Coder. Speaker. Writer.

With the startup market taking off, there is always a clamor to find good engineers, developers, and designers.  People constantly ask if I know people, where to find the so-called ’startup-engineers’, or even where the can find someone like me.

Here are some things to think about for those on the recruiting side:

1. When to start recruiting?

Engineers love to build, solve tough problems, and make progress.  If you’re a founder who is still trying to grasp the product roadmap and create a company vision its probably not a good time to hire an engineer.  There are a lot of engineers out there who have been burned by founders who pull and push them in a variety of directions. We engineers know that need to be agile in a startup and be able to scrap code and rebuild, but want we don’t want is to have a founder who manic or aimless.

2. Sweat equity or salary?

Engineers are humans, we have bills to pay, families to take care of, friends that we want to spend time with, and on occasion indulge in the latest tech gadget.  Contrary to the way we carry ourselves we’re not robots (although I do enjoy being called a machine - but I’m not Summer Glau).  So before you ask someone to even spend an hour of their time writing code or reviewing specs make sure you can pay them in some form (coffee, dinner, laptop, etc.), and if you can’t then you better start thinking of ways to raise enough funds to be able to pay them something.  Don’t expect someone to work for nothing endlessly.

3. How to find them?

The vast majority of us are a lonesome bunch.  We like sitting at home or in coffee shops on our laptops coding away fun projects.  You won’t find us going out to the normal startup networking events or partying all night.  The best places to find us are at tech conferences or panels.  We’ll respond to recruiters on LinkedIn, but we don’t want to be treated like a commodity, and more times than not we’re very happily and gainfully employed.  While we’re willing to indulge to see what’s out there the opportunity has to be ripe enough for us to leave our current position.  Our sense of pride an accomplishment comes from being a part of a team and building something.  So we get attached to our team and product, and its hard to forsake that for another opportunity that we’re unsure of.

When people ask where can they find someone like me, it makes me smile.  The truth is I’ve been created and molded by my experience.  4 years ago I started playing in the startup space.  My motivation was to become a better engineer and knew that the startup space was where I’d learn the entire breath of the development cycle.  It was a tough 4 years filled with mistakes and hard work, but I loved it because I got to create something of value that impacted millions of people’s lives.  And over that time period I learned from great engineering mentors.

There are probably a lot more people who like me have a fire and a hunger.  They want to work hard and prove themselves.  I think its important to keep that in mind rather than always trying to covet a rock star developer with a proven track record.  It’s a huge risk to take on a junior engineer, but would you rather have someone on your team who is willing to learn, grow, commit to the company, and put in the long hours to improve themselves?  Or do you just want a code monkey?

4. Motivating Them

Engineers are motivated by a variety of things.  The most basic is a good company culture.  They  want to know that the founder cares about his team, and his engineers and will give them the resources to get things done.  They want to work on challenging projects but understand that there will be grunt work that needs to get done.  The key is to balance it out.  By letting them learn and play with new technologies from time to time.  We don’t want to work on the same things for months on end without any sort of end in sight.  Part of an engineers desire to solve problems is also a reflection of them wanting to improve themselves by becoming a better developer.  This is only possible if we have time to learn and improve our own thinking, and practice.

There is a reason people choose to become engineers, they want to solve problems mostly those related to systems, usability, and improving people’s lives on a large scale.

5. Listen to Them and Develop Empathy

I’ve seen too many engineers express dissatisfaction at changes in deadlines, product features, and increased workload without gratitude.  Or founders who want the impossible done as of yesterday.  Remember people only have two hands!  You’ve got to understand what engineers are capable of accomplishing and how quickly they can move.  If they’re coming up to speed with the product, development cycle, and company dynamics is good to let them ramp up slowly.  Yes, building software is cheap and fast unlike other products.  But there is still the overhead of testing, scaling, and securing.  So while it might seem like a simple feature should take a day to implement there is more infrastructure and thought that need to go into it before it can be delivered to an end user.

Engineers are good guys, they’re builders, refiners, and affect the course of history by improving human lives.  Its up to the entrepreneur to unleash their potential to accomplish great feats together.  Don’t think of them as code monkeys or worse yet commodities.

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