
How to Find, Hire, and Retain Developers – Interview with Cal Evans - GarethX
http://blog.fogcreek.com/how-to-find-hire-and-retain-developers-interview-with-cal-evans/
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serve_yay
I worked remotely for a long time and am very much in favor of remote work.
But I am uncomfortable with this idea that hiring remotely means you're going
to get the best of the best, and not really pay for it, or rather pay for it
by "letting" the developer work remotely. You're not getting someone on, I
dunno, Yehuda Katz's level for $80k because they work at home.

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greggyb
I think his point is not that remote is cheaper, but that if you want the best
talent, you cannot limit yourself to the people who live within commuting
distance.

The Venn diagram of "best developer talent" and "developers within commuting
distance" have a very small overlap for most locations.

Edit: Typos.

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mikemikemike
"anytime they’re looking at job ads, serious developer positions, not front
end developers... "

Ouch. I guess I never should have dropped PHP for client side MVC apps.

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charliepark
The full quote is "The second thing, if I see Photoshop on a developer ad,
that’s a red flag immediately. What it tells me is you don’t understand what
you want, so you’re just throwing everything out there. I advise developers,
anytime they’re looking at job ads, serious developer positions, not front end
developers, but mid range and back end developers, if they see Photoshop on
it, walk away." He's not saying "front-end developers are not serious
developer positions"; he's saying "if you see Photoshop on a job ad — and it's
not for a front-end position — that's a red flag".

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locahost
Yeah, I bristled at his phrasing, until I read the rest of the sentence--then
I was in full agreement. As a front end developer, I'm tired of seeing kitchen
sink job postings "requiring" Sass, AngularJS, and...Hibernate. Or WebSphere.

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ExpiredLink
IMO, the corporate world more and more develops a culture of dis-respect.
People are not unfriendly or rude. They are increasingly self centered and
just don't care about the other person.

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jasode
_> , I am to the point in my career where I have a LinkedIn profile that if
you printed out in a PDF, it would be 5 or 7 pages. I have 10 or 12 GitHub
repos out there that show what my code is. If you as a developer manager are
not qualified to read through my GitHub Repo [...], and if you’re not
qualified to look at my LinkedIn profile and see that I show a progression of
responsibilities,_

That's great for him but it's not workable for a pool of 22-year old college
graduates with no work experience, or 40-something developers who never had a
chance to write open source for github. That's one of the reasons why
companies actively recruiting from colleges use fizzbuzz and whiteboard coding
tests.

What's the % of compsci college grads that have github activity of any
significance? Less than 10%?

 _> Free lunches, that’s crap. [...] I understand the mentality of free
lunches and dry cleaning and all of this. Those exist so the company can keep
the developer’s butt in their seat longer, and they exist for no other
reason._

I disagree about employer provided lunches. The other stuff like foosball
tables and onsite volleyball court I don't have a strong opinion on but
employer provided lunch is a very nice thing to have.

So many days I'm hungry and I really don't want to get into a hot 120 degree
car or fight the rain and snow just to get something to quick to eat.

The employer catered lunch is very convenient especially if the vendor brings
in healthy food (veggie sandwiches, etc). It is very hard in some locations to
get a healthy lunch when the closest restaurants are junk food places like
McDonalds and Taco Bell.

Every place I worked at that had employer provided lunch never had any social
pressure that forced you to eat your lunch while being chained to your desk.
Maybe he only sees companies forcing programmers to multitask the lunch hour
by eating a sandwich with one hand and banging out code with the other. He
doesn't realize there are companies out there that provide lunch simply as a
progressive benefit instead of some kind of abusive weapon.

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wbronitsky
I totally agree with your first point. He seems to be saying that you are no
good to him if you have not worked on side projects or open source. He seems
blinded by his 35 years in the industry, and seems to not understand two
things: 1) That there are a ton of companies that give 0 time for open source
2) That some people just write code as a job, not as a hobby. Personally, I
would want my employees to give me 100% of their effort on coding. If they are
going home and coding, how much effort are they actually putting in at work?

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greggyb
>Personally, I would want my employees to give me 100% of their effort on
coding. If they are going home and coding, how much effort are they actually
putting in at work?

If you owned a restaurant, would you object to your cooks going home and
making themselves a nice meal?

Note: This is more of an idle curiosity thing that popped into my head reading
your comment. This is not a "Boom, roasted!" type of comment.

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wbronitsky
That's fair. I guess it is more of a management issue then. I wouldn't want my
chef cutting corners and rushing his/her work in order to prepare a 5 course
dinner at home, but maybe I would want them to try out new recipes at home and
bring them to the restaurant. Something to think about.

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zck
That's close to, but not quite the point. Let's say you're happy with your
chef's output at work. The chef is making good dishes, and suggests changes
and new items. Great.

You ask, when the chef comes in for the day, what he or she did over the
weekend. "Well", comes the response. "My in-laws were visiting, so I made them
a proper Italian supper, with fresh pasta and homemade meatballs."

Your restaurant isn't Italian. Are you annoyed? The point is that it's wrong
to control people when they're not at work. If you're happy with a
programmer's output at work, it's ridiculous to tell them that they shouldn't
program when they go home. If you're unhappy with their work, then the point
is not "you're doing too much at home", but "you're not doing enough at work.
Do what you need to do to produce as we agreed your job requires."

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wbronitsky
I feel like I'm being a bit misunderstood. I wasn't trying to talk about
current employees, but lets work with this analogy.

I take issue with the author trying to judge this chef based on the meal he
made for his in-laws. That seems to be the same as judging a candidate's merit
based upon their side projects.

My example and question might have been a bit off, but I still think it is a
bit flawed to make this judgement when trying to hire someone.

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nadams
I have so many comments on this article but this stood out:

> I do not negotiate salaries.

> I ask the person what do you need.

That is the most absurd thing I have ever heard. Did you honestly tell your
employer "oh I only needed $X to pay my bills and eat ramen"?

> I’ve got a junior developer saying I need $100,000, that’s not reasonable

Actually according to glassdoor[1] - salaries for a "junior developer" range
from $60k to over $100k.

[1] - [http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/junior-developer-salary-
SR...](http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/junior-developer-salary-
SRCH_KO0,16.htm)

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honest_george
That link seems to be geolocation-specific. For me it returns salaries from 23
to 31k [1]

[1] [https://imgur.com/cCq85nI](https://imgur.com/cCq85nI)

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nadams
Which I think does add to my point - especially if you are a remote worker.
The cost of living in a small suburbia town will be different than living in
Silicon Valley.

I don't think he has to deal with remote workers - but automatically
disqualifying someone based on how much they ask just rubs me the wrong way.

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brandonb
I'm not sure this is the person we should listen to on engineering management.
This quote is a huge red flag to me:

"I advise developers, anytime they’re looking at job ads, serious developer
positions, not front end developers..."

How can he retain great front end engineers if he doesn't even think it's a
"serious" position? I've done machine learning, kernel hacking, back end,
mobile, and front end, and it takes just as long to learn to be amazing at
front end as it does to learn any of the other categories.

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lostcolony
I feel like he's confusing "front end developer" with "front end DESIGNER".
The mention of Photoshop seems key. I don't think it was meant to be a slight
to those using Javascript on the front end, so much as those who know only the
barest scraps of Javascript, and mostly spend their time in image editing,
with a bit of HTML and CSS thrown in.

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coldcode
I would work for this guy any day, he makes sense. Although I do know how to
spell PHP and code in it it's not my cup of tea however.

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naptime
The fact that he touts Dave Ramsey's 6 month hiring process as some sort of
positive is misleading.

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calevans
I am curious. Do you object to the process or Dave Ramsey? Your comment was
unclear.

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calevans
Thank you everyone for the comments. Whether you agreed with em or not, I do
appreciate the feedback. :)

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Humanistme
I think the guy is great.

As an accountant trying to turn programmer lots of nuggets there.

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MichaelCrawford
If you want to find developers, read their resumes in their entirety before
you solicit them to apply.

A couple of days ago I was solicited to work as an assembler.

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krisdol
Stuff like this concerns me. If a company I'm interested in solicits me for a
phone call and the position is a much more senior level than I've had in the
past, or is of a more demanding skillset than I have experience with, I feel
like I am not only wasting both of our time, but hurting my chances if
something more on my grade becomes available in the future. On the other hand,
I wouldn't want to outright refuse, would I?

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pkaye
To be honest those initial inquiries are done by HR recruiters who have no way
to evaluate your skill set. If interested, try to get a call with the hiring
manager before you proceed far. Some positions can accommodate engineers of
various skill level.

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commentnull
Depends - are we hiring brogrammers or precious snowflake developers who must
be feted and every desire fulfilled to keep them happy - and let them keep
producing the crap bogging down the web as we know it?

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kevining
I agree. Evolution is overrated, let's go back to BBS.

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tracker1
Don't underrate bbsing... the best BBS interfaces were clean, artistic and
didn't have a sense of information overload. The same holds true today,
especially with mobile.

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dccoolgai
Some days I think I would gladly go back to BBSes. The medium was so raw and
exciting back then, in a way the modern web has never recreated with all its
bells and whistles.

