Why hiring programmers for your startup is hard and why immigration reform is a key part of the solution

Ask any tech startup what their greatest challenges are, and hiring will always be in the top 3 and it should be number 1. It’s very hard to hire the people you need to succeed.This is true in Silicon Valley and it’s true in Silicon Roundabout - both places I’ve helped build great engineering teams for startups, so I have first hand experience of just how hard it is.

On the other hand, we have articles like Jordan Weissmann’s in The Atlantic that argues that America’s Tech Talent Shortage is a Myth. Weissmann quotes figures showing only 67% of US Computer Science graduates end up working in the field and that the unemployment rate for programmers remains high.

Could both views be true?

Can we reconcile these apparently contradictory views? Are high tech employers lying about the availability of talented programmers? Some observers have suggested that companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook are lobbying to increase the number of immigrant high tech workers so they can access a pool of low-cost programmers instead of hiring Americans - the same argument is made in the UK and other countries too. That would be pretty cynical of the tech companies, but if there are many unemployed programmers, why else would these companies want to bring in lots of skilled immigrants?

The truth is, both of these positions are founded in truth: there is a genuine shortage of viable programmers in high tech clusters and, at the same time, there are many programmers on the job market and unable to find work.

What makes you so special?

The reason that both of these positions hold, is that not all programmers are the same.There is a special type of programmer who will succeed at a company like Google or a tech startup. These programmers tend to be: voraciously learning new programming languages and techniques; capable of taking on a problem and driving to a solution; extremely focused on their users’ wants and needs; highly optimistic; ambitious and never satisfied with the status quo; always looking for new problems to tackle; passionate and driven; great communicators; always working on the process and craft of creating excellent code; comfortable working in an unpredictable, ever changing, fundamentally risky environment.

This doesn’t describe all programmers. You need to look for a different set of attributes if you are, for example, IBM hiring for a researcher or Goldman Sachs hiring to build derivatives trading systems. A relatively small subset of programmers fit my description; that doesn’t make these people better, but they are relatively rare. In my experience, around 10% of people applying to startups truly meet these criteria. Finding these people is time consuming and results in a lot of companies hiring from a relatively small pool of suitable candidates, especially in hubs like Silicon Valley or Silicon Roundabout.

Why not just hire lots of programmers?

So is this a snobbish, elitist industry that should get over itself and just hire more of the programmers who are already on the market? It certainly can be - heaven protect us from the rise of the obnoxious brogrammer. But there are good reasons why startups hire programmers with a specific approach to the world. Startups thrive on innovation, self-motivation and close teamwork. You can only afford a few hires, so each one needs to be right - the cost of a bad hire is enormous, it can literally kill your company. Filtering for the right type of programmer greatly increases your chance of success.

Could the startups train the skills they need? Many of them do. Even small companies often have impressive support for employee learning. But while specific skills are easy to teach, attitude and approach are almost impossible to inculcate in the timeframes required by startups - months not years. Startups need to hire for people who already have the right approach.

So I continue to look for programmers who will fit into the highly entrepreneurial, innovative teams I like to work for; and those countries that want a significant number of high tech enterprises need to help their startups find the rare programmers that fuel success and growth. Wherever those men and women are to be found.