

How RedGate hired 10 geeks in five weeks - bensummers
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2010/08/how-redgate-hired-10-geeks-in-five-weeks.html

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goatforce5
Summary of the flash movie: The flyered Cambridge, gave away 600 ice creams
from an ice cream truck, drove some trucks around town with banners and
advertised in newspapers and on Spotify telling people they'd get a free iPad
if they submitted a resume and were invited in for an interview. They gave
away a lot (how many?) of iPads and they got their 10 geeks in less than 5
weeks.

What's missing: they don't say how much they spent on the advertising and
freebies.

~~~
Silhouette
For the benefit of those outside Cambridge, it's also worth knowing that Red
Gate is the local rising star software business. I have now lost track of how
many friends, former work colleagues and friends-of-friends have wound up
working there, but it's a lot.

If I've heard about it from that many different sources, so have many other
good people with relevant skills in the local area. You have to factor that
word-of-mouth effect into any thinking about how successful any additional
recruitment drives they've been running have been. If I hadn't gone freelance,
I might have applied myself, but it wouldn't have been because of ice creams
or iPads, it would have been because the company has a reputation for being a
decent employer and hiring good people.

~~~
tome
I've heard many, many good things about Red Gate, and know people who work
there.

There's one reason I reject them immediately as a potential employer: they're
a Windows-only shop.

~~~
eru
Indeed.

We are just around the corner from Red Gate.

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carson
I'm not sure what the point of this is. I can get 1000 resumes and 10 geeks in
a week advertising on hotjobs but in the end it is the quality of the person
that matters. I would rather see the result of this a year from now.

~~~
jreposa
We've had a hard time finding quality candidates. In my experience, the
Craigslist job board seems to be dying out. Is hotjobs your first stop in the
hiring process?

~~~
euroclydon
I think savvy developers will increasingly want to dispense with the
commitment that being hired entails. If there are so many companies in such
dire need of talent, why can't talented developers become highly skilled
migrant workers? I just think it's too difficult to keep a talented person
satisfied, in one job, for years on end -- the ability to ramp-up and ramp-
down without the overhead of a full-time employment relationship or sleazy
middle-men, is the future of software employment, I hope.

~~~
cageface
Generally speaking, I agree with this but there's a downside too. Don't be
surprised if you get tossed out on the trash heap the minute you turn 40 or 50
and are no longer perceived as a young, alpha engineer.

Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're
also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer.

~~~
euroclydon
_Things like blogs and github are great learning resources but I think they're
also starting to skew people's expectations of the average programmer._

What? Care to elaborate?

~~~
gaius
The demographics of the typical programmer-blogger are not representative of
the typical programmer. And writing a blog is not correlated in any way with
talent or productivity.

Probably the vast majority of working programmers either don't write a blog,
or don't blog about programming (but about their cats, kids, and steam-engine
building hobby).

~~~
barrkel
I'd be willing to bet that writing a blog about programming is positively
correlated with programming talent and productivity, for at least one reason:
it shows interest in the subject, and the extra attention compounds over time.

The typical programmer has little interest in the profession other than as a
monthly salary, and spends most of their life doing copy & paste-level
implementation and reimplementation of business rules into straightforward
code and UI. Domain knowledge is usually (a lot) more valuable than coding
ability for these people. Sure, the kernels and architectures of the systems
these typical programmers work with are designed and implemented by people you
would probably more recognize as hackers, but there is so much more drudgework
that needs to be done to make it all a useful piece of corporate IT
infrastructure. There are armies of these people doing it, and the work isn't
interesting code-wise.

These typical programmers, as a rule, don't blog about their work.

~~~
smokinn
Rather than just believe in an unproven hypothesis why don't you test it out?

Find the interesting-code projects you actually use or have heard about (maybe
Apache, Cassandra, Google's Bigtable, etc), find out who did the majority of
the coding and then try to find their blog.

How many people work on Apache? How many of them have blogs? Do you even care
that they blog? Wouldn't you hire any of them anyway?

Avinash Lakshman and Prashant Malik were the guys that wrote Cassandra when it
was still an internal Facebook project. I can't find blogs for either of them.
(Though they did write one blog post on the Facebook Engineering blog.)

Doug Cutting wrote a lot of great code for Hadoop. He has a blog here:
<http://cutting.wordpress.com/> but hasn't touched it in nearly a year.

Jeff Dean has done some amazing work at Google (
<http://research.google.com/people/jeff/index.html> Now THAT is one hell of a
resume) and I can't find a blog for him either.

To me, it seems mostly random whether the person has a blog or not. It would
be an interesting project to catalog and analyze how many do and don't. Then
you'd have a real answer rather than a wild guess you believe religiously
rather than scientifically.

~~~
barrkel
You have it backwards. You are looking at the cream of open source developers,
and then asking whether they have blogs. But the question isn't whether
blogging is correlated with coding excellence (i.e. whether top tier of devs
blog or not); it's whether coding ability is correlated with blogging (i.e. is
blogging more associated with above median devs or not).

There are over two million programmers in the US alone. My proposition would
be true if more people in the top half of that distribution blogged about
coding than in the bottom half, and I don't think that's an unlikely
suggestion. Even if you think whether someone blogs or not is random, the
subject of the blog is not. People's estimation of their ability is correlated
with their ability (Dunning-Kruger effect notwithstanding, check the paper's
graph - perception is compressed but not inverted), and I think it's
conservative to say that people who think they know more about a subject are
more likely to talk about it.

To make it clear, I'm talking about blogging as a signal of ability, not
ability as a signal of propensity to blog (which is what you suggest
measuring). Since there are a lot more people coding than blogging about
coding, it would be unlikely in any case to find a high proportion of bloggers
at any level of the ability scale.

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Aegean
I was expecting to see a mixergy-style talent story where they got 10 geeks
with intuition and little spending. I don't see the intuition or talent here.

~~~
nickpinkston
Likewise - I actually think they were very unimaginative. All of that stuff is
expensive and obvious. I was thinking we'd see some scoured
GitHub/SourceForge/etc. type of stuff or a programming competition, maybe even
a super-poach of a good team.

Karma ++ to whoever put up a "hire geeks on the cheap" post.

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jacoblyles
Is it okay if I love computer science and programming but don't like being
called a geek? My activities and interests bridge several cultural divides. I
don't like being simplified.

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hunterjrj
Are they that desperate for developers in the UK? If so, how does a Canadian
get a work permit!?

~~~
gaius
Cambridge is a nice town, but their "desperation" will be that most developers
in the UK will head straight for London.

~~~
ig1
Shortage of good developers in London too though.

~~~
gaius
Shortage of _good_ developers everywhere :-) But at least in London you know
that they are in the same city, somewhere.

~~~
barrkel
It's probably easier to travel to and from Cambridge and North London than it
is to cross the city for work though.

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helium
Does anyone know if RedGate will sponsor a visa for foreign candidates?

~~~
profquail
They normally don't, but if you're a smart, hard-working developer, then I'm
sure they'd consider it (even if your programming expertise is in a field that
doesn't match what they do).

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jscore
So another VC-backed company bribed a bunch of interviewees with free stuff.

~~~
adw
RedGate are bootstrapped.

