How RedGate hired 10 geeks in five weeks
blog.businessofsoftware.org
blog.businessofsoftware.org
What's missing: they don't say how much they spent on the advertising and freebies.
Of course finding, interviewing and accepting the people are all important steps, but I guess you can't say it's been successful until you've had time to see how they worked out in your organization.
Let's hope for a follow-up later!
From my 15 years in IT, I highly highly doubt it. There is the occasional decent recruiter, but most of them are like realtors, only interested in commission $$$, not entirely unreasonable in itself, but unlikely to be aligned with anyone else's interests.
HR person would say "Thanks for calling! We're having a really hard time finding Black Box developers. Can you get me some Black Box developers?"
The only way to be considered by the company was to answer along the lines of "Black Box? Never heard of that."
Many recruiters utterly failed to proceed any further than this point.
To employ 10 software engineers, at say £36k average salary, would have ended up costing close to £70k through traditional recruitment agencies.
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.
The reason I hadn't applied before was because I was 'reasonably' happy where I was working but this campaign raised Red-Gate's profile in my mind again at a time when I was considering job hunting and also gave me the extra incentive to apply.
It worked, I was hired and I can say that so far it has been a great place to work. Plug for my team, check out http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Source_Control/
There's one reason I reject them immediately as a potential employer: they're a Windows-only shop.
We are just around the corner from Red Gate.
http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/
We bought a Ferrari to give away to any employee who recruited 10 friends. In reality the car only cost $2,000 per month, the person who won it only got to drive it for as long as he or she was employed, and the cost of a Ferrari is much lower than 10 headhunter commissions
I want to hire people that have genuine passion for what they do. If they're passionate about my company, that's just icing on the cake.
I expect that they'll move on. I want it to be on good terms.
True engineers will always want to learn more. My goal is to provide an environment for a massive amount of learning.
It seems that the only way you can do that is to solve really hard problems, otherwise learning just becomes some academic exercise, unrelated to your core mission.
I learn something new everyday. For a learning experience we launched a new site using only HTML5. That was a fun learning experience, but it wasn't a really hard problem. And yes, it is part of our core mission.
Another example is how our company is always looking at new technologies. The concepts can be challenging and fun to learn for a developer. A couple of the more recent ones we've used are MongoDB, Node.js, PhoneGap... I'm sure there's more. Oh, right... we're building our first Rails 3 site. Now that's fun!
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?
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).
If you don't blog or use GitHub, or do something similar, then when that mid-life layoff happens, you'll may be at the mercy of recruiters and whatnot, to spice up your resume try to sell you.
Also I am very amused that you think anyone without a blog is a "good little human resource", as if writing a blog was some great accomplishment of individuality. People who don't do it don't do it because they're simply not interested. Doesn't mean blogs are a waste of time or anything, but they are just a hobby. Like stamp collecting.
FWIW I have my name on the cover of a book, that was in actual real bookstores, about the main technology I use. I mention it on my CV. Hasn't resulted in any more than a minute's conversation in the (admittedly very few) interview's I've done since then. And as an interviewer and hiring manager, I've never taken a blog into consideration. Apart from for the author him or herself, blogs just aren't important.
The bloke I'm thinking of with the steam engines, BTW, is pretty talented. He built his first one with electric tools and his second with tools powered by the first. And he's a great developer. Hiring some blogger over him would be a serious mistake for any organization...
It's a topic I've been on the fence about for a while: how necessary, if at all, is self promotion? I think blogging and using github are just modern ways of networking and interacting with more people through technology. Writing a book is great, and so is being good at your work.
Furthermore, I think the project nature of software development, lends itself more to developers being free-agents rather than employees, which was my original motivation for commenting here. I just hear so many recruiters and hiring managers pat themselves on the back for "finding a great developer", that I wish more developers would promote themselves in order to make it less of a talent search, and so that they could showcase their knowledge, talent, and capabilities to the widest audience.
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.
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.
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.
To put it another way, almost all the job listings I see these days ask for github account info and if you don't have a pretty impressive github portfolio you look like a scrub. There are some upsides to this but, compared to the job market of even ten years ago, it's less forgiving.
Karma ++ to whoever put up a "hire geeks on the cheap" post.
Once you have that visa you can work for any UK company (there's a minimum earning requirement but most software development roles pay comfortably more than that).
Although if you want to do it, sooner is better than later as the current government is thinking about sticking a quota on the number of Tier-1 visas that are issued in a year.