyed me.
- kps 13y agoThe photo is certainly appropriate.
- 7Figures2Commas 13y agoI'll add a reason: you're looking for someone you don't need. Not every startup is Google. A lot of companies have CRUD applications of minimal to modest complexity which, even if actively used, are nowhere close to facing performance and scalability barriers that would require deep technical expertise. These startups don't necessarily need "engineers" with computer science backgrounds, but that's what many of them are searching for.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoQuite true. A lot of companies get it in their heads that they need "ninjas" or "gurus" or "rock stars", in other words world class talent. But why would a top 1%, or even 10%, developer work for a company that is using boring technologies in a boring business that pays only the industry average? Actual top developers are going to find truly exciting places to work and they're going to be paid well above market rates. If you need to hire somebody you need to be realistic. A while ago it used to be possible to find well above average developers for almost any role, but today the industry is too mature for that sort of thing to happen.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 13y agoExactly... There's very few people left who are getting paid under market. Google alone has 900 recruiters who scour the entire world with an open checkbook for the best talent, while offering some of the highest comp packages in the industry.
- Iftheshoefits 13y agoThis is true even for many software development roles at places like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. Equally true is the corollary that the interview process for these positions is laughably out of sync with the duties for the positions to be filled. Very few software engineering roles actually require "deep" technical expertise. What you describe is pointing out yet another way in which the corporate cliche of "we only hire the best" is so pervasive.
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- kumarski 13y agowell done.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- logical42 13y agoGreat analogy!
- RougeFemme 13y ago<<Hiring in your own image For most/many founders this is closely related to "hire people you would want to hang out with on Sundays", another common hiring "mistake/tip". The hiring pool shrinks considerably and diversity of perspective/ideas and any other attribute you value likely goes out the window.
- rorrr2 13y agoIt's because you don't pay enough. End of discussion.
- pastProlog 13y agoCompanies put up barriers for applicants, then wonder why they can't find anyone. A big thing for me is references. I have good references but I don't like to bother people. These are often from bosses who I worked with four years before and have only had sporadic contact with since, I don't want to be asking for favors every other contact. Some companies, in e-mails before I even talk to anyone want me to send them references. I mean it's not like people ask for references as the last step before making an offer. So what I have to do is when I'm looking for work, contact all my references, make sure my phone # etc. for them is current, and ask if they'll give me a reference - they always say yes. I figure I'm then good for the next few weeks/months in terms of that. But it also means I basically have to make the major commitment of saying I want another job. Then I go looking and look until I find one. If people were not so free with asking for references before I even talk to someone on the phone even, I could look for work at my leisure. If a headhunter contacted me, even if I wasn't looking, I could talk to the company. If they said they were almost set with the decision and just wanted some references, then I could do that as a last step. Really it limits when I am available to hear offers. I am only open for offers every 2-3 years, in the weeks and months I am looking for a new job. I'm not open 18 months into a job, because I'm not going to hassle 3 old bosses for one company which hasn't even decided if they want to do a phone interview with me yet. Of course I can always say I don't give references until later in the process, but usually it's some HR drone handing me a sheet and telling me to fill it out. If I don't put contact for references they tell me I should fill that in. It's like I'm sloppy for not bringing contact information, or have something to hide in not wanting to hand out reference information freely. People can say "tell 'them' so-and-so" but there's no them, there's an HR information sheet and some HR drone only peripherally connected with the hiring process. It's not a big deal for me, it just limits my availability for talking to a 4-6 week cycle out of every 100-150 weeks. Companies throw up these barriers against themselves, then wonder why they can't find people. There's other things as well. I work from 9 to 5. But companies want me to come in at 10 AM, I wait around 30 minutes for the first person to talk to me, then they want me to talk to someone else etc. Then two people who I have to talk to before getting hired are busy or not there. Also, if I schedule one a vacation day during the week, my current company might wonder what I'm doing. How am I supposed to make time for these long, drawn out interviews during the work week? Then of course there is specialization. Wanting someone who knows a language like C++ is fine. Even wanting someone who knows OpenGL is fine. Or even more specifically, OpenGL ES if OpenGL is too general. But then they want people who know who Objective C for Apple hooks into C++ with OpenGL ES, as opposed to someone who has maybe been doing Java and JNI hooks into C++ with OpenGL ES. Or if that is not specific enough, then something even more specific. Or it might say BSCS required. So if you're a few classes short - tough luck. The entire interview process is geared towards company's establishing their dominance in the relationship from the get-go. You go hassle your old bosses, asking them to put in a good word for you. You come here when you're supposed to be working. And so on. Companies throw up these barriers as if there is a huge excess of good programmers they can pick and choose from. When that pool dries up, do they think, gee, maybe we should change how we interview? Of course not, they just complain how they can't find talented developers, and lobby Washington so that foreign programmers don't have to hop through the immigration hoops everyone else has to. They don't see a lack of talented programmers, they see a lack of a large pool of talented programmers they can put over a barrel. Because otherwise they would have changed how they do interviewing. While they only have the option of griping about lack of talent, we have options beyond griping about interviews. With the cloud, growth of mobile and app stores etc., as everyone says, now it's easier than ever to get your own personal (or partnered) income stream going. Hopefully mine grows to the point where the spectre about potentially having to go on a job interview ever again diminishes to nothing. I dislike enough the more easy interviews about whether I will consult on a project for a few months.
- marincounty 13y agoWhen In was younger I didn't trust people older than I. As, I got older I became one of those people. In my twenties, I had absolutely so patience for computers. I felt like I was wasting my time looking into a computer terminal. To be absolutely honest--all I cared about was getting laid--oh, and a little bit of beer money. As I got older, my physicality changed. I now cherish the time I can spend in front of a terminal. I still believe the best minds are kids in their twenties, but don't rule out 40, and 50 year olds. Their is a few exceptions though; I would never hire a 'know it all'--young, or old. Eighty hour weeks? Fine, but let them work from home.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- snorkel 13y agoAnother disconnect is start ups tend to advertise "team lead" roles where you have the responsibilities of a manager, developer, and operations all at once while paid entry level salary. No thanks, but nice try.
- debacle 13y agoI think this is a result of fear and marketing - if you have team leads, then you can still advertize a flat corporate structure, and startups are afraid to offer the management title because it means giving up control, which is a bit crazy - you'll give up 15% of your company for 100k, but not a bit of control to a manager who is just trying to do what he can for your company.
- snowwrestler 13y agoIt's trivially easy to find developers. It's very difficult to find developers who are competent and responsible, let alone rock stars.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wyclif 13y agoWhy can't your startup find developers? 1. You want to be stingy on salary and benefits, and avoid paying above market rates. You quibble over meeting trivial salary requests. Your company doesn't have proper review processes and doesn't give raises frequently enough. You don't provide equity in your company to your most valued employees 2. Your interview process sucks. You hand off the candidate to 5 different people, the interview lasts all day, you require too many interviews before making an offer, you have puzzle questions, your interviewer is non-technical and has never used the technologies you're hiring for, you rely on agency recruiters, you and your co-founders aren't involved in hiring, you don't spend enough time on hiring, it takes weeks for you to get back to candidates, it takes days for you to make an offer, you forget about scheduled interviews, your people doing the interviews aren't at work the day candidates have scheduled to come in, you ask inappropriate questions during interviews, you lie to candidates during interviews, interviewing is combat and not collaborative 3. You hire for "culture fit" which means you only hire people that fit whatever your version of the status quo is. You signal that older people or non-hipsters need not apply. You discriminate against people old enough to have spouses and children. Your office has a culture offensive to women and/or minorities. You have the words "rock star" or "ninja" in your description. You prefer "yes men" over free thinkers. You hire only people who are like you 4. You demand that every employee commute to your offices because you have an antiquated "asses in seats" busywork mentality or a "no remote work" policy. You treat remote employees as if they are second-class employees. You demand relocation to the Bay area or it's a 'no hire'. You don't provide relocation assistance. You don't help with visas 5. You require educational credentials for jobs that don't and shouldn't require them. You set up qualification barriers for great candidates. You don't respect candidates who have experience outside of your specific technology stack 6. You have a toxic office environment. Your offices are shabby and "Class B." You make people work in grey cubicles, Office Space-style. You don't provide catered lunch. You pay no attention to, and invest nothing in, office equipment. You don't provide up-to-date equipment and developer hardware 7. You require ridiculous hours that make work/life balance out of the question. You don't offer generous holiday time. You tell people they cannot take holiday time because it's "crunch time." You resent employees who take holiday time they are entitled to
- kamaal 13y ago
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- BrainScraps 13y agoYou can't find developers because everyone in the Greater SF Bay Area is looking for the perfectly seasoned developer that has deep experience in their given stack. It reminds me of a grownup having Play-Doh time with toddlers. The grownup takes the time to make some recognizable object (a dog, a human figure, an ice cream cone) and then the toddler starts grabbing for it. This is how many young companies act with talent. They don't want to invest in people, they don't want to bring on interns or junior folks. They want high-output plug-and-play rockstar senior devs. And they want them on their terms. Some of you might see things differently, but that's the impression I'm getting from all of the listings I'm seeing in my job search (for a junior dev role.) There are some companies that are making the long-term investment in finding the less refined talent and developing it, but they are hard to find. I hope other people see this trend and that I'm not just entirely saturated in the pungent juice of sour grapes.
- chrissnell 13y agoWell said. If properly picked and hired, junior-level inexperienced engineers can be a gold mine. Employers need to retune their hiring process to value intellect and potential over straight-up experience and know-it-all-ness. This is a tricky proposition, since many hiring managers are terribly inexperienced with hiring and don't know how to do much more than coding challenges, "explain to me how DNS works" questions, etc. These hiring managers are trying to compare their own skills against this new hires and they will reject the hire if it doesn't match up. Huge fail. The gold miner hiring manager, however, asks more open-ended questions to probe the intellect of the hire. The gold miner doesn't expect a "full-stack hacker" and is tolerant of "I don't know" responses. The more important question: what problems has this person solved and how did they solve them? If you want to see how to hire and structure your team, a good example to follow is the military. Consider the typical platoon of Infantry soldiers: you have one senior leader/manager, one senior subject matter expert and all-round ass-kicker, four SME-and-ass-kickers-in-training, and about 36 junior guys who are there to learn. The junior guys make a fraction of what the senior SME makes and their skill level is also fractional. No worries. They are there to learn, develop, and do their best. Treat them well, not like slaves, , respect them, and develop them. Most of them will leave after a few years for a new job elsewhere. That's okay. You got something from them (work) and they got something from you (experience). You, the leader, will identify a few promising individuals amongst them and groom them to be SMEs in training, giving them the added responsibility and pay increases that they deserve. Like an Infantry platoon, your team will eventually hire experienced SMEs from outside the company to bring in fresh skills and ideas. If this team building is done right, you can build a loyal, organic organization that grows and trains it's own and you can do it for about the same cost as going out and hiring three or four absolute badasses that will probably leave as soon as the next shiny, well-paying thing comes along.
- dobbsbob 13y agoJust go through an open source mailing list and find people who seem to know what they are doing. Somewhere they probably have a consultant page, or git profile of work. Done, hire them remotely. If they need extra people tell them to find somebody they know who's competent and hire them too. No office, no recruiters, no insurance/rent to pay and no investment needed to buy hardware.
- teddyh 13y agoAs is common, Joel said it all back in 2000: “Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?” http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000050.html
- orenbarzilai 13y agoanother interesting question is how to find the good candidates. We use the usual ways: personal connections, head hunting agencies etc. we have also started to target top talents on meetup groups, hackathons & local technical bloggers. If you have another creative & efficient way to find candidates please share.
- Matt_Mickiewicz 13y agoUnfortunately, Hired isn't in Tel Aviv yet, otherwise I'd love to help!
- rosspanda 13y agoI verbally accepted a job at a UK based start-up once, it was 3 days per week as that was all they could afford at the time. It was not until i got the contract that it stated a minimum of 40 hours in the 3 Days, so they wanted me to work full time hours in the 3 days for 3 days pay. I turned it down. I still see the founder around and he is still looking for dev's.
- polymatter 13y agoWait, so he was asking for 13 hour 20 minute days?
- rprospero 13y agoI played D&D with a guy who did forty hours in two, twenty-hour days. He'd arrive at midnight, work until eight PM, then sleep (on site) until 4 AM, then work again until midnight. From what I heard, the sleep was more of a legal fiction to get around OSHA regulations than actual sleep. I guess it paid decently enough, since he never complained about, but he pretty much slept for the entire following day. He never knew until Sunday which two days he would be in, so scheduling gaming time was a pain.
- taude 13y agoBack in the mid-90s when just out of school, working at MSFT, a buddy and I calculated that we were making about $15/hour after calculating all the long hours we worked (it wasn't 80 hours, but 60 was quite common). ...then the dot-com boom came and we all went and worked elsewhere. Which was good because our stock options never went up much after 1999 (to justify the salary anyway). BTW, it was still one of the best jobs I've ever had working for someone else.
- nasalgoat 13y agoIt's nice to see the fallacy of options is finally sinking in, and people are refusing to take a pay cut for the mystical unicorn of a fast exit.
- robomartin 13y agoI'll tell you how to find the best people. It's not easy, but it works. For a while I tried a very simple policy: You come in when you want and go home when you want. Take as long as you want for lunch. Got errands to run that are important to you? Don't ask me, go do it. Need to go out of town to see a concert in the middle of the week? Have a good time. Bring pictures. In general, everyone in this group was allowed to be an adult and manage their time as they wished. There was no such thing as vacation time or sick time accounting. If you need time off, take it. The only requirement was that the work get done, get done well and on time (within a schedule that was discussed by all and agreed-upon). That's it. What happened? Well, a few people abused it. They tended to be in the younger end of the spectrum and perhaps thought this was a license to fuck off and get paid. They didn't last long. The rest of this small group was great. They got their work done without a lot of supervision, were happy and actually went out of their way to push the project forward. It was an excellent experience and a great way, as far as I am concerned, to filter the idiots from the professionals. This isn't easy to manage. That seems like an oxymoron. You are not actively managing people yet you say that it is hard to manage? Well, the problem is it takes a little bit of time to settle into a stable state. Every addition or change to the team creates a step change that needs to be allowed to settle. Once you have a stable team it pretty much runs itself and it runs well. Until then it can be a little chaotic. I've done this once and was happy with the results. When you are under the gun and trying to put together a new team it is easier to go with a more conventional top-down approach and pretty much dictate what each person needs to do, when, how, etc. Not the best environment but sometimes you have no choice. That said, in general terms I firmly believe in making people responsible for an area or reaching a certain milestone and pretty much leaving them alone. They should come to you if they need help or guidance. Other than that, if you are working with professionals there should not be any need to hover over them every day to see how they are doing.
- jtbigwoo 13y ago>> Founders typically look for candidates who have a similar educational background to themselves and live within 25 miles of their office. I go back to the stories of google rejecting mid-level management applicants because their college GPA's were 3.0 instead of 4.0 or they went to Georgia Tech instead of M.I.T. Seems like everybody makes these same mistakes. http://www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions-that-used-to-make-geniuses-feel-dumb-2012-11?op=1 http://www.businessinsider.com/15-google-interview-questions...
- BigChiefSmokem 13y agoI've given up on salary. I work as a W2 contractor (and 1099 at very high rates) and I always let my bosses know if they want me here after 5pm then they better be ready for me to charge it. I might have to pay for my own benefits but I have full control over my hours this way. It's a nice compromise between salary and freelance, even if I do have to deal with a recruiting agency (just don't work with mom-n-pop recruiters and you'll be okay).
- avty 13y agoI know recent grads making close to $200k (everything included) simply by working at Google...
- gboudrias 13y agoStartups can't find (good) developers because they don't understand how high the demand is. Unless you're in the big league with the big money, you will have to settle.
- sedev 13y ago"Too many twentysomething founders look for employees just like themselves. “So you discriminate against anyone who is in their 30s or 40s or has a family,” says Mickiewicz. “But the most talented and experienced people will be in their 30s and 40s." It's always a relief to see an article like this not just calling out age bias, but putting it at the top. There are other good points in the article too, but it's important to note that Bay Area tech culture skews heavily towards white dudes in their 20s. There are plenty of people pushing back against the "white dudes" part, but we could use a little more pushing back against the "in their 20s." Especially since someone who's 35 today was born in 1978 and was turning 12 in 1990, right around the elbow of the explosive growth curve of home-available computing. You could have maybe made an argument that someone who was 35 in 1995, born in 1960, was a bit late to the game to profoundly grok the web then (I think that argument's wrong, but you could make it without being laughed out of the room). But in 2013, a 35-year-old engineer is someone you want to look for because that's probably going to be someone with perspective and a mature skill set. There are plenty of smart 20-year-olds out there, yet there is no substitute good for experience.
- consultant23522 13y agoThere's a local startup here that I would absolutely love to work for, except for one thing. I have a lot of experience in their technology stack and some domain knowledge. They won't hire be because I'm not willing/interested in churning out 60 hour work weeks every single week. So.. alas, double-lose.
- NadaAldahleh 13y agoGoogle stopped asking questions like "how many golf balls fit into a plane", but they didn't stop asking puzzles and programming trivia questions. If you know how to ask these questions, and what insight you're looking for from them, they can be very insightful. Here's the different types of questions and puzzles you should ask, how, and what insight to get from them: https://www.sandglaz.com/blog_posts/104-How-to-interview-and-hire-junior-developers https://www.sandglaz.com/blog_posts/104-How-to-interview-and...