Poll: Best way for startups to find awesome developers?
Upvote so everyone can share their most effective strategies on finding developers.
Want awesome devs? Do awesome shit.
When you have a good answer to that question, then it's just a matter of making it known to awesome developers. That task will be a lot easier if you actually have a good answer to that question.
Reminder - every startup promises to change the world, cool technology, lots of resources, great people to work with so if you're different ....
And sure, you can find devs that are willing to work for 1000 USD per month, but good developers want good salaries, regardless of their location. And emphasizing on cheap will bring you shitty results.
Personally I would hire people from all over the planet not because it's cheaper, but because the poll of talent is bigger and you can find people specialized for the job you need a lot quicker, giving you a better ROI.
Btw, I like working with americans as you guys generally seek value over price better than any other nationality I interacted with, but on the other hand I'm amazed at how few startups are doing offshoring, especially since startups, IMHO, need it the most.
You can call that laziness on management's part but managing remote team members also requires a different kind of discipline that many startups probably don't have yet.
Seems strange for YC to fund a non-scalable business.
Hiring those developers is hard unless they think you/your company are awesome.
Otherwise, the alternative is to create ridiculous criteria that doesn't even describe a good employee for your situation. Instead of being productive in a company, I'm off developing a me-too open source project just to even get a chance of getting hired to a decent position. This is infuriatingly frustrating from the point of view of someone who is a great developer but enjoys things other than programming.
The challenge is coming up with good criteria to evaluate people on. I feel your pain that oftentimes the criteria has nothing to do with the actual job, but in large part it's a signal that the company isn't worth working for if they don't know what they want.
Anyway, I'm probably just jaded because it's been so insanely hard to hire lately (compared to ~1 year ago.)
When I was trying to hire Rails & front-end folks recently I was seeing the market around $100 - $130k for reasonably experienced people, and had success hiring in that context. $150k for someone out of school seems unlikely to me.
Re: Color - I assume they raised their $40mm at something like $100mm post-money, which would mean a 1% option grant. That strikes me as far outside the norm for any engineer that isn't a core part of the team.
Conciser the breakeven point on 180K for 5 years vs 100K for 5 years? Well, 80K * 5 = 1/4 million + some interest. But what do you compare that to? let's assume it's been funded and you are getting .1% of the company. Well breakeven is now a ~250 million sale but what are your chances of hitting a 250+ million sale?
PS: This is on the extreme end, but it just goes to show you that trading significant amounts of income for stock in funded companies is rarely worth it.
Sadly, professional recruiters (who are taking upwards of 20% of the first year salary at this point)... are far better than I am at it (which is why I've retained a few).
At this point though, I'd probably be willing to offer anyone a 20% referral fee (~$20-30k) for a top-notch iOS developer.
How important is it that candidates have a passion for food?
I've found that in that kind of environment I figure out very quickly if someone knows their stuff and would be a good fit or not.
- Someone who gets things done, maybe using bailing wire and duck tape.
- Someone who can solve problems no one else can
- Someone you can have a beer with.
- Someone who doesn't have a mind of their own and keeps their mouth shut.
- Someone who can't keep their mouth shut and thinks everything you do is wrong.
Sometimes you have to choose.
I have no idea how effective the technique is, but the principle seems sound: everyone at the meetup can be assumed to have interest/skill in Python, and this way you target them without opening yourself up to being spammed by job-seekers who are desperate but not competent.
To put it another way: the harder your job is, the less likely you are to succeed. Less skilled employees make your job harder.