Hiring Developers & a Remote Team: tips for non-technical founders, in conversation with Caelen King.

Richard Rodger speaks to WhatClinic.com founder and serial entrepreneur Caelen King, and revisits remote working by design from 2017 diaries!

Since May, the consistently high rate of layoffs in the tech sector has attracted attention. A combination of high profile retrenchments (Shopify) and the scale of the downsizing (in some cases up to 30% of employees) contribute to an almost palpable feeling of unease from tech employees. If, as a business leader, you happen to be looking for tech talent at the moment or in the near future, it can feel like a great time to hire; right? Perhaps. But be careful.

While it can be tempting to think the pool of potential hires is now a little deeper, the right candidate or candidates still have to be found. And they have to stay. Thinking about your own company, its needs, plans and budgets, will allow you to present a reassuring solidity to candidates possibly reeling from a sudden bout of unemployment. Now is an opportunity to present your strengths to a wider range of potential colleagues. In an ideal world, you’ll find the right people and live happily ever after.

But what if the applicants don’t arrive? Or those that do arrive are not of the caliber you had hoped? Appealing to developers and programmers, especially companies without recognized tech departments or functions, can be difficult. It pays to invest time with an independent technical adviser to make sure your plans and your recruitment language match.

In this week’s podcast Caelen King discussed the hiring of your first tech hires and possible compromises that startups need to consider. In both cases, the human side is more important than the skills, but to get the right human to contribute to your company’s plans as effectively as possible, make those plans ready to be followed from day one.

In this Rachel Robertson (episode 59) podcast from our archive, Rachel shares insights about hiring for team fit - in Antarctica! Rachel’s conversation underlines the themes discussed by Richard and Caelen.

Here’s an excerpt from Richard’s chat with Caelen. The full interview can be found here or wherever you get your podcasts: search Fireside with Voxgig for the complete archive.

Richard Rodger:  Yes, and that's an important point, the developer sub market. Because there's one aspect which is managing developers – and we'll return to that in a minute. But in terms of presenting your company as – it's kind of like a product. I know this is your wheelhouse. It's – you're productising your company as a place to work for developers. But even working to define that helps you go to the right niche, right?

Caelen King:  Yes. You're exactly right with the analogy, as it's just like building a product. And we all know this now through a lot of prior art, that the idea of building a product for everyone is nonsense. You need to find out which is the best market and then narrow that and narrow that and narrow that, and build for a very specific market and then expand over time. But the idea of launching tomorrow a streaming service that applies to everyone on the internet, you're going to lose against Spotify every single time. Whereas you could conceivably – I don't know is this true or not – this isn't – possibly chose a terrible analogy.

You could possibly launch a streaming service that focuses on death metal and being the best death metal streaming service, and you might be able to compete against Spotify against death metal fans and do quite well there. And once you've conquered that, then you can move to the left and move to the right. It's the same thing with trying to get developers, trying to be an attractive place for developers to work.

You could try and be an attractive place for the generic, homogenous mythical developer that exists out there, in which case you're competing head-to-head with Google and head-to-head with Facebook, and you're going to lose every time to them. Because that's who they're trying to appeal to, and they have the scale and the breadth to be able to provide generically attractive places to work. Google has a swimming pool in its basement, so they appeal to swimmers. They have a canteen so they appeal to everything that you could possibly do that Google does at least a good job of doing that.

So, the idea of trying to compete on the generic field is nonsense, and so, right at the early stage is, you get to decide which kind of sub-category of – so, if you're going to focus on developers who like Ultimate Frisbee, then you better be near a playing pitch. If you're going to appeal to developers who live in South Wicklow, your office better be in South Wicklow. So, you get the kind of idea I'm talking about here is, developer is such a large group, and there's every single sub-category within that group. And the idea of saying developers need or developers want is a nonsense because you can't appeal on a broad range. You have to focus on the type of developer that you want.

And right at the early stages – I'm not saying this is necessarily a good idea, but in WhatClinic, my viewpoint is, I am going to focus – at the early stages is, I am going to focus on people who have just landed in Ireland. I'm going to have a set of procedures that help them get their work permits. I'm going to do whatever it takes in order for them – to get them into the country if needs be. I'm willing to put up with communication issues if I can get the technical talent that I need. And that worked for a while; it worked very effectively for a while. But then as the company scales, you need to change that to a new kind of subcategory.

Richard Rodger:  Yes, and it does – so, do you mean – is it related to your business or do you choose some sort of technology niche?

Caelen King:  I wouldn't be – I'm not talking about choosing a technology niche. I'm talking about choosing a horizontal slice of developers. And so, if you take people who are coming into the country, you get every technology skill in there. But you can target people who've just landed in the country. They all go to the same forums; they all ask the same questions in the same public spaces. They all go to the same meetings; they all appear at English language – free English language classes.

The list goes – it's really easy to target that kind of group, where – and yes, you can target to, say, artificial intelligence; they all hang out in one place as well. But I'm not talking about doing that; I'm talking about how do you find a diamond in the rough. And you find a diamond in the rough by focusing on more of a horizontal slice.

Richard Rodger:  There is no magic formula; it's put the hard yards in and-

Caelen King:  Yes. And all of these, there's nothing – there's no free lunch. All of these things come with costs; they all come with effort and they all come with consequences. There's no magic bullet there.

As I was preparing this edition, and during the review of the Irish Independent series I wrote from 2017, I discovered in my 4th start-up diary I had detailed how the company was going to be fully remote, by design, from the start. I find it interesting that my thoughts then are supported by my discussion with Caelen and by our collective experiences of remote working since spring 2020! In 2017 I boiled down my belief in how remote working can be successful to this: “People work for money and respect. That’s what makes remote working work.” Nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.

Reflecting Caelen’s point that searching for and supporting talent, your hires are coming from their own network, perhaps language classes, in 2017 I pointed out that freelancers talk to each other. Your performance and reputation as a boss matters!

Here’s the key insight: remote working requires trust. You build trust by paying people on time. Most remote working relationships start off as freelance engagements.  It’s the only way to know if somebody has the discipline to work from home. This means that you get invoices from your freelancers, which you must pay, regardless of the quality of the work. Now, if the work is not satisfactory, you end the relationship gracefully, but you still pay. That’s perfect for everybody; freelancers expect to move on.

You do not start arguments with your freelancers. You do not hold back payment. You do not look for freebies. You do not allow scope to expand. You decide not to act like 95% of businesses out there. Freelancers talk to each other. A lot. Put your emotions aside. If the freelancer failed to deliver, perhaps it was your fault. Perhaps you failed to set the terms explicitly. Perhaps you were too busy to write the spec properly. Perhaps you just screwed up. Whatever it was, you pay for every hour, and then you close it down.

I hope you get something from my chat with Caelen. I’ll have more experiences from the archives and insights from podcast guests next week.

Caelen King is the founder and board member of WhatClinic.