Don’t hunt for superhero developers

I am sure you have seen job postings looking for senior programmer in [name-jour-language] with at least 5 years of experience using latest tools which are not older than 2 years. Every time when I see such a job offer, I am pretty sure, that this company, looking for “superhero developer”, is doomed. So why do we see this all around? Actually, it is not so hard to understand.

The fact is, that only a few companies has well designed career system and programming environment which allows them to hire juniors. Lack of such a career program is usually implication of poorly managed “human capital” – missing direct connection between business goals and people necessary to achieve them. Running such a business model, you will find your self bouncing between urgent “lack of resources” and “low utilisation”. When you are in situation that your business is growing, you will need to hire some developer ASAP to start the latest [mega-super-hype] product designed by your product department. And here we are posting our job offer for super hero senior developer whom should save us in unrealistic time schedule, programming best new product in full speed from the first day since she/he will be employed. Uh, what a bad idea.

On top of this, all super heroes has some kind of superpower and they tent to be the leader. Believe me, you won’t be able to coach such all-superhero team of yours. To make it even worse, superheroes are expensive and soon bored by routine work maintaining product which is not mega-super-hype anymore. You know what that means – you will have big churn of superhero developers and it will be very expensive for your company. I suggest you to say big and loud “NO!” to this strategy.

Rather start building your own career program and culture. Hire juniors for their potential. Let them learn the best from your seniors in you development environment. Challenge your seniors with your most innovative business ideas and keep them interested by continuous requirements for innovation, growing application scale, while maintaining hi-level of quality and flexibility in application development.

Of course there are exceptions from this approach, but if you find your self in a situation looking for superhero developers, you should take a long walk and think about my advice. I hope that you will decide to change your job posting to find the last superhero. The one who will change you culture and creates sustainable development environment on top which you will build your business.