Let’s say your a hiring manager and you need to hire a software developer for your team.
Well, most people start with a job posting:
- Dice: $459
- Monster: $395
- Career Builder: $419
- Joel on Software: $350
- Signal vs Noise: $400
You may also want to browse existing resumes:
- Dice: $895
- Career Builder: $600 for 2 weeks
- Stack Overflow: approx $500 per week
And if you’re having trouble you may need to use a recruiter:
- At about 20% of your new hire’s annual salary, that’s $10,000 – $20,000 per hire
So now you have a giant pile of resumes, time to spend hours and days and weeks on:
- Reading and sorting through resumes
- Following up with candidates
- Doing phone screens
- Administering coding and technical tests
- Doing technical interviews
- Doing behavioral interviews
- Doing management interviews
- Considering a hiring manager’s salary, that is some serious $$$
If you don’t find anyone, you have to start over.
- Losing money in opportunity cost as we wait weeks and months just to find the right person
If you do find someone, you may want to test the waters:
- Hire them to do a project for you on the side: $5-15K
- Hire them on contract for 3 or 6 months: $20K-40K
So, how much money does it cost to hire a good programmer? A lot!
That doesn’t even take into account what happens when you get it wrong and hire a bad programmer. You waste all that time on training them on your system and incorporating them into your company. To top it off, crappy programmers actually mess up your system worse than when they started.
Imagine this.
5 programmers who can really write code at the level required. You can test them all you want, but it’s not necessary, they’re already qualified and capable through and through. They are all looking for jobs and geographically located near you (assuming you care).
You meet with them to determine mutual culture fit and pick the one that gels with your team.
How much would that be worth?
(Put your answer in the comments)
Well, over $9000 obviously. Considering good programmers can be up to two orders of magnitude more productive (or less destructive
then bad ones, it makes sense they get paid in multiples of the bad ones.
Sadly, this is not the same across the world.
The question is not how much it costs to hire a great programmer, the question is how much it will cost in lost income not to hire the very best programmers.
Programmers are like racehorses. Bad ones cost a lot, good ones cost a lot more, but only good ones win races.
You cannot know that a programmer is a great hacker until you have seen his work. And you have not seen his work until you have hired him and worked with him for a year. See Great Hackers by Paul Graham at http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)
There is no guarantee that a great hacker will produce great code when working for you. There are many variables that contribute to great code being written and the great hacker is just one of them.
Companies and founders make the mistake of developing a system in which they assume to fit in great programmers, only to realize they will at best end up with average programmers who need supervision, and will produce a tangled mess of code. Granted, for many companies, that is the only option. But if you want to build the next Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, or, dare I say it, Microsoft, you will need to spend a lot of money, the kind of money that will make paying Joel on Software or Stack Overflow Careers (which btw I don’t use–don’t want to pay to post my resume) seem completely insignificant.
So, just like horseraces: you burn through (b)millions of dollars getting top talent, or you content yourself never finishing in the top 5. There is no alternative.
Oh, and on culture: there is already a Hacker culture: embrace it and live it, and hackers will gravitate to you; don’t, and they’ll stay away. Of course, you can only live the hacker culture if you are yourself a hacker, therefore it is impossible for companies founded and run by non-hackers to naturally attract hackers, and furthermore, if by sheer monetary incentive or plain luck a great hacker should come work at your non-hacker-led organization, he will naturally gravitate away, so you will have to bend over backward financially and corporately to keep him or her.
This is why I said developing a system that will handle average programmers is the only option for most companies.
On hacker culture: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
You may want to read this a few times.
Despite claims to the contrary, effective programmers do not always subscribe to all, or even many, of the “Hacker identifiers” listed by people such as Paul Graham or Christopher.
Software development as a whole, and coding specifically, involve a variety of tasks. Effective programmers have a talent for one or more of those tasks, and normally perform well at almost all of them as a result of experience and determination.
As a result, no two “Great” programmers are in fact alike, and the tendency to attempt to describe them with a single set of beliefs and requirements is just one of those weird myth things.
Unsurprisingly, some great programmers can’t really be bought – money matters little to them and all they’re interested in is suitably interesting problems to solve. However it’s a continuum from that right through to people with the right talents and motivation who will cheerfully work on whatever you like so long as you pay them for their time. Not all of them are hideously expensive either.
In practice, as with any person with sufficient talent, the only real difference between a really effective programmer and an average one, aside from their outcomes, is that they simply have more options – if they care to look they can probably find a better offer.
The secret to avoiding that does not require some mystical founding by a “hacker” or some bizarre set of rituals involving mantras about free software. You simply need someone who has a talent for attracting, motivating and retaining people. You need to understand the person you hired, and employ them in a fashion that rewards them appropriately in consideration of the skills and knowledge they bring to the table.
Yes, you will pay over the odds for a really effective coder, but you will pay over the odds for an effective manager, an effective sales person, HR, CEO, admin, etc etc all the way to secretary. There are benefits and downsides as with all of these roles.
Programmers are not special, it is tiresome to read the same old litanies over and over again acting as if their skill at convincing computers to do things in a smarter fashion than their peers somehow offers a company greater leverage than any of the other myriad of skills involved in building a world class company.
Hire good people because they’re *good*. Pay over the odds because they’re *worth it*. But more than anything else, build a team with a shared vision, because without that, you can’t get great results.
150% agree with Richard (no need to point out the math! Just being cheesy) If you find the golden egg, and hire an awesome programmer, and pay him an awesome amount, and he shows up to work (even if it’s from his home) and the non-technical staff is piss-poor, that treasured golden egg is going to get apathetic at best, or just leave. And the best long term employees, programmer or otherwise, know that enjoying the people you work with is just as important as enjoying the job you work at.
XD That’s just silly
That, and casual dress codes for coders. It’s not possible to write amazing code with a business-based dress code
@Xain:
Usually the good programmers need to show up to client & stakeholder meetings, and they should be well dressed for these occasions at least.
I believe that before we ask “How much does it cost to hire a good programmer?” we must first ask “what skills should a programmer have to characterize him as “good”"?apart from that in my country programmers are hired with far less money.Really sad but sooo true