My first day at the new office
Thursday, 9/7/2006, was the first day at my new San Francisco office. It is a long commute for me, about 1 hour, but I think it is worth it. My friend Shadi, the founder of multiple companies since the late 1990s, has generously given my an office in his 3000 square foot space in San Francisco. So for the next 6 months Esomnieââ¬â¢s official headquarters will be 300 Broadway. Here are a couple of photos of the buiding, the office space, and my office.
The first day was very exciting. I am sharing the space with a bunch of entrepreneurs. All together there are about 7 people working here. The skills of my office mates range from Graphic Design and Software development to Marketing and Business Development. There are a lot of ideas flying around and I certainly enjoyed being around such a positive, high energy group of people.
I canââ¬â¢t wait until I start coming to my office on a daily basis. For the time being, I am still employed at Intuit. My official last day is 9/22/06 but I will be working 3 day work days until then. Next week I will not be coming in to the office since I will be attending a 2 day conference called The Future of Web Apps instead. It looks like it could be very interesting an hopefully worth my time and money.
The Signal vs. Noise of Recruiting: The differences between hiring a Rails and a .Net developer
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.
| Position | Applicants | Interviews |
|---|---|---|
| .Net | 25 | 1 |
| Rails | 8 | 7 |
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.
The Adventure Begins
I officially resigned from my Senior Software Engineering position at Intuit earlier today. I have been thinking about using my talents to start a company for quite some time now. After attending RailsConf, I became very motivated and started to seriously consider my options. After a couple months of planning, some luck, and the stars lining up, I decided to make the plunge.
Here is an overview of my plans for the next six months:
1. Expand my software development consulting business, Esomnie. I started this company in 2001 when I was attending school and continued to service clients while I was working fulltime.
2. Use the revenue from Esomnie to fund some basic web applications that I would like to build.
3. Build enough residual income from these basic web applications to start focusing on some of my large project ideas.
My blog will service as a diary of my business activities over the next couple of months. I am hoping that by writing about my daily business and technical activities, I will be able to better reflect upon my business goals while providing the software development and entrepreneurial communities with insider look of a self-funded startup.