The myth of the developer hiding under a rock

I often hear that hiring is a mess and nobody can find anyone. Supposedly we Czech developers are bugs hiding under rocks. We’re good, but nobody knows about us. We don’t write or program in public, which apparently means making at least one GitHub contribution a week. Universities are supposedly useless because there are too few students, demand is enormous and salaries are princely. And developers barely have to lift a finger because it’s all served to them on a silver platter. The result? Good people are hard to find. They were hard to find fifteen years ago too. Maybe twenty or fifty years ago. It’s always been a problem. What’s changed is how we try to solve it, and that clearly isn’t working.

We live in an age when we judge developers by references on a network where everyone is, or was, everyone else’s colleague or acquaintance, or at least pretends to be (LinkedIn). Or we judge by the impression a GitHub contribution makes, paying only a little attention to whether the code belongs to a ten-line shell script or to a project nobody ever needed. At interviews we treat solving a problem as the height of expertise when it would take five minutes to find and understand the answer online. So we either hire nobody, hire and fire, hire and assimilate, or hire and quietly grind our teeth. We use the wrong method badly and then complain about it.

You can’t tell how good a developer is from GitHub stats or a LinkedIn profile. Programming is a trade you learn your whole life. You essentially need two things, the willingness to learn and to work on yourself. Above all, it matters what company culture you fit into. A bad culture can make you a worse developer, and a good one can make you better. Look for people who fit your culture and build the kind of culture that attracts the people you want around you. Then you don’t have to fret about LinkedIn or GitHub, and maybe you don’t even have to worry about whether someone is more junior or senior or which language or technology they know today.

A quick aside for well-meaning people. Company culture isn’t defined by what you hang on the wall or print in the company newsletter. It’s what shapes how the group behaves, its esprit de corps, and it arises incidentally from how you act and what you do. Telling your colleagues to innovate won’t make innovation happen. In the same way, you can’t create a culture by ordering one into existence. It’s nonsense.