Hiring Good Web Devs

[Christopher Gutteridge]

I know from a few anecdotes that we're we're not the only ones having
trouble hiring, or even getting people to apply for positions doing web
development.

Lots of bright people have left the sector for startups etc. could that
be it?

Maybe we just write bad job adverts or advertise in the wrong places?

Basically, I've this awesome job doing open data stuff at a national
level, with tons of different facets, so lots of skills to be learned.
https://www.jobs.soton.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=285413JF

And so far *nobody* has applied and there's only a week to go and I'm
getting worried.

If anyone has any suggestions or better still, do you know a person who
you think could survive, or even thrive, working in the desk between me
& Patrick McSweeny?

--
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg

University of Southampton Open Data Service: http://data.southampton.ac.uk/
You should read the ECS Web Team blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/webteam/

[Chris Keene]

It's an interesting question, and I've heard it come up before. I have no direct experience, so this is all speculation...

• Our adverts and recruitment processes have to conform to HR policies which can turn of people used to much more informally processes and adverts that speak their language.
• Many jobs are fixed term, and even if there is good chance of extensions or moving in to other projects we can't allude to this. I wonder if this puts people off even if they only plan to stay in a given job for a year or so anyway (i.e. they like it to be their choice). But perhaps this wouldn't be so much of a problem if it wasn't that...
• Most of us are not based in London. It's not the only city with plenty of web (as opposed to 'enterprise') tech jobs but people want to probably happier to take on fixed term work when they know that at the end there will always be a flow of new jobs coming on to the market daily.
• We have an image of a stuffy working environment  and people may have been burnt by previous experience in HE.
• Even our benefits (kick arse pension) are boring benefits that boring people (um, like me) get excited about
• We may sometimes advertise in the wrong place, and hang out in the wrong pubs to meet the kind of people to spread the word.
• On a different track, HERA - the process of grading jobs based on things like 'levels of responsibility' seem to be there solely to ruin every job in HE and probably pays a part of troublesome recrutement in some HEIs
• Many of us have CompSci Depts churning out potential applicants, but may not always be doing enough to make the most of this.

Looking at your job, which sounds awesome, and using it to provide some examples of the above

• Looking at http://www.wiredsussex.com, a popular place for IT jobs around brighton, I noticed many adverts used emotive language, that HE jobs rarely do. 'You'll be making a real difference'. E.g. take a look at the 1st para of this http://www.wiredsussex.com/jobs/vacancy/php_developer_in_brighton_and_hove/12256 - the word 'creative' appears four times in the brief advert. 
• The company above sounds like it is going places and growing fast. 
• The advert above mentions HTML5, CSS3 and frameworks. These are sexy and show they are using modern stuff. Compare that with 'HTML, PHP, SQL, Apache' - if someone thinks that Universities are not cutting edge (and they would mostly be right) then they will presume the worst when seeing such broad terms.
• Many startup jobs I see ask for SCRUM. You ask for PRINCE2. Lovely PRINCE2. Lovely MS Project.
• It takes bloody forever to get from Southampton city centre to your campus by bus. My limited experience is that the number of decent ales within 5 minutes of Southampton campus is low. 
• Your advert mentions the campus is 'a pleasant working environment', yet doesn't mention TBL

What bits of this job could attract good developers...

I think it's a really exciting time for Open Data and whoever gets this job will be part of a bigger movement to open up data and public organisations and make really useful stuff. They will be helping (we hope) the progress of Science in the UK and helping Universities not waste money.
Will they be able to use a mac? make their source code open source? use github? work in an exciting and smart team? get a say in what they are building and come up with ideas (as opposed to being a code monkey)? access to good coffee? Ability to experiment/fail?

Sorry if this comes across as a dissection of your ad, I was really using it as an example, and as noted we are often limited to Uni/departmental policies which can remove any exciting elements out of a job. 

With jobs here (non-dev jobs) informally posting a job to social media and mailing lists has allowed me to put my own spin on it and given room to try and create interest before people reach the formal stuff. 

On another note, some of the smartest people I know work as freelancers. They will happily work at a company for many months, and act basically like an employee while there, but refuse all jobs offers. It would be difficult to pull off in a HE environment but maybe putting fixed term jobs out for freelance work (where ever such things are advertised) maybe an option. We may have to pay more, which would mean less developer days/hours for the same amount of money, but this may be an acceptable trade-off for getting the right person.

Chris

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[Christopher Gutteridge]

Thanks Chris, this has made me realise one really important thing. For fixed term posts, especially, we are not competing with other universities, but rather with local firms. That may sound obvious, but I think  university HR depts maybe need to get their heads in the game to hire good technical people.

Chris

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[Ben O'Steen]

In my experience (and likely reiterating what Chris has already said), the general job pattern for academic/university developer staff jobs is:

A underwhelmingly paid *short* term contract in a University city (expensive, small choice of rentals), with slim-to-no career prospects for progression, no matter how well you perform. Work tends to be more mentally rewarding than commercial but that may not be enough for some.

Too pessimistic? Likely as I am making generalisations but I maintain that the academic sector has no real developer career path outside of shifting to be a manager and stepping away from coding and problem solving.

Ben

[Ian Stuart]

*cough*

14 years, and still loving it.....

Yes, most University developers are stuck in small, almost niche, posts... but there are some GREAT places to work out there.

Soton is one.... EDINA is another.

Ian

[Carwyn Edwards]

I think one of the issues is that many of these research council funded posts are fixed term. I've been arguing for some time now (I've been working in HE for over a decade now) that it would make more sense to have a permanent pool of developers at Universities or maybe even shared between institutions that are "contracted" out to research projects. This also helps solve the other achilles heel of these kinds of projects - developer continuity. Countless times I've seen drastic re-writes of software as the new, usually junior recently graduated appointee proceeds to re-write large chunks of the project from scratch, mainly due to lack of understanding or personal taste.

This fits in with the comment by Chris about freelancers. There will be a pile of them sitting in the Computer Science dept working on their freelance work in between coursework. Why not make it something they can earn course credit for? They would probably need advice and expertise from more senior developers but every University has these scattered around the CS and Engineering depts and possibly central IT (if they are allowed to write code these days).

In the HE sector I think the following are the most interesting things I've seen for a while:

http://www.software.ac.uk/

http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/

It's worth noting that companies like Google, MS et al have recruitment drives at may of the OSS community conferences out there:

http://www.flossuk.org/

(or see various on Lanyrd)

Carwyn

[Giuseppe Sollazzo]

The problem, I think, is that HR departments tend to recruit people in a conservative way that it might match the way administration and certain strains of academia work, but not highly paced departments like IT. One thing is to hire a Dean of Research or an Academic Registrar, a different one is to hire Developers and IT Managers (which nowadays all seem to have to be management graduates with no technical experience or, in other words, PRINCEs - excuse the very cheap joke).

Also, not understanding the technical value of some positions, they undermine the goal of hiring the best candidate. "We already have a senior engineer who is on salary band X, so this position will be junior on band X-1" is a common comment, which means the engineer position will have a lower-than-market salary scale, and turn into underqualified applicants.

Some time ago we had 3 applicants for a developer position.

G

Giuseppe Sollazzo
- http://www.puntofisso.net
- http://twitter.com/puntofisso

My newsletter is available at: http://tinyletter.com/puntofisso

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[Jim Downing]

Hi Chris,

I've been spending a lot of my time since I left the sector
recruiting, and I can relate to a lot of this. Chris makes some good
points about the ad, especially about the open data part and making
people care about the role. The biggest point I think missed until
about 6 months ago is that how hard you need to work to attract
applicants. I tried using loads of recruiters, advertising in local
press, regional websites, our website, LinkedIn, twitter,
careers.stackexchange, went to recruiting fairs and tech meetups. My
theory was that one of them would have much better signal to noise
than the others and I'd know where to focus. They all yielded, but
very little; no strong winner. I now reckon it takes me about 3 days
per role to write the job spec, ad and post it to all the places it
needs to go, and we'll spend about £500 per role on fixed advertising
for each, and then be prepared to pay an agent or a %age salary
advertiser anyway. There are ways you can use LinkedIn etc that don't
cost money, but you have to trade extra effort for it. Just to
emphasize, this is so we get enough good applicants that we'll hire
one, we've rarely been in the position of turning good applicants away
from anything but internship roles. Long and short: It's hard, and
takes time and [money|effort].

If I were in your boots, I'd be asking some pointed questions of which
of these modern channels your HR department are using on your behalf,
and asking for access to an administrator who can help you manage
these things and put some of the legwork in. I'd most likely try to
budget for recruitment costs in the project bid (not that it's likely
to be a popular move).

I think my parting shot to the JISC when I left the University was
that the short, fixed-term contracts suck for recruitment and
retention, so I can't offer much solace there. Just keep plugging away
at them. Reactive mode funding (a la TSB) in bigger chunks would help.

Good luck!
jim

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[Paul Walk]

This problem has been a preoccupation of mine for some time.

I think I would qualify the 'underwhelmingly paid' aspect - dev jobs in HE at the junior level have been pretty good in the past - I think they are competitive even now. The real issue with HE developer jobs is when you get past the 'recent graduate, needs to be keen and bright rather than experienced' stage. Sadly, we still have virtually no career path for developers beyond a certain point in HE.

It gets harder when you want to recruit *experienced* developers from the open market….

Paul

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[Paul Walk]

This accords with my experience dealing with an HE Human Resources department who told me I was wrong when I suggested that we might need to search for developer talent more widely than through the prescribed channels.

It's interesting to compare how recruitment happens for experienced academics with that for developers. Developers are recruited using the same generic approach used to recruit admin assistants - yet good developers can have skills, reputations and profiles much more akin to academics.

So yes - like Jim says - start asking the HR dept what they are actually doing for you….

Paul

[Ian Stuart]

Question: How many HE/FE developer jobs actually require a specific skillset?

In the banks and the big commercial houses, where the job is to work with an existing code-base (and longevity & reliability are the watchwords), where you want developers who are experienced in very specific areas, and can work as part of a larger team, working on fragments of code.

I would have thought that HE/FE was more interested in generalists: people who can work with existing systems, and develop new system with new tools.... and understand when to apply either approach (avoiding the previously mentioned "total rewrite" scenario)

Ian

[Ian Stuart]

I think one of the biggest differences between Academia and Commercial is the ability to head-hunt: in academia its very hard to employ someone because they're good - you generally need to create a job, get it graded by HR, advertise the job, and finally take the best candidate that you interview.

I believe the commercial world can find someone they like, and just employ them...

--
Ian

[Mia]

In my experience museums also find it hard to recruit good developers,
partly because salaries rarely reflect market rates. Emphasising the
'do good in the world, work with great content and interesting people'
aspects helps, as does removing as much of the bland HR-speak as
you're allowed to. I'm no good at decoding it myself, so how on earth
is someone outside the sector meant to know what it means? Forwarding
ads to appropriate lists with a note of why I think it's great also
seems to help - your note above would do the same thing.

And yeah, PRINCE2. That's one of the words that raises a warning flag
and makes me more likely to skip over an ad, particularly in
conjunction with anything that sounds like a euphemism for 'difficult
working environment' or 'lots of red tape'.

Speaking of developer careers, is anyone else going to
http://workshopforresearchsoftwareengineers.eventbrite.co.uk/?

Cheers, Mia

--------------------------------------------
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http://twitter.com/mia_out
I mostly use this address for list mail and don't check it daily; use
my open.ac.uk address for personal email

On 28 August 2013 11:34, Christopher Gutteridge <c...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

[Carwyn Edwards]

@paul: Sadly, we still have virtually no career path for developers beyond a certain point in HE.

Absolutely! certainly from what I've seen any progression if at all is into management roles and even those are few and far between within any given institution. From my personal experiences I've hit the point where the vast majority of options are now sideways or involve a significant shift to people management.

@mia: PRINCE2 / ITIL

I'd agree, I think most clued up developers feel these are already rather old fashioned. I'd say the "current" state of play is more Scrum or Kanban.

Carwyn

[Jim Downing]

On 28 August 2013 16:26, Ian Stuart <perl...@googlemail.com> wrote:
> I think one of the biggest differences between Academia and Commercial is
> the ability to head-hunt: in academia its very hard to employ someone
> because they're good - you generally need to create a job, get it graded by
> HR, advertise the job, and finally take the best candidate that you
> interview.
>
> I believe the commercial world can find someone they like, and just employ
> them...

We can, but my experience is that beyond a certain point it isn't a
great way of building a team. The effort you spend on creating a job
description is well worth it - you're more likely to have a viable
role at the end that someone will enjoy and more likely to find real
people who can fill them.

Also, most of the headhunting I do is directed towards a vacancy, and
I'm approaching people to invite them to apply => completely
compatible with HE/FE recruiting. It takes time, though - are you
allowing long enough to find candidates?

Grading was always a right pita, although the alternative is having
completely secret arbitrary salary rates, which has it's own problems
(arising from too little secrecy and too much arbitrary).

A thought: presumably you're restricted in what you say in official
job advertisements, but you're less restricted in opinions you give
individually about them through social media? An opportunity to sell
the position better ("great team, lots of geek banter in the pub lunch
every week", "no guarantees, but I've been continuously employed for X
years on similar contracts" etc)?

PRINCE has its place in modern software development - the books make
pretty good monitor stands, along with anything with "DHTML" in the
title.

[Shaun Hare]

This is a really interesting thread from the viewpoint of a developer in HE 

I agree on the fact there appears virtually no career path for developers beyond a certain point in HE

which is saddening it would be interesting to hear on thoughts to take to our own management on how we could address this?

I have also hit the point where the vast majority of options within HE are now sideways or involve a significant shift to people management, which I am not keen on.

The HE benefits are great which is both good and bad as it means it is easy to become comfortable and less hungry to move on.

Getting back to the main topic (hiring good devs)  maybe I am old fashioned but the fixed term contract trend in roles that could/should be permanent is in my opinion/situation definitely a turn-off

Of course it is understandable there are great projects with limited funding and those are short term (from the outputs I have seen I am sure this is to be one of the greats) 

but this is combination with the previous fact is again why it is hard to wrench from an existing HE role to one which would definitely help you develop , knowing that could finish and the only options with HE then are 

to return back to base as it were.

Shaun

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[Rob Ingram]

On Wednesday, 28 August 2013 17:42:05 UTC+1, Carwyn Edwards wrote:

@paul: Sadly, we still have virtually no career path for developers beyond a certain point in HE.

Absolutely! certainly from what I've seen any progression if at all is into management roles and even those are few and far between within any given institution. From my personal experiences I've hit the point where the vast majority of options are now sideways or involve a significant shift to people management.

I completely agree. Alerts from jobs.ac.uk do occasionally show senior dev roles but they certainly don't follow that route at Nottingham. I know that there must be a massive number of developers here earning exactly the same as me with little prospect of it going up (quite the opposite actually) however well they perform. Frankly I'm surprised that any of them stick around but after a while I guess the pension arrangements can be a kind of golden handcuffs.

Rob.

[Christopher Gutteridge]

yup. I'm "lucky" that I'm now a senior dev, but it took 15 years. There are people with a third my experience paid only a few £K less than me. It's no secret that I love my job, but people as enthusiastic as me are rare.

I'm of the opinion that we would do better to let people grow into being great developers, rather than trying to hire them. Big organisations can make it difficult for people to get the freedom to learn and grow.

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[Ian Stuart]

On 29 August 2013 11:09, Christopher Gutteridge <c...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

yup. I'm "lucky" that I'm now a senior dev, but it took 15 years. There are people with a third my experience paid only a few £K less than me. It's no secret that I love my job, but people as enthusiastic as me are rare.

.... and organisations that can keep developers on for 15 years, giving them the freedom and opportunities to explore new areas, are rare.

There will be very very few outside a computing / electronics environment that will be able to do that!

 

I'm of the opinion that we would do better to let people grow into being great developers, rather than trying to hire them. Big organisations can make it difficult for people to get the freedom to learn and grow.

To a certain extent, I agree with you.... however we have a pay/grade-structure that is fairly restrictive (which applies across the whole HE/FE sector), and an income-steam that's only slightly less variable than researchers (who are so tied into grant-incomes its scary)

Like Chris, I'm lucky to be in an organisation that has actually grown, year-on-year, and has a damn good record in staff retention (I've been here nearly 14 years.and have no intention of moving on :) )

[Ben O'Steen]

On 29 August 2013 11:22, Ian Stuart <perl...@googlemail.com> wrote:

On 29 August 2013 11:09, Christopher Gutteridge <c...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

yup. I'm "lucky" that I'm now a senior dev, but it took 15 years. There are people with a third my experience paid only a few £K less than me. It's no secret that I love my job, but people as enthusiastic as me are rare.

.... and organisations that can keep developers on for 15 years, giving them the freedom and opportunities to explore new areas, are rare.

There will be very very few outside a computing / electronics environment that will be able to do that

This highlights what I meant about underwhelming pay. In terms of a permanent position, the pay is becoming competitive but permanent roles are few and far between. Most of the developer job offers are fixed term (~1ish yrs) and the pay doesn't include compensation for the potential risk of relocating twice, once at the start and then at the end when the role vanishes and a new job needs to be found.

 

I'm of the opinion that we would do better to let people grow into being great developers, rather than trying to hire them. Big organisations can make it difficult for people to get the freedom to learn and grow.

To a certain extent, I agree with you.... however we have a pay/grade-structure that is fairly restrictive (which applies across the whole HE/FE sector), and an income-steam that's only slightly less variable than researchers (who are so tied into grant-incomes its scary)

Like Chris, I'm lucky to be in an organisation that has actually grown, year-on-year, and has a damn good record in staff retention (I've been here nearly 14 years.and have no intention of moving on :) )

[Ian Stuart]

I was speaking to one of my neighbours, who's in the commercial IT world - and they seem to have similar problems to us (academia)

One of the interesting things he said was that they use an agency for everything but recent-graduate appointments - the pre-filtering and selection process the agency does saves them far more than the cost of the agency charges.

They also recognise the problems of advertising for new staff: Whilst we all recognise that the proforma HR advert is useless, and writing your own description is infinitely preferable, they find the best way to get eyeballs on jobs is actually by word of mouth.... and they find that technical conferences are good: give loads of talks; raise the profile of the company name; have a note in the corner of a slide that says "we're hiring"; get your developers to "big-up" the benefits of your company.... sound interesting!

--
Ian

[Giuseppe Sollazzo]

Another thing to add is that there is a misconception about pay in IT. I don't find massive differences in salary scales between public and private (and between academia and the commercial sector). 

To get much higher salaries you need to either:

a - work in finance

b - aim for a career [especially in consultancy (accenture, capgemini)]

The problem with a) is that finance is not necessarily what a developer wants to do in life, whether it is for ethical reasons, work patterns, types of colleagues, motivations for being productive.

The problem with b) is more subtle and can be summarised with the fact that the "next step" for a lead developer is to embark in some sort of management career. Which for someone with a passion for technical things can be boring, and in academia means inevitably "PRINCE2 Project Manager".

We need to find a way to imagine a career path that keeps good technical folks doing technical things, at a higher level, leading the way, managing teams, without letting this poisonous definition of management and project management become the only reason for their position to exist.

G

[Christopher Gutteridge]

on the equipment.data.ac.uk project we are very lucky to have a really great project manager who does all the paper work and uses phrases like "I worry about that so you don't have to".

-- 
Christopher Gutteridge -- http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/cjg

[Ian Stuart]

On 30 August 2013 10:13, Giuseppe Sollazzo <punto...@gmail.com> wrote:

We need to find a way to imagine a career path that keeps good technical folks doing technical things, at a higher level, leading the way, managing teams, without letting this poisonous definition of management and project management become the only reason for their position to exist.

It's an interesting one, isn't it?

There are some of us who just don't want to manage people - we LIKE having project managers who deal with the politics crap, and the endless report writing.... we just want to create code!

There are some of us who recognise that we don't have the aptitude to make non-techies understand WHY we've built the data-store we have, and HOW we're able to get from statement-A to deduction-B

.... and yes, having 20 years of experience in coding is a lot of experience..... but is that actually quantifiable in some way? How do you compare someone who loafs through the day, and someone who's out there on the bleeding edge?

I'm often reminded of the [apocryphal] story of the Big Company that had a Big Iron server in the basement. They had a team of IT people who managed it: mostly young hot-shots who ran around and made the thing sing.... but they had an older guy, who sat in his hauf, drinking tea and reading his red-top paper. When the company had to "make efficiency savings", the old guy was given a career-enhancement opportunity (they killed the job, and stopped employing him).

Some months later, the Big Iron failed. The hot-shots ran around, fiddled with loads of things, scoured google, and phoned various companies. Eventually, they phoned the old guy, and asked him if he could come in "as a consultant".... which he did: he looked at the Big Iron, walked around it a couple of times, and then kicked it.... back into life.

He sent in a bill for £40,000.

When this was queried, and an itemised bill requested, he sent in the following:

Callout fee: £50

Travel costs: £25

Time-in-site fee: £25

Knowing where to kick the server: £39,900

--
Ian

[Ian Stuart]

On 30 August 2013 10:31, Christopher Gutteridge <c...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

we are very lucky to have a really great project manager who

I'd praise both the project managers I've had here at EDINA.....

(but then I'd have to admit to the truly awful advert at http://edina.ac.uk/about/jobs.html)

--
Ian

[alis...@codebrane.com]

Hi Christopher,

have you considered remote working? I'm always puzzled by the need to be
in a specific place in order to write code. Most parts of the country have
decent broadband and there are tons of tools to support remote workers,
not to mention the odd 'return to base' now and then.

Alistair

[Christopher Gutteridge]

I anticipate that we'll need to be training them on the job, so that
might not be
ideal. Our team has a pretty good common sense attitude to from-home
working,
but it varies wildly around the IT dept. Obviously some jobs have lots
of meetings
or are to provide support at specific times.

[Ian Stuart]

We have a number of developers who work from home part time... and they all say that working from home means they miss out on much of the inter-team social building, and the easy support that comes from asking questions across the room

(and yes, we run our own IM service)

--
Ian

[Ben O'Steen]

Hi,

I realise how cynical my comments in this have been but I'm unfortunately going to have to continue being so!

The more misunderstood or 'invisible' your work is, the more you have to show your face to prove that you are actually working. Some work cultures are changing, but this has been a real issue in past (and in current) roles. Even though we have reached a point where the only real barriers to collaborating online are country time differences, some offices operate on face-to-face meetings, and sometimes 'canteen catchups'. Any other form of meeting (especially in open plan offices) are seen as awkward and annoying.

For remote working to function well, you need the whole office to work with the same comms tools as everyone else, or it rapidly devolves to 'people in the office we can tap on the shoulder' and 'people we need to boot up skype and mic up to reach'

</cynical>

Ben

On 28 August 2013 12:43, <alis...@codebrane.com> wrote:

[Ian Stuart]

On 30 August 2013 11:20, Ben O'Steen <bos...@gmail.com> wrote:

For remote working to function well, you need the whole office to work with the same comms tools as everyone else, or it rapidly devolves to 'people in the office we can tap on the shoulder' and 'people we need to boot up skype and mic up to reach'

Not cynical at all.... born out of observation, and backed up by lots of others saying similar things.

I use the EDINA IM system to talk to people across the room (open plan office) as well as working at home

.... but the thing that is really missing is the "coffee-cooler conversations" - those times when you swing by someone's desk to seek some wisdom about a problem, and the conversation drags in someone else, and takes interesting twists and turns.... which leads it other, more interesting, information being passed on

--
Ian

[Tim Hunt]

If you want to move in this direction, then I would recomment the Open University Postgraduate certificate / diploma / MSc in computing. http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/qualification/f66.htm. Those courses straddle the techical and magement sides, and are generally very good. I completed my diploma a year ago, and while it was quite hard work, it was also very interesting. I think it is good to be able to study these topics while working full time. The courses encourage you to consider whether the theoretical ideas would actually work in your workplace, or are just rubbish dreamt up by academics. (They don't quite phrase it like that ;-)).

Of course, I must add a disclaimer that I am a member of OU staff, and they paid the course fees for me, so I am probably biased, but I do genuinely think that these are excellent courses.