How to Find, Hire, and Retain Developers – Interview with Cal Evans | Hacker News Reader

How to Find, Hire, and Retain Developers – Interview with Cal Evans

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45 pointsGarethX47 comments

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.

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.

"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.

I think you were ahead of the curve. I have seen multiple companies that seem to think of front-end as "lesser" engineering, but then struggled to fill front-end roles more than any other position, and struggle to build great UIs. "Front-end" still has a stigma of taking a PSD and turning it into HTML/CSS, even though these days front-ends are getting extremely sophisticated and require tons of strong coding skills. Ultimately supply/demand work in your favor. And I wouldn't take anything a PHP expert has to say about "serious" developer roles too seriously.

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".

Even if it is; you're going to be pigeonholed as a designer, not a developer.

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.

Seeing a lot of knee-jerk reactions to that, and I agree it's poorly worded. But slow down and read what he's actually saying there - he is not saying front end devs aren't serious developers.

I do apologize for the unfortunate wording on that comment.

It really was not my intent to imply that only back-end developers are serious developers. I'm going to chalk that one up to the fact that this was a live interview and sometimes things just fall out of my mouth before I can shut it. I do apologize and ask that any front end developer, designer, or any developer proficient with photoshop to please accept my apology. :)

I was trying to say that if a company is advertising for a developer, seeing photoshop on the ad is a red-flag. I have known a few developers who can also design but only a few.

In my experience, when you start seeing disconnects like this is it because the company hasn't put a lot of thought into exactly what they want the developer to do. That is bad for them, it is worse for whomever they hire.

I am married to a wonderful designer and would never ever disparage designers. :)

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.

>, 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.

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?

>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.

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.

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."

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.

Cooking is different as it's something you do in order to eat--a basic necessity of life. So a cook would likely go home to cook a meal for his family but might not be happy about it.

Software development is not a basic necessity of life.

Okay, so replace it with professional racing drivers who drive off the track; an illustrator drawing something in their free time; a photographer taking pictures of their friends; a manager who helps organize a charity event; a sysadmin who owns their own computer; really, any similar combination of employment and use of job-skills on personal time that would allow you to engage with the actual point of my comment.

My comment was not about cooks; that was just the first example that came to mind. The point is that sometimes people do things in their spare time that make use of the skills that their employer pays them for. Why is it inherently negative for an employee to use their job-skills for non-job purposes?

>>Why is it inherently negative for an employee to use their job-skills for non-job purposes?

It's not. I guess my point to the original comment is that they might not put in as much passion on the after-hours stuff because they are tired from work; and that doing it because you're kind of obligated to do it (for family, friends) is different from being required to do it in order to keep your career moving forward.

This sub-thread is the response to a sentiment I've never seen before -- wbronitsky's argument:

>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?

The discussion is over "what should coding at home mean about a candidate or employee?" While certainly I agree with you that coding at home should not be /required/, I don't agree with the argument presented in the quote that says "coding at home means you're not working hard at work".

You are correct on the second point. I do fully understand the first point, however my answer is that if programming is a craft to you, take your own time to master your craft and put your efforts up on github.

As to your second point, some developers are not passionate about programming as a craft. I know developers and have worked with developers that programming is a job. Outside life, they have other interests and do not want to spend their evening turning a unit test green. I'm fine with that but when I am hiring, I am looking for passion.

Horseshit. You're welcome to hire that way, but I can tell you right now, you're missing a whole class of excellent devs that put 100% of their time into the stuff they're working on at the office. I have side projects I occasionally work on, for myself, but they're not on a public github, and they're almost always when things at the office have slowed down a bit. The rest of the time, I enjoy what I do so much, that I spend it on the work tasks, trying new PoC's, refactoring, etc. Now tell me exactly why you'd not hire someone like me?

I agree. What if you're applying for a Network Admin job? Are they supposed to have a github repo for admin scripts?

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...

Not agreeing or disagreeing but I don't think he meant what do you need to survive but after he goes on to say that it means "what do you need to be happy with this job".

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

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

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.

To him a junior dev is not worth $100k, it doesn't matter what Glassdoor says.

The thing about not negotiating simply means that he asks you your number, and then makes a binary decision based on that number. As opposed to trying to get you to agree to a lower figure, your number is either acceptable to him or not. If so, hired; if not, not.

Salary is a very tricky thing. Yes, there are locations that pay a Jr. developer $100k or more. My bias is showing in that I don't live on one of those areas.

That still does not change how I handle salaries. However, I left out a critical part.

Yes, I like hiring remote developers. Yes, I like paying each developer what they feel they are worth so that they are comfortable with the job and not always looking for the next thing.

HOWEVER, before I start looking for a developer to hire I have to assess what the position is worth to the company. Regardless of geographic norms for the developer, if the position of Jr. is not worth $100k to the company, then I will dismiss the candidate because others will provide similar value and within my range.

I want everyone to be comfortable with the salary being paid. That includes the developer I am hiring, the company I am hiring them for, and myself. The person who will be held responsible for the decision.

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.

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.

You reacted too quickly - the front end part is important to the rest of that quote. Some people (not me personally) consider Photoshop and a small amount of photo editing (think cropping/resizing) as a legitimate part of front-end work. So it can make some sense to ask for that in a front-end dev. But it doesn't make sense if you're trying to hire someone to work on an API or something, to ask them to also be good with Photoshop.

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.

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

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

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

I think the guy is great.

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

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.

How can you expect people who don't read to read this?

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?

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.

I routinely get recruiters for help desk jobs emailing me. No idea where that came from.

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?

They aren't the only ones producing crap on the web.

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

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.

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.

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