Jot Thought

After giving my notice at Intuit I was asked to stay on board until September 20th. This is the day that QuickBooks, the product I work on, is ready for its marketing release. My main tasks over the next couple of weeks involve finding a couple .Net software engineers to join my (ex)team.

For my web development business, Esomnie, I have been looking for a Rails developers for a rewrite of PreviewFirst.com. With all this recruiting and interviewing, I have seemed to stumble across an interesting difference between hiring a Rails and a .Net developer.

The Rails and the .Net communities have very different roots. The typical Rails developer is a web hacker who has worked with various scripting languages like PHP, Perl, or Python or, a Java developer who is tired with dealing with plethora of complicated libraries and frameworks. A developer who is interested in Rails typically agrees with most of the strong opinions it imposes. For example, the community generally accepts the notion of Test Driven Development (TDD), Agile software development, DRY, and the importance of CRUD.

On the other hand, .Net developers come from a variety of backgrounds. Some come from the desktop world of C, C++, Win32, and MFC. Others come from the VB6 either on the desktop of ASP. And yet others are migrating from server-side Java to ASP.Net. This community is very diverse and it is typically to have .Net developers with very different outlooks on how to develop great software.

What does this have to do with recruiting? As mentioned before, I have been doing a lot of recruiting for both Rails and .Net developers in the past week. The table below shows the number of applicants for each position and how many of them met our qualifications enough for an interview.

As you can see, we received a lot more resumes from .Net developers than Rails developers. This seems to make sense. The .Net developer community is much larger than that of the Rails community. But check out the interviews. Out of the 25 (prescreened) resumes, only 1 candidate fit our job description enough to interview.

Compare that to the Rails position. We only received 8 resumes. But of those 8, 7 met our requirements enough to interview. I realized, after sorting through all those resumes, that the .Net diverse community makes it more difficult to find a qualified candidate that matches your criteria. While Rails, since it is very opinionated, it makes it much easier to find a developer that shares your opinionated Rail point of view. In other words, looking for a Rails developer provides a higher Signal vs. Noise ratio compared to finding a .Net developer.