Finding a Nerd
How to recruit an engineering or design student without sounding like a tool.
A new paradigm of social interaction. A bit like Snapchat, but mashed up with Tinder and Uber to make for a Twitterific experience for pet owners. The next Facebook.
Engineering and design students have heard pretty much any combination of tech or entrepreneurship buzzwords pitched to them as The Next Big Thing™.
We want to help you with your project, we really do. The problem with engineers and designers is that, while our skill set is useful to extracurricular projects, we also tend to be oversubscribed with a million projects and rather substantial coursework. To make matters worse, the better people are at making things, the more they tend to have on their plate.
So what’s a non-technical or non-design person to do? Knowing how to get people to help you with your project/app/startup is simply a matter of knowing how to ask, and, more importantly, how not to.
Nerds Just Want to Have Fun
Left brains and right brains. Techies and creatives. Hackers and hipsters. Whatever you want to call them, engineers and designers may be special little snowflakes on the individual level, but we tend to all want similar things, especially while still in school.
Interesting Problems
As makers, engineering and design students love a challenge. Being in highly challenging fields, and tending to be intellectually and creatively curious, we’re constantly looking for something new to sharpen our skills or push us to the next level.
Maybe that hardcore iOS hacker who’s built 20+ iPhone apps doesn’t want to help you build the iOS version of Tinder for dogs, but perhaps she’s willing to try her hand at building a marketing website for it. Maybe your Google Drive competitor isn’t destined for great success, but it could give some Computer Science major a chance to play with that new natural language processing library he’s heard so much about. That design student down the hall is probably sick of being asked to make Craigslist clones, but might be willing to help figure out how to address the problem of rape culture on campus.
It’s highly beneficial for us to be exposed to as many different types of problems as possible. In both tech and design, one of the strongest conceptual tools available is to map a problem to something you’ve already encountered. If a problem can be reduced to a series of manageable sub-problems, it’s much more tractable. As a result, we eat problems and steal their powers (just like Kirby), learning something new and “gaining new powers” from each problem or situation we face.
When you’re selling a project, the maker archetype often couldn’t care less about how “straightforward” it is — we care if we’re solving a problem (either a technical/design problem or a user problem) that interests and engages us. Appealing to this sense of adventure and love of learning is the truest way to our hearts (even more so than through our stomachs).
Passion
Here’s a little hint about makers: a lot of the best coders aren’t in it for the money. There are some extrinsically motivated coders and designers, but focusing on non-monetary incentives can often bring about a stronger team than just throwing money at the problem. In the early stages of development (and later on as well, to some degree), projects depend on being built by someone who will go the extra mile to see them through.
Instead of money, what we want is a project that engages our passion, as well as yours.
An important point to keep in mind is that you being engaged and passionate is just as important, if not more so, than the passion of the people you’re bringing onto the project. If you’re not excited about your own project, why should I be?
Want me to bust my ass working nights and weekends to help you achieve your goals? Show that you’ve got skin in the game. Non-technical members of a team need to be just as heavily invested in the project as their technical teammates.
Show enthusiasm, put in the hours and pitch the project like it matters to you. Showing that it’s your top priority is a very important step towards making it one of ours.
At the end of the day, you’re not even pitching your project to me, you’re pitching yourself. Simply being a student is very rarely a qualification on its own. Your job is to convince me that you not only have the passion and skills to carry the project to success (even if you need to ask for help from others), but that you’re also somebody I would want to work with.
Collaboration
When you bring a technical or creative person onto your project, you need to make it clear that they’re a partner, not a subordinate. Granted, there is a line to walk, and if you’re paying the bills then you are responsible for managing your team’s time. Still, there’s never an excuse to treat your teammates like puppets by telling them exactly what you want built and expecting them to spit out code or Photoshop documents.
Engineers and designers aren’t remote-control coding and design machines who are meant to religiously execute your vision. As implementers, we often bring alternate viewpoints and experiences to the table that shape the product design process in a very meaningful way. Even if you are the “idea guy,” there’s often a lot to be learned from the people working close to the metal.
The process of building something has to be a collaboration, not a top-down, command and control exercise. Nobody likes a pointy-haired boss. If you treat makers as teammates and acknowledge that they can contribute to product decisions, I guarantee they’ll do better work and feel much more engaged.
That said, a lot of this does come down to expectations (on both sides). Not every coder or pixel jockey wants to be an even partner, and they may prefer well-structured tasks and deliverables. This is fine, but very rarely translates into a desire to have no input whatsoever. Making sure you have clear and open communication with your entire team early on can help ensure that you find a comfortable (and harmonious) balance of product input.
Respect
It’s ok to not understand what coders or designers do, but own up and acknowledge that. A good way to piss off any self-respecting maker is to trivialize our work (whether or not it’s intentional).
Referring to projects as “simple”, “straightforward” or “easy” is a dangerous game. Trying to guess how much time a task will take if you don’t know how to actually perform said task is similarly ill advised. No, your five page marketing site isn’t a three hour job.
Likewise, leave the decisions of what tools to use up to the people actually using the tools. Specifying in your job post that applicants must be “familiar with the LAMP stack and PHP ninjas” when you don’t know the ramifications of those architectural decisions doesn’t make you look decisive. It makes you look like a micromanager.
Finally, be careful with how you value an engineer or designer’s work. Not every project has a budget, but it’s a bit presumptuous to expect people to work for nothing. In addition to good will, interesting problems and the chance to actually build something, find ways to reward your teammates (equity, swag, friendship, etc).
If you do try to use money as an incentive, be sure to understand how much our time is actually worth. For example, the average starting salary for Cornell University graduates last year was $58,200. For Cornell Computer Science, it was $95,670. Due to the nature of the learning curve in Computer Science (it’s hard to go from the basics to highly productive, but once you’re there, you’re there), interns tend to do roughly the same work as full-time software engineers, and are paid accordingly. This doesn’t by any means imply that you’ll have to cough up tens of thousands of dollars to pay your fellow students to work on projects with you, but don’t be surprised if we’re insulted that you think our spending several weeks on a website is only worth $200.
Nerd Hunting
Now that you have a sense of what a developer or designer is actually looking for, now it’s time to make your ask.
Ask For Help
Everybody loves to help out the humble beginner. Nobody wants to slave away under a Steve Jobs/Kanye West sized ego.
Bursting into a Computer Science Facebook group or listserv demanding that people line up to get in on your world-changing idea is a good way to come across as full of yourself (and full of something else). Oftentimes, taking the ego down a notch and admitting you need help is the most effective way to actually get the attention of the people who can move the needle on your project.
Maybe you think you are the next Steve Jobs. If that’s the case, pretend you’re a total n00b and ask for help — you might be surprised to find out how much others have to offer.
Learn About Code and Design
It’s not necessary to learn enough to actually code or design your whole project yourself (though that would make things simpler). It is important to learn enough to have a reasonable conversation about a technical topic though.
Being able to discuss what engineering work there is to be done with a prospective engineer shows the person that you actually care about and understand what they do. More importantly, it shows you’re willing to step out of your comfort zone to make your project succeed.
Having an understanding of what’s actually easy versus what’s computationally difficult is an incredibly important skill for anybody who works with engineers. It makes scoping projects a lot easier (maybe you need one developer, or maybe you actually need five) and keeps you from unwittingly making unreasonable requests of your teammates. Even better, it makes you a better project manager, since you can tell if somebody is trying to BS you.
Be Persistent, but Not Annoying
It may be hard to hear, but when you first post in a bunch of Facebook groups, chances are that all the engineers and designers won’t immediately recognize your brilliance and flock to you. The important next step is to not give up.
There are plenty of ways to build momentum and move a project forward without an engineer or a designer. Make a pitch deck. Build a mockup. Enter idea competitions. Validate your concept.
If you don’t care enough to do the legwork to push the project forward, why should I (or anybody else) care enough to actually code it up?
Here’s the thing: the more you push the idea forward, the more buzz it generates. A random Facebook post is just that — a random Facebook post that I may or may not ignore. Those flyers on campus are starting to seem familiar though, and I recognize the project name when I see it on a list of campus startups. After overhearing a couple people talking about it in the local hackerspace and seeing you pitch at the campus career fair, it’s much more likely to have registered in my brain as credible and worthy of my (ridiculously short) attention span.
Use Your Friend Network
While broadcasting the fact that you need people to help with your project across every social media channel to which you have access will increase the quantity of people who see it, recruiting through your friend network instead is all but guaranteed to increase the quality of those connections.
In trying to build a team, the emphasis should rarely be on the raw talent of the members. Instead, be on the lookout for people who are passionate about the problems you’re trying to solve and work well together.
This is where referral based recruiting comes to the rescue. Not only will people be more likely to respond to a request from a friend, but people who know both the recruiter and the recruited student personally (or professionally, or socially, or even vaguely) will have a better idea if it’s a good match to begin with.
What’s that? You don’t have a huge network of (or any) developer friends? Sounds like it’s time to make some.
Where to Make Nerdy Friends
The prospect can seem daunting, but it’s actually way easier to meet engineering and design students “in the wild” than it is to attract our attention in the vast expanses of cyberspace.
The thing to remember is that, just like any other person, we value genuine, personal connections. Engineers and designers don’t want to be commoditized and filed away in a rolodex as a potential “human resource” any more than a business major wants to be stereotyped as somebody who would do such a thing.
When you’re talking to somebody who you’re interested in working with, it’s often aggressive and unappreciated to jump straight into your pitch and try to recruit them. Taking a genuine interest in what they’re working on and finding common interests (just like any friendship or reasonably strong connection) will go a lot further. Even if you don’t end up with a new teammate, you might end up with a new friend.
Take a Class
It might sound like I’m being facetious, but one of the best places to find a CS or design major is in a CS course. Taking an intro level course is not only a great way to learn about the world of engineering and pick up some basic skills, but gives you an easy way to talk to product-focused people. Given the explosion in popularity of intro CS courses in recent years, it’s also more likely than not that you’ll meet other non-CS majors who are exploring the subject.
While you might find more experienced hackers in some of the higher level courses, you shouldn’t worry. It’s very unlikely that you’d need to sit through a PhD level algorithms course or a practicum on compilers to find talented coders. Most projects don’t actually require a lot of really advanced theoretical knowledge (the content of the first few courses in your school’s CS curriculum will usually do the trick). In addition, people in the lower level classes are usually there because they’re curious about the subject and are hungry to learn more.
A lot of times, intro level web development, mobile development or interaction design classes are your best bet. These often have a mix of design students, less experienced engineering students who are looking for opportunities to improve their skills and more experienced back-end or systems programmers who want to learn more about front-end programming and/or design.
Tech Talks and Meetups
If taking an entire class isn’t your style (or is a style that clashes with your schedule), a good alternative is to attend tech talks or meetups. People often attend these events with an eye towards networking, so they’ll be receptive to meeting new people, especially not in their direct field/major. In addition, the content tends to be fairly high-level to account for differences in experience, so chances are you’ll be able to learn something, even without being a code or design guru.
Unlike the class crowd, people at extracurricular events are demonstrating an interest in tech beyond what’s required to graduate, and will often be the type of people who are more likely to take on a side project. If not, then they’re probably there for the free food/swag, in which case you’ve already identified a clear recruitment hook.
Hackathons
When it comes to people who enjoy building things, you can usually find us by the dozens (or hundreds) at hackathons. A hackathon is a short (usually 24–48 hour) sprint where engineers, designers and product people come together to see how much awesome stuff they can make in a limited amount of time.
If you can deal with the sleeplessness, the crowd and the overabundance of caffeine, a hackathon is a great place to meet engineering or design students.
Some hackathons such as 3 Day Startup or Startup Weekend tend to be more entrepreneurial, and therefore actively recruit business-oriented participants, but there’s no reason a non-technical person can’t join in on a standard hackathon. While hackathons are quite accepting, the key is to bring something to the table to help your team, since, just like for a group assignment in class, nobody likes dead weight.
Whether you’re pitching the final product, helping to mock up and design layouts (on teams without a designer), picking up a bit of code over the course of the hackathon (the Google Maps API or a bit of CSS are some easy things to start off with that can make a big difference during a hackathon), or even just being the team cheerleader, keeping energy levels and spirits high, being able to contribute to a hackathon team is an amazing bonding experience. Given that stress levels can get pretty high in the wee hours of the morning, a hackathon is also a great way to judge the compatibility of potential teammates.
Hackerspaces
Hackerspaces, coworking spaces, makerspaces and all of the other variations on the concept are not only a great place to meet cool hackers and hipsters working on their projects, but they’re a great place to plan your next moves and work on building up some momentum if you don’t have any coders yet. Most have resources like quiet or collaborative workspaces, printers and whiteboards galore where you can crank out some plans or pitch your ideas. They’re often abuzz with tons of makers who are more than willing to talk about all the cool stuff they’re working on.
Becoming a familiar face at a local hackerspace can increase credibility and make it a lot easier to recruit teammates. While most of the people you meet at a hackerspace will already have projects they’re working on, they may be on the lookout for their next undertaking, or have a friend who’s interested in the types of ideas that you’re pitching.
Onwards and Upwards
Though it’s a lot of text, the main takeaway from this for trying to convince engineering or design students to join your project is that we’re people too. We have lives, goals, strengths, weaknesses, insecurities, motivations and all the same things you do. Taking the time to talk to somebody and truly understand what their motivations and expectations are when recruiting them to join a project is an important part of the process. With some degree of certainty, it will save everybody a lot of grief, increase your chances of success and keep you from looking like a major tool.
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