How To Hire Me (or any other programmer)

I've been a sales/biz dev entrepreneur & founder for 15 years. Bootstrapped my last co. to $7-fig/yr net (this was non-tech, east coast). Recently moved to bay area to build tech startup grounded in sector I've lived & breathed for many years.

Startup aims to tackle pain-points in enterprise relocation, $50+B market. I have a MVP & have been prospecting/selling 12-15 hrs a day. In 3 weeks since launch I have 2 large companies that have agreed to to direct significant percent of their business to us., this=profitability.

I seek to recruit a talented developer that has product design experience as well as leadership & network capability to become VP product. I'm attending meetups, contributing where able and working hard to connect to SV ecosystem. But developers still seem to see me as the "biz guy" enemy.

I work for a NYC startup that has hired Philly residents in the past - either remote or remote-occasional-commute. Geographic salary fences are falling, and falling quickly - may I suggest $95K is below-market? Heck, around here $95K is below-market for a good, fresh undergrad.

I certainly drilled down into more detail, but I'm not convinced that there's as much of a dichotomy there as you may see. Nonetheless, I understand what you're saying, but I'd counter that "details matter" and that different details matter more to some people than others. Also, I certainly don't intend that list to be seen as an alternative to your list, I mean it to be additive (from my perspective anyway).

2. Mine are about them, yours are about you.

To some extent, yes. But asking whether or not a company has, and understands, a reasonable software development methodology, or whether or not they have a culture that foster employee engagement and empowerment, is very much about them.

Mine show interest in the big picture; yours could easily paint you as a demanding nit-picker (whether you are or not).

Yes, I will say that I chose to drill down to a deeper level of detail. Basically I'm working backwards from the bad stuff I've actually seen in my career, and putting it in terms of "these things suck, I don't want to be in this environment, so convince me that this won't be the case here".

I just don't think I ever would (or ever have) discussed them with a prospective employer.

I mostly didn't in the past myself. But that was out of naivety, or fear. Either I was naive about the existence of the issue, or I felt like "I need this job too bad to be too demanding." As I've gotten older and more comfortable in my skin, and more confident in the value I can provide, I don't worry about that as much. I can walk away from a job offer, knowing there will be others.

And even if I didn't discuss these issues with potential employers, they have certainly been factors. I was invited to an interview with $BIGCORP once, went in, did the first round of interviews, and then got a phone call asking me to come back in. I politely declined. Why? I saw that all of their developers were in a big cattle shed full of low-walled cubicles - an environment that I consider "optimized for maximum distractions" and fairly inhumane. I decided they weren't a good fit for me based on that factor alone. Doesn't mean they were wrong and I was write, or vice versa, it just wasn't a fit that would have worked.

- Be Interesting

Well, the company either is or it isn't. If you're an auto parts distributor who needs to convert your application from Cobol on AIX to ASP.NET on Windows, then well, you aren't really very interesting. And there's not one thing the recruiter can possibly do to change that.

* Care

Perhaps you genuinely care, but what if you don't? The recruiter is human too. Maybe they just want to do their job and go home. You can't decide to genuinely care. You either already do, or not. And we're saying they absolutely must not pretend to care. So ... the only remaining option is not caring.

* Acknowledge Applicants

I don't think Matt appreciates the sheer volume of resumés that come in for an advertised position. I know some HR departments that insist on sending an acknowledgement for every received application, and they spend a lot of man-hours on it, and are constantly having to defend this practice to executives. And honestly, why does the typical badly-formatted, ungrammatical resumé actually deserve a response, anyway? Matt may be a special unique snowflake, but trust me, all those other people aren't.

* Get to Know Programmers

You can't do this without getting to know programming. And the whole point of specialization of labor is that you shouldn't have to. You can hire a doctor, lawyer or plumber while knowing nothing about plumbing, doctoring or lawyering. Why should it be different for programmers? As a profession, why should the rest of the world bow to our desires, instead of us creating a better product for them to buy?

* Let Me Code, Dammit

This is the one piece of good advice. The best way to interview in any field is to engage the applicant in job-related task behaviors and observe the results. With programming, we're lucky that this happens to be pretty easy. But I don't understand how this squares with the earlier rejection of having the applicant code a Fibonacci function.