Things Developers Want More Than Money (2006)

My take on that would be that paying more would almost certainly help. Companies who are wondering why they can't seem to find or retain top talent should most likely not wonder about all the soft factors but pay more.

There is this almost comical aspect to companies hand-wringing about how they tried everything, except paying closer to top of the market.

I wanted the high variance outcome. I say this because usually when HN threads with titles like this come out an army of people descend to say "No! This is not what developers want. They want cash".

I wanted to work in a competitive atmosphere where we had to demonstrate to the market that our stuff was good. I wanted to be an engineer but not a spec-to-code converter. I wanted unlimited vacation. I wanted my coworkers to be fine being my friends (though I have friends elsewhere too). And I didn't want private offices or cubicles.

But what I really really really wanted:

* Trust, and from that, autonomy

* Coworkers I could trust

* Recognition of achievement

* Intelligence org-wide in decision making. And true openness in this.

* Rapidity in development

* Interesting technical problems

I actually found a place I liked and it didn't have all the things but it had a lot.

I thoroughly enjoyed working there and would happily "work" in the shower. None of the scare factors materialized. It actually worked really well. Many of the people I knew there senior to me went on to found other companies and I can see that they took a lot of the culture with them.

There are lots of 9-5ers and there are lots of companies for them, but the best companies for the other kind are in the Bay and I love it for this.

It's funny but when you have a good management team, so many worries go away. You don't have to protect the downside of "what if the company doesn't actually respect 'unlimited' vacation?" Or "What if they won't buy me the new Tesla GPU for my work?" A good management team won't nickel and dime you and they know when to say "Cash is tough now, we can't expand that cluster. Let's try to make the job more efficient" (less relevant now when you don't have this massive necessary capital expenditure and have some elasticity, but it was back then). They won't screw you on options because they aren't planning for this to be their only success.

In fact, now I'm fully confident that the leadership is everything when it comes to a startup. Life's too short to downside protect. It's a hell of a lot of fun to swing for the fences.

Working in a team is extremely frustrating. It's like artists working together to produce a portrait. No matter how good the artists are, the process would be mired in conflict and compromise and produce a mediocre result.

The only thing i want, is to reuse my code. To save everything above. Frameworks exist for a reason.