Ask HN: Best place for a startup to hire quality coders

If you ignore subtle nuances (idea, team, fit, equity, blah, blah), hiring is mostly about the money.

Pay $0 --> Nobody will work for you.

Pay $60k --> OK few people interested

Pay $200k --> Suddenly a lot of devs want to give up their idea and work for you.

Pay $1M --> Small, mid-size CTOs

Pay $10B --> Steve Jobs?

The things you mentioned "solid idea, traction, technical myself, and profitability" are about 1% of the deal. 99% is what the employee gets in his or her first paycheck.

(This has been my personal experience, so far. I'm in the Bay Area too)

As a developer who recently turned down the chance to work for less money for a share of someone elses idea, but who works for someone else at the moment and doesn't like it and would rather work on my own ideas, I have a solution that would work for me - part time.

Half the time of a good developer advances your project a lot further than the full time of no developer, and the entrepreneurial developer gets paid enough to bootstrap their own idea. Everyone is a winner!

My two cents.

When you are searching for quality developers, we assume that you are a quality coder yourself, the developer you hire would sure grasp these things from you and your work environment quickly - if he/she is passionate enough to convince you that you should hire him/her for the job.

As far as i believe quality coding is achieved over time, this is a ongoing learning process. Those who mastered this art are not available - they already have figured their own way to go along. If you went on searching for coders and "quality coder" is your first priority, most probably all of your 3 points will always restrict you from hiring coders and there's where the paycheck flow as @kirpekar outlined applies. Whoever you hire, you as a manager should trust your developer in term of quality and give them a environment to grow not in terms of performance only but in terms of quality coding too.

I don't think i am a quality coder, manager, i am myself learning each days from discussion like this. It cost me 1 month (of my business) to build self learning and growing charisma in a coder i hired recently, he asks me only few question in a while these days - "i solved it, how would you have done this ?" we then discuss for improvements.

Try searching for basic qualities that matters to you and your work ethos and focus on skill set that you are searching for rather than "quality coder", this will ease hiring decisions i think.

If you're in the bay area finding talent is going to be especially hard, not because it's not here, but its already in such demand. The jobs area of stackoverflow and github could be great bets for finding people. As these are newer resources there may be not quite as many companies taking advantage yet.

Networking events while a slow path is a good one to take. It also makes the interpersonal parts of evaluating someone much easier than through the formal interview process.

The final thing, is that even though there is profitability salary compensation will be a factor for talented employees. If you're looking to give up a bulk of equity then you're looking more at a co-founder than employee and should just set expectations accordingly.

If you're really going to a lot of developer events, and rinsing your network to its fullest extent then I'd suggest keep trying. Assuming you're talking about hiring developers for market rate, then you should have success eventually.

You could try to ask friends as to whether anything in your proposition is putting off potential hires.

Finally, personally I wouldn't bother with Craigslist, but you could try the job/career functionality on both Github and Stackoverflow.com.

Hope that helps

Tried posting here? :) Just thought I could contact you but I didn't find your email in your HN profile.

If you are hiring, I'm one of those on the lookout for something interesting to work on.

Have you tried HN who's hiring threads?

Craiglist should be your cheapest and most sure fire bet.