Advice on how to attract good developers: how do you treat your developers

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President

During the dotcom boom in the 1990s, many companies offered plenty of benefits to attract developers: table tennis and billiards, fine lunches, game rooms, wine, signing bonuses, oh yes and stock options! Now, some of these benefits have become classic jokes, but some have become standard for modern technology companies.

The past 15 years have changed a lot, but the demand for good developers has not changed. Big companies are still offering all the crazy benefits to attract top talent (think about the stories, like working at Google), and they buy companies to get the company's developers.

To illustrate this, let's assume that you've built a small company, and you're looking for new developers, I mean developers who care about their output (such as hackers). How do you compete with your opponents according to the many needs of the developers?

Not surprisingly, the first thing you have to do is to know what the developers are thinking. We are very different from the regular staff and we do not stop working because we leave the office. We hack our projects, we do more work for the experience, and we participate in user groups to contribute to the technical community. We live and breathe in technology, that's us. Understand this, you are already halfway, learn to encourage this among us, you will be a big success.

It's not hard to attract developers, it's just that you support the things we're interested in, and here's an example of what you can do:

Support for local user groups

Although developers are thought to be very introverted, we love to get together and share ideas and new technologies. One way is to participate in user groups, the company that supports user groups is very attractive to developers.

It's cheap and easy to support groups, and the simplest and easiest thing the company does is provide snacks, food and drinks. It doesn't have to be extravagant, and a snack dish, pizza, sandwich or soda is enough.

Another way is to provide a meeting place, because once the discussion group grows up, finding a place to meet is not easy. Opening your office to a discussion group is the best way to find a genius.

Finally, they often need speakers, so encourage (not force) your developers to speak.

Coding contests and programming marathons

Developers not only get together to discuss technology, we also get together to play technology. Most languages have some contests (website programming contests, JS hacks, Django dash, etc.); Major open source projects often have new releases of bug fixes, and it's exciting that new projects or versions will be released at the marathon.

Supporting these things is similar to supporting user groups. With refreshments and meeting venues, your developers will be warmly welcomed and your name will be remembered.

Technology Summit

Unlike user groups and programming marathons, participation in technical meetings requires more spending, time and resources, or a combination of the three. However, increased spending is worthwhile and the exposure rate will increase.

Organizing a meeting is expensive, but it's a good deal for the sponsors. Blogs, sponsor pages, Twitter and facebook,t shirts, meeting announcements and many more are ways to increase the prestige of the sponsor.

The user group may have more than 10 developers, and the summit will often have 150 or more (attracting reputable developers). By supporting the summit, showing interest in genius, through conversation, your company will certainly be interested in developers.

As I said, it's not hard to get interested in developers, but it's a bit different because we need to know if your company is showing the same situation as your company. There are at least three things that show you are a developer-friendly company: give back to the community, encourage hacker culture, and support your current developers.

Community Feedback

Chances are that your organization uses open source software, but opportunities include your organization not giving back to those open source projects. I'm not just talking about money, although open source projects are happy to accept donations, I'm talking about feedback codes to the community.

Michael Bleigh, in the article "Why Open source corporate culture is important," explains why companies and organizations are as open-source as possible, and the following is a good illustration of the problem:

Why do you care if developers are happy? Each company should be concerned about whether the employee is happy, but software development is a combination of science, art and crafts of the black magic. Some work can be done in a forced way, but software work requires inspiration and passion, and you won't let developers feel suffocated and quarantined outside the development community. Open source makes developers happy, and when you open up your code, you get the community and feel like a developer-friendly person.

Encourage hacker culture

Creating a corporate culture is not a trivial matter, and many companies ' cultures are naturally formed, but in other places, such as Apple, culture is actively developed and nurtured. This article does not have enough space to describe the company culture, my qualifications are not enough to say this, I would like to provide a few tips to explain how to make the hacker culture and growth.

Encourage failure

I used to work in a company that didn't allow failure, and it was a horrible work environment that was suffocating and demoralized. If there is no space for failure, there is no room for creation.

Failure in computer programming often occurs because programmers are also people, and we want to try new ideas, grow up in exercise, failure is part of growth, when your developers stumble, support them, and when they succeed, celebrate.

Support attempts

Technology is changing, nothing is clearer than programming. By allowing your developers to experiment with new technologies, they will feel the direction of industrialization and find organizational response plans.

In addition to allowing your developers to try new technologies, they also encourage them to try out novel development methods. Pairing programming, stand-up desks, test-driven development, agile development, and open seating arrangements can inspire the excitement of the developer.

Support Trial Time

As you probably already know, Google takes 20% of the time to support this. Employees are allowed to spend 20% of their working hours on projects they find interesting. About 50% of Google's products come from this "20%" project, including Gmail,orkut, Google News and AdSense.

20% so much so that only Google can do that because they have redundant employees. But what if you allow one months to take out two days (10%) and let developers try something new?

The Red Nova Lab, Kansas City's local company, recently really started the project they called the release version. The company took out a whole week to make up a group to try out new ideas. As a result, two new products are on the verge of release. What can your company do in a week?

Support your current developer

Finally, support the developers you already have in your company, are we the most business minded people? No. Do we know the evolution of technology? I don't know. If you really want to support your developers, listen to their opinions. We are nerds and geeks, as John Stewart said: I believe the word you are talking about should be "expert."

One aspect that I have not emphasized is that most developers would rather feel valued, less paid, and not paid for high wages. If you don't value your developers, one of the following three things will happen:

1) They leave (most likely);

2) They spend less energy on their work and more energy on their own interests;

3) They become the gears you think.

Unfortunately for your organization, this is a seller's market. We know what we want, we use our knowledge to balance what we want. Fortunately for your organization, however, most competitors do not know how to make the developer happy, and the billiard table and free beer are not enough. Also, developers don't always know which environment is their favorite. But if your organization can provide support to community developers and provide a thriving environment for developers, then there should be no shortage of good developers to choose from.

Tips on how to attract good developers: how do you treat your developers