Day 16 of #productidea — Course to transform B developers into A developers

This is part of my #productidea 30 day challenge on which each day I write about a new product idea.

Instead of developers, I could have said designers, marketing people, PMs, etc.

Startups search desperately for top people, because they are few and each member matters a lot. When you talk with hiring managers or CTOs, everyone tells you they can’t find enough great developers. The best ones are usually happy at their current jobs, they don’t want to move to another city or they are with their own project; and that’s only if you can pay them well. The window of opportunity to hire them is really narrow. This is something that started happening in San Francisco many years ago and it’s becoming more common in other areas of the world where tech companies are booming.

So the question is, how could we have more great developers? One year from now there will be more great developers, as more juniors and seniors have learnt from their experiences working. Can we accelerate that process reducing that period to six months? How can we transform a B developer into an A developer as soon as possible? Currently, there isn’t any other solution rather than self-motivation plus time.

The first thing we need is the motivation from the person, not just be another developer but be a great developer who is able to lead and take everything into consideration.

Having that, a part-time course could be organized where developers would be challenged with tough decisions to make in quality of code, scalability, urgency and team management. This is not the same as bootcamps or courses to teach the basics, this is about the hardest knowledge. Much of that knowledge is currently shared in talks, articles or books; but here it would be concentrated.

A possibility is that local companies join to organize those courses so the technical pool available enlarges. Probably, those developers, who nowadays have a cultural fit but a not so high technical level, will be ready to join the trenches in 4 or 6 months.