Jot Thought

Ok, we’re officially swamped now. We’ve got several cool, good sized projects going, including our first internally built application (can’t yet disclose the nature:-) But we definitely need more help. To that end, we’ve posted two positions on our jobs page: one for a user interface designer, and another for a web developer. If you know anyone who might fit the bill (you know, creative innovators currently spending way to much time in meetings…), please send them our way.

Dean Mao has officially joined the Esomnie team. Dean comes to us from Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco.

We met Dean at the San Francisco Ruby meetup a while back and found that we shared common passions around software development. He’s got a background in Smalltalk, loves Ruby, has done work in open source projects and also runs his own Askterisk server - in short, he loves to create great software.

Dean’s currently living in San Francisco but is looking to move down the Peninsula a ways, which means he’ll be getting a car again (he gave up his old car when he moved here last year from Atlanta.)

We’re quite excited to have Dean join us - it’s already been a lot more fun in the office!

Well, we’re officially in hiring mode. Business is so strong that we need help asap. After doing lots of research and advice gathering on general employment (and there’s a lot,) we got down to business by writing up a couple of job descriptions and heading out into the world seeking great talent. Our methods to date have consisted of:

1. Posting on our web site
2. Posting on free sites like rubynow.com and rubyrockstars.com
3. Posting on paid sites like jobs.37signals.com and linkedin.com (we also used their free posting to our own networks)
4. Posting on the Stanford and Berkeley job boards
5. Announcing open positions at local ruby meetups
6. Posting on various message boards to which we belong
7. Sending out requests for recommendations to friends and family

The results have been interesting so we thought we’d share.

37signal’s job board, at $300 a post, generated the most traffic to our site, but not the highest number of applicants. In fact, we got as many inquiries through the free ruby boards as through 37signals. We’ve had the most luck from the meetups (fewer candidates, but much higher quality) and using LinkedIn (great candidates through our own network and more submissions through their paid listings than any other source - which is a good deal since they only charge $145 a post)

We also encountered a couple of unexpected results:

1. A ton of recruiters and staffing firms submitted to our jobs form. Suffice to say, we’re not willing to pay fees of up to 30% of first year’s salary.
2. We had a number of folks contact us looking for help obtaining an H1-b visa or sponsoring them for one they already have.

All in all, we’ve actually met a number of really promising candidates, and have one who’s accepted our position of web developer. You’ll hear more about him when he starts in a few weeks:-)

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.