Great developers are raised, not hired

I have been following hackernews for 15 years. 20 years since I saw an stallman interview in local pc magazine, blown away by the intensity of the man. I am an artist. I love to read plt stuff and haskell lisp code, I cried over sussman lectures.. It expands my mind, finding ways to express my thoughts so that common people in my world can understand me better, for their sake. I dont write programs, a lot of the code feels unmusical, not ergonomic, my musical background made me aware of how unmusical a keyboard feels like. Learning functional programming has made me aware how most people use imperative chain rule sequences to generate their thought patterns. I would love to work with inspired people just building new ways to express thoughts. But I quietly read and try to translate visions and feelings into code. Writting linear sentences is becoming a drag. It feels as if the time is ripe to raise our conversations to a more constructive functional level. It is happening. It is a slow progress. I can't see myself working in IT because of business deadline material oriented approach. So I continue to quietly read plt stuff. I do not want to understand anything because the other is usually limited to a smaller temporal frame. I read code and apply different real life variables to it and see how the interactions develop within my interaction space. How would you mentor me? /rant

Are you picking and choosing or are you farming?

Currently we grow engineering skill in (often) high cost institutions with limited capacity such as traditional universities. Moocs and bootcamps are alternatives which try to address the scalability, cost, and time commitment barriers of traditional education.

The question is should there continue to be a strong dichotomy between organizations who consume the output of these growth channels and the growth organizations, or should software development companies create programs of structured education and growth that have a low barrier to entry?

As others have mentioned startups who can hunt/find/pick people with relevant, high quality skills have the advantage of not paying the time and organizational cost of training.

Personally I think that large organizations should be taking more hands-on approaches that take all, or nearly all comers, and then provide training for the kinds of skills they need.

If you look at military funding for medical educations (for example) you'll see that the organization can be very generous in terms of time and training cost as long as a candidate ends up with the skillset they need. You might not go in wanting to be a urologist, but you can end up highly skilled and very well paid if you're willing to meet the needs of the organization.

Thankfully, not everyone thinks as you do.

The question is why would someone leave your company once you train them? If someone is more valuable on the open market than you are paying them, pay them market rates. HR compensation policies need to be in line with the market, not the old “we have a policy of not giving more than 5% raises”.

I’ve been working in development for a $long_time but I restarted my career about 10 year ago and my rise is about the same as you would see from someone just graduating from college 12 years ago. Out of the four job changes I had, two were partially because the next company was willing to offer me $25K more (not talking crazy west coast salaries here).

One other went out of business and the other because they decided “they didn’t want to be a software company” and they just wanted report writers a year and a half after I was hired as the dev lead.

1. Pay more than everyone around you. (Obviously, not generally viable.)

You don’t have to pay the most, but don’t pay so much under the market that everytime the employee sees a random job posting or a recruiter call they know they can make signifactly more just by picking up the phone/responding to an email.

2. Make mentoring/growth a central strategy at every level so people will see a path to grow. I'd be curious to hear other possibilities.

That helps. But why would I spend a year a two “growing” at your company, when I could both “grow” and make a lot more money some place else?

I’m at a happy place where I work now, and I am decently compensated compared to the market, but even now if someone was willing to pay me $25K more, all other things being equal (work life balance, no travel, short commute), I would jump ship. But the only realistic way I could make significantly more is by going into management (not interested) or being a consultant (not interested right now).