Thinking of hiring your first developer? What we learned from talking to developers in charities

Published in

The Digital Fund

6 min readOct 23, 2020

Late last year at NCVO we were considering hiring a developer for the first time. If you’re interested in why we thought it might be a good idea, and why we thought it might be the right time, have a read of my previous post.

We wanted to take some time to think carefully about whether this is the right thing to do, and learn about how to do it well. With help from the fantastic Nissa Ramsay of Think Social Tech, we set out to interview developers to learn from their experiences. We also looked at job descriptions and adverts and spoke to other charity digital people that work with developers in their team.

Thank you so much to everyone that talked to us or helped us to connect with people.

I was about to publish a previous version of this post in March when covid-19 hit. Since then the world has completely changed. It is no longer the right time for NCVO to hire our first developer, although I still think we will get to that point.

But maybe it feels like the right time for your organisation. In case you are thinking about it, this is what we learned.

Lone developers in charities are rare

It was not easy finding people to interview that fitted the profile we were after — the only developer within a charity. We have pretty good networks, but we discovered that most charities have no in-house developers, and those that do have teams of three or more. But we did find others in a similar position to us. They were really interested to see what we learned because they were thinking of making the same leap, but were similarly worried about whether to do it, or how to do it well.

Developers like to work with other developers

This wasn’t particularly surprising. An assumption we had going into the research was that developers would want to work with other developers, and this was definitely borne out. Some people we talked to recommended that we don’t try to hire just one developer.

None of the developers we spoke to worked side by side with developers in external agencies. One of the reasons we had thought this might be right time for us to hire a developer is because we’re now working with great agencies, doing amazing work, who believe strongly in developing the skills of their charity partners. We also have really good collaboration practices in place, great documentation and development workflows. We’ve been working hard to get these foundations in place so that developers can build the right things in the right ways. So if someone joins us, they wouldn’t be working alone, they’ll just be the only developer on NCVO’s payroll.

Selling the mission and the culture is the key

We all know that charities can’t pay competitive salaries. Everyone we talked to loved their jobs, and stayed despite earning less than they could in the private sector, because of the mission, and because of the culture. They talked about supportive teams, enjoying coming to work, knowing that their work was making a difference, work being interesting, collaborative ways of working, and feeling that their contribution and expertise was valued by others.

If and when we do take this step, we will need to think carefully about how we can convey our culture and the value of the work we do through the recruitment process.

With the role itself, we also learned that we need to understand and communicate the balance in the role between maintaining existing products, iterating products, and developing new things. Different people are drawn to different things, so honesty is the key here.

A supportive and knowledgeable team is important

When it comes to the wider team and the developer’s role within it, we heard that it’s important that direct colleagues have enough technical knowledge to understand what the developer is doing. It’s also important to have someone to help prioritise, test thinking and share practice with. This is another reason that we had thought this might be right time for NCVO, as we have a head of digital and digital product managers with this expertise and experience, as well as a wider team across our agency partners that we can share with and learn from.

Relationships with wider stakeholders and the extent to which digital ways of working are understood across organisations are always hot topics. We learned that different people will want to play different roles here, so we would need to adapt to the strengths and preferences of whoever joins us. Some people will prefer others to protect them (and their time and ability to focus) from stakeholders. Others really want a seat around the table and like to play a role in influencing and collaborating with stakeholders. We’re lucky enough to have a large enough team that both approaches could work really well.

Recruitment may take longer

Speaking of recruitment, what we learned from the experience of others who have recruited developers, and the varied routes* into the roles of those we interviewed, suggests that we would need to be patient and take our time. It’s also important to think about different and varied ways of finding people that might want to apply. Some of the people we spoke to developed their skills on the job, having previously been in different roles within their organisation.

*this included conventional routes such as Charity Jobs, the Guardian and Charity Digital Jobs, as well as sites where developer jobs are advertised and relevant online communities and networks.

Good kit is important, but most developers will adapt to what the organisation uses

We weren’t surprised to hear that good kit was important. This included powerful laptops, desk set ups (two screens) and the ability to have some control over the set up. But we were surprised that those we talked to were largely agnostic about which technology they used and were happy to adapt to what the organisation uses. We would need to be clear about what we can offer, and we’re lucky that our IT team are very supportive (as long as any set up is secure and fits with our wider infrastructure).

Being able to work remotely and flexibly is important. Pre-covid, NCVO already had a great approach to flexible working, and as we start to deliver our new strategy we will explicitly be open to people working from around the country, and not just from London.

Hopeful, but waiting

These are the most important things that we’ve learned from our research. Based on this we drafted a job description and advert, and then covid hit…

We learned a lot of things about how challenging it can be to hire a developer. But we also came away excited about the incredible value that a developer can bring to a team and an organisation. We were heartened to hear from developers who were passionate about the work they were able to do for their charities and how much they valued working there.

We felt that we were in a really strong place to do this well — the work we’re doing is exciting and important, we have great technical partners for a developer to work with and learn from, and we have a really strong digital team in place.

Covid has thrown a spanner in the works, but it doesn’t change the strengths that we have. It will just take us a little more time before we’re ready to take this step. But I’m hopeful that it will happen in time.

(I was able to bring Nissa Ramsay of Think Social Tech in to help me with this research thanks to our grant from The National Lottery Community Fund’s Digital Fund).