Where did your star developer come from?
If your startup has a star developer :
- what was he/she doing before joining your company?
- How did you find and get into contact with him/her?
3 Answers
UKRAINE! - Our MVP developer is a resident of the Ukraine. We actually found him originally from a small project we posted on Odesk. He was an associate of the developer we had hired. We have had great luck with developers from Ukraine and Belarus.
A great way to find developers is to lookup companies you admire on LinkedIN, and reach out to their people directly.
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oDesk is great. Just curious, does someone on your team manage your dev? Who does user experience and architecture work? – Alex Cook 14 years ago
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We have a total of 11 folks in our dev team. They are not always working on the same projects. They vary from guys who specialize in flash, C#, (Html Jquery front end), DB, etc. There is a lot of overlap. I still use Odesk if we are looking for a special talent that we cannot fill through referalls but most of our guys know good guys. All our projects are intially planned in the states, with heavy feedback from our senior guys. Project management is done from the states. We operate very loosely, giving these guys the flexibily to work however works best for them. We have daily update.. – Frank 14 years ago
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..emails, and my partners and I are regularly on the phone. Most of these guys are very responsible. We pretty much divide tasks, set timelines, and have rarely had to push things out for reasons other than adding more features. Most of the guys are in Eastern europe with exeption of one guy in Turkey and one in Sweden. They sometimes work on side projects and we allow that. Most are on Salary fixed monthly, with bonuses based on how the project performs, or if we just feel there was an outstanding job. We have hired some bad apples, but the good ones police the whole situation. – Frank 14 years ago
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ITs not uncommon for them to "Rat Out" someone that is not pulling weight, cutting corners, or just not qualified like we had expected. In ukraine there is a wealth of talent. The culture is a lot easier to work with than Pakistan and India, accents are not a problem, and there is drive to provide quality. We travel there quite often and have met with our team. We have not purchased space for a dev office, and probably will not because our guys are perfoming so well working from their homes, (plus two share an office they rent). I would strongly look into Ukraine and all of eastern europe. – Frank 14 years ago
I used Craigslist. He has his own software development company (apparently his own shop, and he works from home). I was looking for someone local, and it was almost impossible to find someone- almost everyone was offshore. Maybe that's a Craigslist thing, but it was a difficult search.
Ironically, I interviewed someone for the developer position. I asked him to do the famous FizzBuzz test and asked several difficult programming related questions. He became very frustrated and agitated that he was unable to do the FizzBuzz test that he basically just got up and left.
Later this same person, said he had a friend who was a really good programmer that I had to interview. Luckily I took his advice and interviewed him with some questions and a different type test. He passed with flying colours, and is my all star developer. It's really ironic how it all played out but I am really happy with the outcome.
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Great story! What was his background and what was he doing before you hired him? – Zippy 14 years ago
