

Attracting great engineers - tomblomfield
http://tomblomfield.com/post/61958629156/startup-series-part-2-attracting-great-engineers

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kadabra9
> we strongly encourage people to choose between the MacBook Pro and Air.
> We’ve had several people originally opt for various flavours of Linux, but
> they’ve all swapped over to Macs within 12 months.

I'm curious if they've swapped more because of their own personal preference,
or the "strong encouragement" from your team, or some combination of both.
While I completely get the added value that comes from the homogeneity of
equipment in the office, as a Linux guy, I've interviewed in places where they
were basically like "Yeah, we're a mac shop, and you need to be too". It was
kind of a turn off. I like macs and don't mind using them, but at the end of
the day I'm a big believer in going back to the tools you're most comfortable
with.

I guess what I'm trying to ask here is, how do you strongly encourage people
to go for MB Pro or MB Air, without coming off as overly pushy? Interested to
hear how you strike that balance, because I agree 100% that getting most of
the team on the same equipment (or roughly so) is a big plus.

~~~
nraynaud
I generally ask people to all use the same tools so that they can interract on
each other's machine, and so that the code is all looking the same (unless
someone is trying a new tool, of course). Development is about collaboration
and thinking, it's not about typing fast or other time sensitive things. But i
explain all this at the interview, so that candidates can determine themselve
before accepting a job. Switching to linux would emcompass convincing the
whole team.

~~~
capisce
On the other hand, I see a developer's tools as an extension of his or her
mind. Enforcing that everyone uses the same tools seems like a great way to
encourage hive mind thinking.

Especially proprietary tools that can not be automated or extended is
something you should be wary of pushing onto for example a bash and vim
wielding programmer, unless your business has no need for major productivity
gains to grow or to sustain itself.

~~~
nraynaud
I don't encourage hive mind, by other means. The proprietary tools I recently
used where automatable with either apple script system or in java for jetbrain
product, but generaly we would do a lot of command line automation because we
are more proficient in that. And I try to push products designed for their
users instead of designed for their licence or their developers to my product
team. But also i leave the freedom to my team to change the tools, every
wednesday, we can change some tools, for the whole team.

------
tptacek
Unchecked assumption: the developers most likely to engage with "incendiary"
posts about "ditching Responsive Design", or developers that show up at
developer conferences, are most likely to be the "top engineers". Why do we
think that? How do we validate whether that's true?

~~~
mechanical_fish
On the one hand, I agree that the idea of needing to engage with blogs and
conferences in order to succeed as an engineer is way oversold. The whole
point of engineering, after all, is to create artifacts that speak for
themselves.

On the other hand, I think I might know "why we think that": If hiring is the
hardest and most important problem facing most companies, which people keep
telling me it is, then it pays to hire with an eye toward further hiring. You
might therefore put a premium on hiring people who engage with others via
writing and conferences, not because these are necessarily the best widget
designers, sprocket debuggers, or gadget platers, but because you expect these
people are more likely to go out into the world and be _noticed_ by the great
designers, debuggers and platers who you'll want to hire next.

Obviously this can be overdone, and if you feed this process back on itself
you'll end up with a one-dimensional clique of a company - in part because
blog posts and developer conferences are a very narrow and biased sample of
the universe of competent and potentially-competent people. But it shouldn't
be surprising that companies _think_ that "always be advertising" is a
characteristic of a "top engineer": The problems of hiring are at the top of
management's mind, and are probably the _only_ thing at the top of _upper_
management's mind - in my experience, the CEO could not care less about the
glitches in the firewall-configuration system, but she interviews half a dozen
candidates every day. Every all-hands meeting is filled with exhortations to
blog more, shake more hands, hand out more cards, meet more people.

------
onion2k
I've been wondering recently whether having a team of top flight developers in
your tiny startup is actually a good idea. Developers need things to do. More
developers directly equates to adding features (assuming you have a reasonable
team who understand modern deployment, frameworks, testing, etc). It must be
possible to have more development resources than you can do user testing for
(eg finding out what users want/need).

At what point does available development talent make "featuritis" inevitable?

Clearly, in a startup like GoCardless where they're dealing with banks,
financial regulations, etc that's unlikely to be a problem, but if you're
making yet-another-photo-sharing-app or it's-just-chat-but-different-this-
time-honest-dot-io it should be a small concern.

------
CmonDev
"...based on a £40k salary..." How sad that it's still considered "normal" in
London. So basically toys and noise are cheaper than hard cash. No wonder best
devs go to finance.

~~~
startupcry
Well, it seems thinking behind salaries at startups in London is simple - get
a cheap workforce (ideally fresh uni graduates) and let them falsely believe
that they can get rich by giving them a tiny slice of stock options.
Ironically the people who are hiring them would very often badly struggle
passing tech interview at another company - especially when sometimes you're
interviewed by people who have no background in CS.

------
nraynaud
I'm always a little bit warry of "developper marketing" like blog and
conferences, because when you do that you're not developping, and this shows
skills that are quite different than the ones required for software
development. Marketing is all about mass media one way communication
(broadcast), development is at most two way personal communication.

~~~
tomblomfield
I think blogging is actually much more a 2-way communication than traditional
broadcast media. See this discussion as an example.

If you sit in your office writing fantastic software without telling anyone
about it, you're destined for a pretty lonely future.

~~~
nraynaud
Participation on the internet is around 1%(edits on wikipedia), that's way
more than tradionnal media, and 1% of a one to one conversation. Blogging is
still putting on a suit, climbing on a soapbox, reading an edited speech and
answering publicly to remarks (ie taking stances, playing roles).

------
dustingetz
they already have jobs so you have to poach them from where they're working;
netflix/facebook/google etc. you do that with money. all this other stuff
should be taken for granted. if you're hiring engineers that are failing
google interviews then you're not hiring the great ones now are you.

the problem is that most companies don't have the ability to poach great
engineers, but they pretend they do so they go and write little posts like
this one, but ironically they aren't qualified to be writing these posts in
the first place!

~~~
rza
People leave big companies for smaller companies for a variety of reasons that
don't have to do with money: product, culture, team, technology, or just for
the sake of working at a smaller company. And for the record, Google is not a
perfect Utopia that has a monopoly on all the good developers with a flawless
interviewing system.

