Tech Cofounders: Lack of developers or lack of imagination?
“Hello, my name is X and I’m looking for a tech cofounder”. This is the natural state of my inbox as of lately. That there is a scarcity of developers is not news. You can read it everywhere. What is rare though, are people trying to fix this. As always, it’s free to voice your complains about a problem, but much harder to be constructive and put your money where your mouth is.
The number one ad-hoc solution for big companies is to throw money to the problem. We’ll pay outrageous wages to attract top talent. Non surprisingly, this has had a limited success. If human resources departments spent more time understanding human behavior they would have easily deduced that, while money is important, it’s not the source of talent attraction.
The next line of attack has been the “Hotel California” technique. Companies will shower their employees with all kind of benefits and local services so they’ll get attracted but they will never leave. This has worked to a certain extend, but in the end, no matter how much you buy your work force with, people tend to look for meaning and resonating values.
Finally, it’s dawning on several companies that corporate culture is one of the cornerstones of employee retention. When we talk about culture people get all fuzzy and talk about cool offices and playful scenery. There is a grave risk of entering cargo cult territory. Culture is, in its essence, about values. A tribe, a social group, stands together because they share a common set of values. Cool offices and game consoles are just the reflection of such values, not the cause.
Most start-ups, though, don’t have such resources and so they’re stuck to appeal to their coolness and imagination to find someone to join them. While many criticize the lack of talent, the scarcity of developers, others attack the “quality” of such people. I believe, it’s not the quality of their work they complain about, but their behavior. Start-ups require a very specific mind set that not everyone shares. It’s not a problem of quality but of professional values.
On of such values is responsibility. In a start-up there are many things going at the same time, which means, each team member is dealing with multiple issues and can’t police the others. If trust is breached and responsibility forfeited, the start-up in question will most surely spiral to its death. Now, most start-ups are looking for senior developers, not because they need someone with experienced knowledge of coding issues, but because they’re looking for someone that has had proven responsibility elsewhere.
There is a problem with this attempted solution, there isn’t a big market for unicorn-like senior developers that will work for nothing in exchange of imaginary equity, specially in countries like Spain. There are actually two reasons why paying out equity doesn’t really works in most countries. Firstly, the chances of a start-up becoming a serious business are very slim. Much more in places like Spain. The reason isn’t because start-ups don’t work here, but because most people behind them lack seriousness and responsibility, which in turn translates to dropping the towel at the first sign of problems. The second reason why it’s impractical to pay in equity is because, betting on equity assumes you have a way to sustain you and your family somehow until the start-up raises some money. In ecosystems where raising money might take up to a year, you need to have enough resources to sustain one year without a salary. The problem is, there is a correlation between hard-to-raise-funds and low salaries. This means that, in such ecosystems salaries don’t allow for much saving, which in return make the going on without a salary really hard.
The only way to actually get someone to work for a start-up without getting a salary is to touch base with people that have the necessary tech skills but haven’t incurred into any debts. In this case, most European university systems ensure that students don’t incurre in major debt as what happens with their US counterparts, but at the same time they get a good tech education. Plenty of universities have Computer Science or Computer Engineering degrees and crank hundreds of graduates a year.
Funny enough, most companies seem so obsessed with the search for the holy-Grail-senior-development that they fail to see that there are many young people that could fit the bill. This is specially hard in countries like Spain with under-30 unemployment rates over 50%. I find it amusing that there has been a rise of employment portals in Spain in the past years, but non of them target students on their last years of university. While I assume a part of the problem is their narrow mindedness of just being a broker and expecting both sides to join in their platform, the major problem is that, those of us that have attempted to recruit from the university have ended up burning our hands.
The problem goes back to a lack of responsibility of the students. They mostly expect to earn great wages, work next to their apartment and have a reduced workload. Sadly, they’re not at fault. It’s the way society works in countries like Spain. There is such a culture of getting things for free without any effort that our youngsters have fallen into the same fantasy. While the economy was booming, the issue was largely ignored, but when the shit hits the fan, panic spreads and we start believing that the Apocalypse is upon us. Not so. It was just a matter of time until reality sunk into society.
All this said, if we want to tap into the amazing student workforce, someone needs to help out with removing such mentality gap. It’s a simple issue of experience. The current programs for entrepreneurial activities within Spanish universities are scarce and those that come from outside the academic world are even rarer. The ones that do, only target students in their last year, ignoring the other students, ranging from freshmen year all the way to undergraduates.
Again, short-term mentality is trumping any efficient aid. For students to learn about commitment and responsibility, they need to experience, early on, what working is, specially in a start-up context. That means, plenty of dropouts and failed experiments, lack of commitment and dropped projects. This is to be expected and is part of the relearning process our students need to undertake. Of course, this would mean to devote resources to train such students beyond what the university is currently doing. Everyone would welcome a trained student force but no ones wants to be the ones to do it. Not even those job seeking portals that so flamboyantly praise themselves as relief for our current unemployment situation.
I suggest the creation of a training force that would bring tech students in touch with start-ups. Students would get experience and get exposed to start-ups while they get real life experience of what entrepreneurship is all about. Such force needs to be extremely active. This is not yet-another-internship program, but actually more of a start-up student association. The goal would be to preach about entrepreneurship within the university and group anyone within the student force that is willing to work on a start-up project. On the other hand, such group should be gathering start-ups that are looking for developers so that there is a pre-existing project pool. In the same way, the group should preach to professors within university so that some parts of the homework that’s handed out could be parts of start-up projects.
Essentially such group should be the bridge between the academic world and the start-up world and should operate as a start-up itself. Due to the expected dropout ratio, projects should be entrusted to multiple students that should form working groups to tackle each of them. While this might look like what current university or student associations are doing, I have yet to see a single one of them that has solid foot on both worlds. Either it’s a student born association that expects start-ups to send them job offers with limited influence within the professor ranks, or it’s a start-up that expects students to apply for jobs within their database without even bothering to swing by the university. There needs to be an active bridging between both and and active group behind it, with people on both sides of the equation.
Concluding, while there is a lack of developers, the lacking isn’t in qualified developers but on committed, responsible and professional developers that are willing to work for close to nothing in exchange for experience. There is, of course a market for higher talent that is, more or less, tackled by professional head hunters, but the student workforce market is sorely misrepresented in the ecosystem and everyone seems to ignore it. There are valid reasons to ignore it currently, but no one is doing anything to fix such gap between what’s needed and what universities are producing. I call up on those foundations that so highly talk about giving money to create employment to donate money to the creation of such an institution to bridge the gap that will surely help in producing better developers for our current needs.
