Weirdly, however, I don’t feel like I’m being arrogant because a lot of these traits that you speak about, no one else seems to agree with it. I can’t understand why, but I eventually over a long period of time get buy in from others, it just takes them 6 months to a year before they get it. I don’t push too hard and I know I’m not always right, but I never see the same burning desire to find what is the “best way” (which seems to always be constantly changing) to do something in a lot of other people.

The other thing I have really had to turn down the volume on is the enthusiasm. See, I love coding, and making things people love to use, and when I see light bulbs go off over people’s heads it just gets me jazzed. Show me a sick UI that people “just make sense” and I’m excited. Show me a new way to refactor something to make it easier to change or test and I’m a happy guy. Other people just seem to be doing their day to day tasks, and I’m again not faulting them, but there are sometimes when a healthy argument on why we should have unit tests for at least some functionality on a legacy application would be a good thing. Other times it’s press time and I get that, and we clear out of the way to get things done but mostly that seems to be the way things done. But give me a reason like “it worked before, just do it the same way” when it would take an extra 1 minute (not kidding) to do it the right way, and I’m left scratching my head. I’d rather stay the extra 5 minutes per day to do it right…

I suppose I don’t want to ramble so I’ll leave it at that. I think if anything if someone see’s what you’re getting at with this ad you’re going to get what heck of a developer, so I really like it. For me it really sticks out way above the other “Must have 5 years experience with C#” bull crap you get everywhere else.

Ideally, you want to already be both known and attractive before you even post the opening. Case in point, Fog Creek. I don’t know if Joel bothers posting for his own openings, ‘cuz the people he wants probably aren’t reading job ads, but they read his blog. They know who Fog Creek is. They watched shanselman’s video tour of the office a couple of weeks ago and know what the place looks like.

You need to promote yourself even when you aren’t hiring, so that people will notice when you are. And if you’re in a position of obscurity, you need to make it easy for people to overcome that. Your web site’s not helping you out there. It’s totally customer focused.

Do you like working with really talented developers?

You want to learn from them, they want to get the same from you. Great developers always want to work with other great developers.

Hope that helps some. I feel your pain, findin great Sr. level devs can be tiresome.

~Lee

I am curious about whether or not you see the ‘tell me your best hack’ question as valuable or not (I was going to write another post on this topic). We actually just dropped that part recently because the flow of candidates dwindled quite a bit and we were nervous that the essay question possibly prevented some people from applying. I’m not entirely sure that we made the right decision, but we were nervous that someone who is only passively looking may not be willing to jump through any hoops until they’ve at least had a phone interview with us and learned more about us. Do you think that was a good call or bad call on our part?

Particularly good point about the 1.1 stuff. We’ve actually made enough progress since we originally wrote this ad that I definitely feel comfortable rewording that part or even changing it all together. Although to be fair, I can deal with someone not being bleeding edge as they are passionate about learning and thus have a really solid foundation (i.e. they read books about design or do deep dives into particular technologies rather than just being vaguely familiar with a broad range of newer technologies).

You need to focus on adding more wheat to the mix, and wheat is harder to separate from its loaf. It doesn’t NEED to look around, so you have to make it WANT to look around. How can one find out more about life there? Do the employees blog? Where? You also need to work on the “Come Play With Us” (aka Careers) section of your web site. Take a look at Perceptive’s and Garmin’s.

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Oh, and you want bleeding edge talent, but you’re still on 1.1? You might want to just rephrase that little bit along the lines of “we’re currently migrating to 3.5.”

Promoting how cool your company is to work for and how cool your products are in the local press and via social media is probably going to be more productive than a catchy job posting. If you find a catchy job posting that draws in the best talent, even if they are marginally happy where they are now, don’t tell anyone your secret!

What I’d really like to do though is to figure out a better way to get them to interview with us in the first place. Surely there is some language that would catch the eye of even the most shy and humble developer over the usual job ad. I’m just not sure what that is…