Monday, 28th of April 2008 at 01:05:12 PM
I hear this from startups all day long: I need developers; know any?
Frankly I don’t know enough of you and desperately want to.
Here’s what I suggest. If you are a developer looking for something interesting to work on, go to our forums and post your name so we can refer you when we get requests. You can also comment on this post.
I suggest you put your name and skills, but leave off your email address so you don’t get spammed. You can email me your contact info and we will make the connections for you.
Additionally, there are the job boards with openings for startups as well.
How about a former developer, now into tech support engineering and other human-oriented tasks?
The opposite is also true. I know several developers looking for business contacts, but it seems the two groups don’t have a lot of overlap. Also, most of the opportunities I run into have unrealistic expectations. Most are paying way too low (and pay is usually the only compensation), or they have impossible requirements.
Now being a developer, I have lots of contacts within my own industry. Still opportunities come up that I don’t know a good candidate for. That’s when I use my network of contacts to find someone. Usually I start at http://www.linkedin.com, then try the local user’s groups (http://php.meetup.com/121/ or http://www.houstonrb.com/, there’s others for other languages too). This is usually as far as I have had to go, but from there I’d probably go to an actual recruiter (I do know a few good ones, too).
Billy, you make some excellent points. There seem to be two different needs: developers as hired guns and developers as co-founders. I am less concerned with the former and more with the latter. I know several people with great ideas that need a developer partner to build the application with them. It takes a leap of faith but the developer businessperson tandem will have the most success IMHO.