Hiring (Superstar) Programmers

Ross Turk wrote, "We've been looking for senior engineers to work on SourceForge.net for a while now, and it's been a lot more difficult than it was a few years ago. Has the tech market improved so much that working on a prominent website is no longer enough to attract the best talent? Is everyone else running into the same problems, or is it just here in the Valley and other high-tech corridors?" This is a question that I've seen coming in a lot; the economy has not picked up everywhere — so how are other people handling this? Going outside the traditional Valley/Route 128 corridors? Outsourcing? And how do you find people — beyond just using job boards? (Full disclosure: That's our job board thingie, as you probably have figured out.) Or do job boards alone work? Some people have been swearing up and down that CraigsList works — and there's always something to be said for nepotism.

Re:Hubris!

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean the top 5% or 10%? The 'top' 90% is a lot of programmers.

Valley is too expensive

[sarchar]

Having moved from a relatively cheap area (Central Orlando) to northern California, I can say with experience how bad the difference is. A home that would cost 250k$ in Florida would cost 800k$ here. I was nearly reluctant to move out here having been offered 45k "straight out of college" in Florida I could afford a mortgage on a small 100-150k home, something I would have liked to have done. Now, in California even being paid in the upper 100k's, it's very difficult to afford a mortage. My point is this: "People in their 20s are more inclined to buy real estate now than they were 20 years ago, according to annual statistics from the U.S. Census bureau. In 2005, almost 26% of household heads under 25 years old owned their home, up from 17% in 1985. Homeownership rates for 25 to 29 year olds also increased over the past two decades, though not as sharply." (src: http://www.realestatejournal.com/buysell/tactics/2 0060802-meehan.html [realestatejournal.com]) A lot of really smart and educated people straight out of college, or at any age really, are looking to own property and do things with their income than pay for the silly cost of living in CA. A website (i.e., sf.net) can be run from almost literally anywhere so why run it from the most expensive place in the country? I think a lot more people with talent have the option to persue these things and therefore refuse to move to the valley.

Hire telecommuters

[GeneralTao]

Many folks just don't want to pick up and move some place where real estate prices are insane just so they can get a job with a company that gets bought out 6 months later and downsized 6 months after that.

For 99% of software development, system administration and network management, physical proximity is completely pointless. Hell, most of the time you end up working for a company with more than one office, and you do remote work on remote systems anyway. Yet the majority of tech companies are still afraid to hire telecommuters.

I've been telecommuting for almost 6 years with great success. An employer who is willing to hire remote workers suddenly has a gigantic field of potential employees to pick from.

Re:Hubris!

[Courageous]

I would suspect the engineering community has become saavy to the idea that working somewhere for the mere "prestigiousness" of the position isn't what it's cracked up to be. I think cool factor is about as worn out as stock options are at this point. Candidates are looking for something real.

There's also the issue of organizational self importance: most organizations think that they are better than their competitors, even though statistically that simply cannot be true. I.e., I'm sure that VA Software thinks it's "the best," but they need to rethink this. Obviously their candidates aren't buying it.

Seems to me that VA software should reconsider what it is they are doing to attract top talent. If they cannot do it with salaries, they will have to give in other areas. Work week, benefits, perhaps work environment, perhaps something to make the daily grind more interesting.

Google's mandatory side projects come to mind. I think half the tech world wants to work at Google for that reason alone.

C//

Re:Hubris!

[rossturk]

I'm certainly not saying that people should take a pay cut to work here just because we have name recognition and work in the OSS space. :) In fact, we're willing to pay very competitively.

Ross

Re:Hubris!

[recordMyRides]

Joel Spolsky has a good article about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 50.html [joelonsoftware.com]

Basically, you have to be willing to give competitive pay. Your company can give itself an edge with some items that are 'cheaper than money' like interesting projects and a plush work environment.

Re:Pay? Is that the main incentive??

[JustNiz]

Wow your expierience differs from mine.

A company I used to work for tried outsourcing to Russian and Indian programmers. The quality of the code coming back was just awful and cost a lot more in after-support than the dev. cost saved.
 

Re:It's the way you word it

[rossturk]

Perhaps I should refine what I mean by "superstar".

We just finished hiring for some PHP positions we had open, and we found three engineers that I consider to be "superstars". It's not because of their experience, necessarily, it's because they have great attitudes and awesome raw talent. They were great hires.

Perhaps our problem is that we're hiring for Java? Is it that Java is a language people learn for industry, not because they love it? Are we likely to find people who specialize in Java and are compelled by the idea of working on an OSS site? Is that part of what this is about?

Ross

Re:Location

[Bob9113]

You, an Alaskan, complaining about politicians trying to take your money and give it to someone else is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black. I can't think of a single state currently that more exemplifies this thanks to this example. Even CA and NY don't have such ridiculous public works projects.

NY and CA? They're not the ones suckling at the Federal teat. The welfare states are the red states. All the states that vote for the tax cut President are the same ones that are putting us in debt. You want to know where the welfare checks go? It's the Bush backers.

Federal Taxes Paid vs. Spending Received by State [taxfoundation.org]