Comments on: Programmer Nesting Rituals

By: Thought Forge – Should we Implement UEFA Financial Fair Play in IT

Thought Forge – Should we Implement UEFA Financial Fair Play in IT — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 12:31:55 +0000

[...] Programmer Nesting Rituals [...]

By: A Primer on Technical Interviewing and Hiring

A Primer on Technical Interviewing and Hiring — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 02:36:29 +0000

[...] Programmer Nesting Rituals, Joel Spolsky in ERE.net – 10 things other than salary that engineers care about when deciding where to work. Any recruiter, even if they aren’t highly technical, should be able to speak to each of these. I try to have answered most these for candidates by the time we give an offer (whether they asked or not), and that’s served me well. [...]

By: Interviewing and Hiring Technical People

Interviewing and Hiring Technical People — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 02:35:17 +0000

By: A Primer on Interviewing and Hiring Technical People - Morgan Missen

A Primer on Interviewing and Hiring Technical People - Morgan Missen — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 04:24:04 +0000

By: Recruiters Ponder Pay, Metrics, and Relocation in California’s Silicon Valley - ERE.net

Fri, 20 Jul 2012 10:38:11 +0000

[...] Jon-Paul Ales-Barnicoat has been doing recruiting consulting for a variety of organizations — ‘’a serial consultant,” he says, mainly for small- to mid-size companies and organizations looking for fresh starts. He says people — companies, recruiters — need to work harder on building personal relationships. He has no Twitter presence, and no Facebook page either. “You have to earn the right to make a candidate an offer in this market,” he says. Recruiters, he adds, need to be prepared to answer: “Is it the right job? Is it the right organization? Are we going to live up to our end of the investment?” Candidates, he says, want their work to be special, to make a difference, and you need to convey how your jobs will do so (more on that from Joel Spolsky.) [...]

By: A Primer on Interviewing and Hiring Technical People: Further Reading | Morgan Missen

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 05:47:04 +0000

By: ERE Expo Spring 2012 Expo — Your Chair Welcomes You! | Riviera Advisors

ERE Expo Spring 2012 Expo — Your Chair Welcomes You! | Riviera Advisors — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:29:12 +0000

[...] Be The Purple Cow: Standing Out and Attracting Top Talent and offers his ‘secret sauce’ to recruit and retain key technical hires using quality over quantity. He has been successful in creating environments where candidates and [...]

By: ERE Expo Spring 2012 Expo — Your Chair Welcomes You! - ERE.net

ERE Expo Spring 2012 Expo — Your Chair Welcomes You! - ERE.net — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 09:54:37 +0000

[...] The Purple Cow: Standing Out and Attracting Top Talent and offers his ‘secret sauce’ to recruit and retain key technical hires using quality over quantity. He has been successful in creating environments where candidates and [...]

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:50:04 +0000

@ Karen & Martin: Re: autonomy-
Except for rare exceptions, who DOES like to be micro-managed, not be good at what they’re paid to do, and not see the bigger picture of their work?

Happy Friday,
Keith

By: Karen Stanford

Karen Stanford — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 12:51:43 +0000

For those of you interested in this topic, I suggest reading “Drive,” by Daniel Pink. He postulates that motivation is intrinsic, and that one of the key elements in achieving it is, as Martin suggested, autonomy.

By: Irina Shamaeva

Irina Shamaeva — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:45:43 +0000

Nice list! There are some additions, coming “from the field”:

- in my experience, really good software engineers want to “own” what they do as the highest priority. They may own a small project but they want to do it right. There’s also team ownership feeling.

- few software engineers seem to look for a company where they may learn powerful systems as a goal. Usually software engineers are pretty opinionated about what’s good and have been learning on their own. It may be that they would want to leave a company that wouldn’t switch to the right or the coolest tools.

- along with the fashion, working with modern “cool” tools and languages help software developers to be marketable. This is a high priority when considering a job.

- in the San Francisco Bay Area currently 99.9% of people who have experience with top requested technologies, such as anything mobile-related, are either happily employed or are trying to start their own thing. Posts on Monster.com get few clicks and 4-5 total applications at most. There are companies that publicly announce 30% fees for *any* 3rd party recruiters who sign up. New York is coming close to that. Nobody is actively looking; anyone “passively looking” hears from 20+ recruiters per day on average.

My 2c

By: Martin Snyder

Martin Snyder — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:25:32 +0000

Three simple words mean everything:

Autonomy

Mastery

Purpose

By: Keith Halperin

Keith Halperin — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:19:18 +0000

Thanks, Joel. A few points:
1) As mentioned previously, average salary is not median salary. A few super-paid folks can appreciably skew the average, but not the median.
2) The concerns mentioned seem very logical for folks in a field with low unemployment.
3)If companies want to hire the best, they need to be/have the best at something: salary, benies, technology, real career growth, quality of work life, something tangible, not just typical marketing hype. A top 30% percentile company shouldn’t expect to hire “Fabulous 5%” people, but they could get top 25% people. Good hiring requires realistic hiring expectations.

Cheers,
Keith

By: Joel Spolsky

Joel Spolsky — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:10:00 +0000

@Paul – thanks!

@Howard – sounds like a semantic question. Google’s salaries were already in the range of reasonable, but they decided that they were losing too many people, so they raised them across the board.

@Mark – yep, there is definitely a different approach needed to recruit people who are not actively seeking a new job.

@Robert – the terminology across our industry is not that consistent. In some places the word “engineer” cannot be legally used to refer to someone without engineering certification, which doesn’t cover very many people in the software field. In other places the term is used freely as a highfalutin’ programmer. You make a good point that just choosing a good title for a job goes a long way to making it desirable.

By: robert hohman

robert hohman — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:19:25 +0000

From a longtime engineer and now CEO – Start by not calling software engineers ‘programmers’. Really good software engineers more or less consider that an insult. ‘Programming’ is one portion of software engineering – architecting and designing the technical solution is often times harder than the actual ‘programming’ (act of writing code).

I agree with this article though. Engineers usually care about the tech, people, and product they will be working with first, and money second.

By: Mark Lally

Mark Lally — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:17:07 +0000

Joel,

You’re missing the biggest piece of why ads don’t work to attract programmers.

“They are not actively looking” (because talented ones are heads down working)

After 15 years in the tech agency space I’m still mystified why CEO’s do not get this

By: Howard Adamsky

Howard Adamsky — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:51:26 +0000

“Google recently had to give a 10% raise to all its employees just to stay competitive.”

Joel, correct me if I am wrong but if you increase compensation to remain competitive, you are not giving a raise. You are rectifying a wage and salary issue in order to do what is deemed correct by those in leadership.

To see an adjustment as a raise is a grievous error.

Your thoughts?

By: Paul DeBettignies

Paul DeBettignies — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 15:31:00 +0000

Joel,

I am very happy to hear you will be presenting. I have followed your blog for many years.

I was at a tech event last week and was asked by software company CEO why he was not getting a reply to his job posts. I took him to Monster, Craig’s List and a couple of other sites where he saw his post sucked as bad if not worse than all the other posts.

Being a “well funded start up” as a selling point is not that cool in a pool of well funded start ups.

Help these folks Joel. They need it.