The Developer Divide: When Great Companies Can't Hire

http://www.nirandfar.com/2012/01/developer-divide-when-great-companies.html

by tadruj • 15 years ago

30 18 15 years ago

tadruj3• 15 years ago

I think that companies like Pinterest don't need lone wolf type of developers, but should look to buy whole shops of quality developers who are currently in the wrong business, but have the brain to architecture and scale.

nireyal2• 15 years ago

It's a good idea but the practicalities of finding a recruiting an entire shop from overseas makes it very difficult. I think hiring local engineers is the only way. What could Pinterest do to attract more local talent?

tadruj3• 15 years ago

Talent Acquire Silicon Valley startups on their pessimistic side of startup roller-coaster, just make sure they've build scalable stuff but were unable to scale the business.

kls3• 15 years ago

What could Pinterest do to attract more local talent

Please note that I am not implying that Pinterest has this problem, but one thing that cannot be discounted among some start-up technical teams is out and out arrogance on the part of the team. I cannot count the times that I have seen a really good developer (top of the 10Xers) not get a position because the interviewing technical people did not like an aspect of the individual, specifically the aspect that they wrote code differently than the companies technical people. Two different skilled technologies can implement the exact same solution in very different technical implementations. Generally the hiring technologist will fall back on excuses like well his use of X leads to an unmaintainable system when in fact X may be very maintainable for that developer and how he thinks. The point being there is a huge problem in this industry when in comes to hiring that can be summed up by two observations which are: different solutions do not equal bad solutions, and lack of knowledge on the part of the interviewer does not equal a bad solution. Far too often those are the conclusions that are drawn though out of self reinforced bias. Again I am not saying that this is the case with Pinterest, but they should check their process to ensure that they are not doing it to themselves. I have always contended that in this industry it is more expensive to have a false negative than a false positive, a false positive will surface within a week on the job, a false negative is lost forever and possible so is their social circle.

mahyarm• 15 years ago

It doesn't have to be overseas, it can be the rest of the USA too. Canada and Mexico are also relatively close. Many good developers don't want to move to the bay area and stay where they are.

And for the Canadians, health insurance costs are greatly reduced.

dsolomon• 15 years ago

Finding quality people is easy. Finding a quality company is the difficult part.

qq66• 15 years ago

I think both problems are equally hard.

sbierwagen• 15 years ago

Since Nir didn't bother telling me what Pinterest actually does, I checked for myself, and it appears to be... a Tumblr clone.

A Tumblr clone with $27 million, and a bunch of users, but so what? What are they actually doing any different from Tumblr?

danielharan• 15 years ago

Your behaviour is exactly what is described in the article.

There has to be something different, since users are joining Pinterest in droves. Non-techie women on my FB feed are raving about it.

How about you ask passionate users of Pinterest why they find it so fun?

Turing_Machine• 15 years ago

"Non-techie women on my FB feed are raving about it."

Exactly my experience. The pins I see in my FB feed are almost exclusively from women, and are almost all non-technical (fashion and home decor seem to be very popular). I've never seen anything with this level of uptake for that audience, except maybe Facebook itself.

Pinterest gets non-techie women. It's going to be huge, IMO.

tadruj3• 15 years ago

Pinterest is a design oriented pin-board which focuses on curation not creation like Thumblr.

rjd• 15 years ago

But so what? very few websites are much more than CRUD + validation with some analytics thrown in to make money. If you're lucky there maybe some curly business logic to deal with, but generally not.

The main difference between one company and the next is the hype/cool factor. With a comment toned like yours it leads to the point that many developers are interested in personal ego than actual software.

hornbaker• 15 years ago

If Pinterest continues their exponential growth rate, they will pass Tumblr like they're standing still in the next few months: http://i.imgur.com/bmrdx.png

I'd proffer that it doesn't really matter what they're doing different from Tumblr; whatever they're doing is working and organically engaging a very large number of users. Try their service if you want to see what state-of-the-art social onboarding feels like circa 2012.

The Developer Divide: When Great Companies Can't Hire

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