What else can you offer to attract developers besides high salaries and beautiful girls?

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During the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, companies offered a ton of perks to attract developers: ping-pong and pool tables, fancy lunches, arcades, booze, signing bonuses, oh yeah, and stock options! Some of these perks are now classic jokes, but others are standard at modern tech companies.

A lot has changed in the past 15 years, but the need for good developers has not. Big companies still offer all kinds of crazy benefits to attract the best talent (think of those stories about working at Google, for example), and they buy companies to get their developers.

To illustrate this, let's assume you've built a small company and you're looking for new developers, by which I mean developers who care about their output (like hackers). Given the many demands of developers, how do you compete?

Not surprisingly, the first thing you have to do is understand what developers think. We are very different from the average worker, we don't stop working just because we leave the office. We hack on our own projects, we do more for the experience, and we participate in user groups and contribute to the technical community. We live and breathe technology, that's who we are. Understand this, and you're already halfway there, learn to encourage this among us, and you'll be on your way.

It’s not hard to attract developers’ interest. It just requires you to quietly support the things we are interested in. Here is an example of what you can do:

Support local user groups

Although developers are considered to be very introverted, we love to get together and share ideas and new technologies. One way to do this is to join a user group, and companies that support user groups are very attractive to developers.

Supporting user groups is cheap and easy, and the simplest and easiest thing a company can do is to provide snacks, food, and drinks. It doesn't have to be extravagant, a snack plate, pizza, sandwiches, or soda is enough.

Another way is to provide a meeting place, because once the discussion group grows, it is not easy to find a place to meet. Opening your office to the discussion group is the best way to find talent.

***, they often need speakers, so encourage (but don't force) your developers to give talks.

Coding Contests and Hackathons

Developers not only get together to discuss technology, we also get together to play with technology. Most languages ​​have some competitions (website programming competitions, js hacker song, Django Dash, etc.); major open source projects often release new versions to fix bugs; what's exciting is that new projects or versions will be released at programming marathons.

Supporting these things is similar to supporting a user group. Provide refreshments and a place to meet up, and your developers will be welcomed and your name will be remembered.

Technology Summit

Unlike user groups and hackathons, attending technical conferences requires a higher level of financial expenditure, time, resources, or a combination of all three. However, the increased expenditure is worth it in terms of exposure.

Organizing a conference is expensive, but it is a great deal for the sponsors. Blogs, sponsor pages, Twitter and Facebook, T-shirts, conference announcements, and many other ways to raise the profile of your sponsors.

User groups might have a dozen developers, and summits often have 150 or more (attracting big name developers). By supporting the summits, showing interest in talent, and having conversations, your company is sure to attract developer interest.

Like I said, it's not hard to get developers interested, but getting us on board is a little different because we need to know if what you present as your company is consistent with what you actually are. There are at least three things that show you're a developer-friendly company: giving back to the community, encouraging a hacker culture, and supporting your current developers.

Giving Back to the Community

Chances are your organization uses open source software, but chances are your organization isn't giving back to those open source projects. I'm not just talking about money, although open source projects are happy to accept donations, I'm talking about giving code back to the community.

In his article “Why an Open Source Corporate Culture Matters”, Michael Bleigh explains why it is important for companies and organizations to be as open source as possible. The following quote is very telling:

Why do you care if developers are happy? Every company should care if their employees are happy, but software development is a black magic combination of science, art, and craft. Some things can be done by forcing methods, but software work requires inspiration and passion, and you don't want developers to work when they feel stifled and isolated from the development community, right? Open source makes developers happy, and when you open source your code, you gain community and a sense of developer-friendly.

Encourage hacker culture

Creating a company culture is no small matter. In many companies, culture emerges naturally, but in other places, such as Apple, culture is actively developed and nurtured. There is not enough space in this article to describe company culture, nor am I qualified enough to do so. Instead, I would like to offer a few tips on how to create and grow a hacker culture.

Encourage failure

I've worked at companies where failure was not an option, and it was a horrible, demoralizing, and horrible work environment. If there's no room for failure, there's no room for creativity.

Failure happens a lot in computer programming because programmers are human, and we have to try new ideas and grow through practice. Failure is part of growth. When your developers stumble, support them, and when they succeed, celebrate.

Support attempts

Technology changes rapidly, and nowhere is this more evident than in programming. By allowing your developers to experiment with new technologies, they can get a feel for where the industry is headed and figure out how the organization can respond.

In addition to allowing your developers to try new technologies, encourage them to try new development methodologies. Pair programming, standing desks, test-driven development, agile development, open seating arrangements can all spark excitement among developers.

Support trial time

As you may already know, Google supports this with 20% time. Employees are allowed to spend 20% of their working time on projects they find interesting. About 50% of Google products come from this "20%" project, including Gmail, Orkut, Google News and AdSense.

20% is a lot, and only Google can do this because they have redundant employees. But what if you allow two days a month (10%) to let developers try new things?

Red Nova Labs, a local company in Kansas City, recently actually started a program they call Release. The company took a whole week and had teams work together to try out new ideas. As a result, two brand new products are about to be released. What can your company do in a week?

Support your current developers

***, support the developers you already have in your company. Are we the most business-minded people? No. Do we know the evolution of technology? Unclear. If you really want to support your developers, listen to them. We are nerds and geeks, and like John Stewart said: I believe the word you should say is "experts".

One aspect I didn't emphasize enough is that most developers would rather feel valued and get paid less than get paid more and not be valued. If you don't value your developers, one of three things is bound to happen:

1) They leave (most likely);

2) They spend less energy on work and more energy on their hobbies;

3) They become the gears you think they are.

Unfortunately for your organization, this is a seller's market. We know what we want, and we use that knowledge to balance what we want. Fortunately for your organization, however, most of your competitors don't know how to keep developers happy, and pool tables and free beer aren't enough. Additionally, developers don't always know which environment they like best. But if your organization can support the developer community and provide an environment where developers can thrive, there should be no shortage of good developers for you to choose from.