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Attention, Rockstar Developers: Get a Talent Agent
ErichTheRed writes OK, we all know that there are a lot of developers and IT people in the field who shouldn't be, and finding really good people and hanging onto them is very difficult. However, I almost fell out of my chair reading this breathless article suggesting that developers hire agents. I grant the authors that recruiters are sometimes the only way to cut through the HR jungle in some companies, but outside of the hot San Francisco startup market, can you imagine a "10x rockstar developer" swaggering into a job interview with his negotiating team? I'm sure our readers can cite plenty of examples of these types who were only 10x in their own minds...
If you're trying to hire an agent, at least in other areas of creative space like acting or writing novels, the agent themselves has to believe you're worth the effort. So if this really does become a thing where a hotshot developer wants to find an agent to represent him, you can be damn sure that agency is going to be a hundred times harsher about testing skills before agreeing to represent the talent than an interviewer would be.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Many developers ARE famous. If you're a dev who created some very popular/well known open source framework, you probably have an army trying to get to you. You're basically a celebrity, and in the extreme case may have to end up dealing with things like one.
My employer has been trying to build a front end team recently, and willing to pay whatever it takes and remote work is fine. But even getting in touch with some of these people to be able to say "Hey, name a number, we'll give you that number" is near impossible, because they shut themselves out with all of the normal recruiters trying to reach them.
Then you have the "not famous, but very good" devs. The average shitty dev still get a seemingly infinite amount of recruiters reaching out to them. The ones that are actually good? Yeah, its crazy. And if they don't want to go to work for a well known company (ie: Google), and actually have to poke around the market to find a good match, it can be more work than a full time job and a half. If you're looking and have an actually useful recruiter under your belt, its helpful, but at the end of the day they don't work for you. Having someone who actually does? Why not.
Never trust anyone who calls Programmers "Rockstars, Code Ninjas, Gurus" or any other derogatory dumb ass hipster name. Being a "Programmer", "Developer", "Hacker", or a "Coder" is awesome enough. There is no need to attach prepubescence boy names to the job. You're not a "Teenage Multiplatform Ninja Coder!" Grow up and stop disrespecting the field. Seriously, you don't see Doctors, Lawyers, or Mechanical Engineers using such language to recruit.
(Plus people who call programers "rockstars" probably use Macs an live in San Fran. That alone makes them retarded.)
A lot of performers may appear extroverted on stage, but confess to actually being very introverted. That's not an assert when looking for work.
Plus, when the norm is short-term gigs, that means that a lot of time has to be spent looking for work. If the job can be outsourced to an agent, that means that the performer (or whoever) can spend more time actually working and practicing.
Developers, of course, don't fit that mold. We're all team players who are just eager to meet and deal with as many people as we can as much as possible and we'd never want to pass up social time just to do geeky code things.
Being worth the effort is about being marketable, that's all. Talent has very little if anything to do with it.
As for developers, I would think if you're in Silicon Valley and working for Google or facebook, a lot of other companies are gonna want to poach you - not because you are great, but because they want to steal the technology.
I heard this VP of "engineering" at a social media firm *coughmeebocough* bitch about she couldn't get "qualified" people because the only people who were capable of doing what they need worked at Google and Facebook. Ah no. What she really wanted was to steal Google and facebook's tech without having to do her own R&D.
THAT is what is meant by qualifications. They ended up selling to Google anyway.
and finding really good people and hanging onto them is very difficult.
I thought that last bit is missing. Anyone agree?
God do I wish I had an account with mod points so I could mod you up. You just said everything that I wanted to say.
All of the "rockstar" developers I've had the unfortunate chance to work with have been arrogant beyond belief, 100% set in their often-esoteric (at best) or downright destructive (at worst) ways of coding, and sometimes actually belittling to their coworkers when they express concerns about said rockstar developer's behavior.
These people don't exist in a vacuum, however, they exist because of the other side of the coin, the enablers: Engineering managers who are so far out of their depth or simply so out of touch with the people under them that they scoff at those who complain about their golden boy. After all, they're paying him 30k more than the next person down on the rung, got to protect that investment, right? Then, when their coworkers actually decide to show a shred of backbone and stand up to the rockstar developer, you can bet your ass he's in the manager's office 30 seconds later, with the manager eagerly lapping up a meal of bullshit about how that coworker is a "problem".
Here's a hint: The rockstar developers, the ones who claim to be such amazing coders, typically aren't. actual good developers, the actual people who know their shit backwards and forwards as far as a given field of programming is concerned, are the ones encouraging the people who work under or around them, getting their shit done, and going the hell home at 5PM. Would John Carmack or Mike Abrash describe themselves as "rockstars"? No, but I'll bet they're a hell of a lot better than any jackass coder demanding an agent.
"I'm not a rockstar. I'm a professional. My job isn't to write the greatest code ever. My job is to turn out software that works, that does what you need done, on time and without bugs or maintenance nightmares down the road."
A productivity difference of 10X-20X is well documented. I've seen it several times. Note that's average productivity over a year, not consistently every day. Here's an example:
I've seen more than one instance in which a average, "competent" developer will spend 10 days writing a module to add feature X to some software, to solve business need Y. The expert/guru/rockstar will spend ten minutes changing a setting to solve the same problem.
So the average person spent ten working days, the expert spent ten minutes in this one case. The expert could then be only equally as productive for the rest of day and they will have accomplished in one day more than the first person accomplished in ten days. I very often solve business needs by _removing_ code, removing a restriction or problem. You can imagine that removing a blocking problem can easily be ten times as productive as the typical approach of solving new problems or handling new tasks by building new systems. Simply asking "why can't we use the existing system for this new task?", then tweaking the existing system to handle the new requirement, can be hugely more productive than starting out with the idea that new tasks require new systems to be built.