How does a software company attract talent? Compensation? That’s how they attract people. Free lunches and foosball tables? Keep guessing.
The most effective way for a company to bag top-tier engineers is simple: let developers be developers.
Engineers Drive Innovation
Software is a symbiotic creature, and there are two ways a product is built: from the top down and the bottom up. Top-down development means that requirements are curated by and flow from the business, product owners, and managers, downward to the engineers. With the latter, developers explore new ideas and use technology that may be outside the organization’s standard gamut. Ideas for new products or features are born and pushed up to product owners where they can be cultivated.
Both of these methods must strike a balance for a company and its products to be successful. Without a focused vision, a product will fail. Without embracing new ideas and technology, a company will become irrelevant.
Open Source is King
How an organization perceives OSS is paramount to developers. Companies that contribute and maintain open source projects tend to attract talented software engineers. Just look at some of the top repositories on GitHub. Unfortunately, there can sometimes be an eternal struggle between engineers and lawyers.
It’s equally important that a company supports the use of OSS in its own products. I’ve worked on projects where the use of open source code was discouraged in favor of homegrown solutions. This is dangerously senseless considering most mature, open source projects are battle tested and have large community support.
Developers want to work at companies that embrace open source, which is a push-pull dynamic.
Let Me Work, Dammit
I do all of my development on a MacBook Pro running OSX. Some of my coworkers use similar hardware configurations with various flavors of Linux. Back when I worked with .NET, I used Windows. The CLI is now my home, however, and Vim is Old Reliable sitting in the driveway. Some prefer IntelliJ, some PyCharm, and yet others Sublime Text—to each his own.
What I’m getting at is everyone has their preferred setup for building software. If your product does not have technical constraints resulting from the stack you’re using, don’t force me out of my element. Let me use the environment I’m comfortable with because it’s the environment I’m productive with.
No More Ninjas
Tech recruiters: no more code ninjas, no more Jedis, no more rock stars, no more gurus. These words are an unfortunate by-product of the startup culture. You may have the best of intentions, but to me, these words are red flags and marginally patronizing.
Perhaps I’m overly cynical, but I tend to translate job postings of this nature as “Seeking to exploit naive, young programmer to build a startup by working unsustainable hours. You’ll get equity!” It’s the hard sell.
We get it, you’re looking for skilled programmers, but no self-respecting programmer will call him or herself a rock star. And if they do, not only does it blow expectations out of proportion, it makes them look like a dick. Let your company, its products, and its culture speak for themselves. If you aren’t finding the “rock stars” you were looking for, it wasn’t meant to be.
Let Developers Be Developers
Yes, I’m biased. Developers are opinionated—I certainly am. Nonetheless, I would hazard to guess many top tech companies tend to address several of the points I’ve touched on. Call it headstrong, obstinate, whatever, but these are things I like to get a feel for when interviewing with a company. Others may disagree, but I suspect you wouldn’t be too hard-pressed to find many who take the craft seriously share similar views.
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