Finding Great Dev Talent

So we’re in the process of looking for good Rails developers these days. The first question I guess is “Why Rails?” Well, there are a lot of reasons and I think that Kareem could answer more of the technical side of the question but I’ll take a shot at the other side:

#1 - We love working with passionate people. In fact, those are about the only types of people we want to work with. You know, the types of people who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…to quote Kerouac. Most Rails devs are like that. Mad to develop in Rails. These are people we want on board EduRev.

#2 - We’re skating to where the puck is going. You know the old Wayne Gretzky reason for being the best player in hockey (he skates to where the puck is going vs. most other hockey players skating to where the puck is). That’s how Rails seems these days. It seems so many of the cutting-edge developers are gravitating there. So while it might be a little tougher now to find solid Rails devs it should be a lot easier in the future as more talented and experience techies take it up.

#3 - We want to Get Real. We love the whole mentality behind the 37 Signals apps and fully intend to build our apps in much the same fashion. Rails devs are often Getting Real devotees. That’s exactly what we’re looking for. Hence Rails is a great choice.

So now on to finding devs. We’ve looked a number of places. Posted to sites like RubyNow. Contacted a bunch of people on WorkingWithRails. Pinged a lot of our friends, colleagues and even stood up on a table in a college cafeteria and shouted “Hey, can anyone here code in Ruby?” OK, maybe not the last part but we done a lot.

Bottom line? It’s really easy and really tough to find developers. On one hand it’s easier than ever. WWR lists over 7,000 Rails devs and that’s only a fraction of all the people that are out there. No doubt there are a lot of skilled folks out there. The key? Knowing what you want. I think about where we started and where we are now and we’re much more clear about who we want our devs to be.

What we’ve learned…

#1 - No dev shops. Talked a lot of them. A lot of really good ones. Ultimately it’s not the right fit. We want people who are willing to go contract-to-hire and then eventually join the team full-time. Dev shops aren’t a great fit for that. Plus…

#2 - We want dudes who’ll work for equity. Not all equity. Devs don’t produce if they are starving. Rather, we’re looking for people who are willing to take a major portion of comp in equity. Why? Contextual alignment. We’ll blog more about this later but ultimately we want devs who will share huge in our upside but also bear at least a little of the risk we’re taking.

#3 - Track record matters. We’re going to talk to the people you’ve worked with in the past. We’re going to check out the sites you’ve done and ask you what specifically you did on them. We want to know that you have a background that demonstrates that you can build really cool shit. This seems obvious. I think the reason to bring it up though is that we’re getting better at asking the right questions to determine if a dev is right for us (I’ll let Reemer fill you in sometime on what some of those questions are).

End of the day and we’re getting close. Not there yet. Still have a ton to learn here. But I feel that I’ve learned a lot more about finding good development talent in the last few months. If you have any lessons you’ve learned please feel free to add them in the comments. Back to work…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 10:05 pm and is filed under building edurev. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.