Think hiring engineers is impossible? You are doing it wrong.
Three keys to give you a killer advantage
If you’ve been in tech for the last couple years one narrative you’ll hear over and over is that hiring good engineers is virtually impossible. If you feel like that… you are probably doing it wrong.
Is hiring good engineers easy? No. Is it trivial to inspire and recruit talented folks with a lot of alternative options? Absolutely not. But to say it is nearly impossible or the hardest thing ever is just not true — and startups need to stop the complaining! In the last month alone we could have doubled our ecommerce engineering team simply by hiring the qualified in-bound requests from developers we’ve received.
There are three things you should focus on if you are feeling defeated in your search for technical talent:
Make learning your team’s priority
Most developers are motivated by learning as one of their highest values. Once your engineering organization gains a reputation for being a place of learning talent will be knocking down your door. Invest in mentoring and pushing junior developers into bigger and bigger roles. Trust me — we see this paying off all the time at Science. Most of the inbound interest we get is from folks that have been referred by our existing developers.
You can’t fake a learning culture though — just putting all sorts of new technology buzzwords in your job postings won’t cut it (you know the ones I’m talking about!). Neither will a 20% policy that gives people a diversionary learning opportunity. Where developers really thrive is when you push them to learn and grow by working on a core part of the business or tech stack that is outside of their comfort zone or skill level. Provide this experience for them (with coaching and mentoring) and they will naturally bring their friends.
Use remote teams effectively
Science has developers on four continents including core teams in India and Armenia. Our US based team is scattered along the West Coast from Portland to San Diego. It’s true, there is crazy competition for a limited pool of talent in San Francisco. So don’t limit yourself to developers where you are based. In fact, most devs value uninterrupted time to focus so being removed from constant meetings can be a huge benefit to remote teams.
Re-evaluate developer pay
Developer pay has gone up only slightly over the last five years while demand has gone through the roof (See here: link link). In fact, starting market salary for developers is exactly the same today as my starting salary was ten years ago. We don’t skimp when we pay our lawyers, why should we expect super talented developers to work long hours for free food or a mythical chunk of equity? The good news is that the best developers like learning more than they like money — but they do use money as a yardstick of whether you value their contribution. So don’t skimp.
If you focus on these three things I promise you will soon have a healthy, growing engineering team that is also eager to refer their friends (shameless plug — check out Springrole, a Science portfolio company, if you need help getting referrals).
Of course there will always be exceptional circumstances that make hiring disproportionately hard — such as a super specific product area that requires deep understanding (computer vision and bioinformatics are standout examples), but for the vast majority of startups and tech companies this is the exception rather than the rule. Even areas once considered the domain of uber-engineers such as machine learning and distributed systems now have enough of an open source ecosystem that they an be tackled by talented full stack engineers.
So next time you are about to complain about how hard it is to hire a good engineer… just don’t. I’m tired of hearing it.
I build software at Science, Inc, a technology studio based in Santa Monica. You can follow me @neddenriep.
