talent vacuum

Businesses whining they can’t recruit software developers. Wah wah, lack of talent, etc. No there isn’t. Look on Github. There are over three million projects on there and most of them are completely non-profit written by hobbyists scratching some personal itch. Talent is not in short supply. Therefore you must begin asking why you are not attracting it.

Stop whining and look at your recruitment process. You’re probably paying barely anything and you’re probably using a recruitment agency/consultant who is rude, stupid and difficult to deal with. You might be asking candidates to start programming in the interview. That’s a favourite, but it’s also a pain. For every line of code I write, I probably spend ten minutes thinking about it. Even coming up with skeletal design and stuff, nope, sorry, I don’t think on the spot. It makes me write bad code. If you’re doing this, you’re a bad interviewer. Maybe your company is just boring. Maybe it gives the impression that it’s more concerned with stock prices and revenues than anything else. Most companies are. But as a programmer I couldn’t care less. All I want is somewhere to write some code, be creative and do something innovative once in a while. I don’t want to be bogged down in process or have to use obsolete tools because you think they are “stable” and it would be “risky” to try doing things differently.