Where software engineering talent goes
What motivates software engineers to choose one employer over the other?Hint: it’s not only money [1].
In July 2020, Uber laid off the Developer Platform team in Amsterdam. More than 40 highly specialists sought a new employer. Some of the most brilliant people I had ever worked with. Over 20 companies reached out to them, some even timely arranging dedicated info sessions. This led to the situation that that most had several options to choose from.
I want to reflect on those people’s decisions to join one company over the other and try to distill some knowledge on how to attract sought-after talent. Each paragraph will contain a core quality [2] and the company’s name as an example.
Disclaimer: This information is based on conversations that I have led with the people affected and is purely anecdotal.
Growth and Scale Databricks
One of the engineers wanted to start as fast as possible. Their primary motivation was that they wanted to work on new and exciting things. You know, software that changed the world. At this company, they would have the opportunity to build backends that would power the most compute-intensive applications out there. Also, they would join pre-IPO, onboarding onto a place that is bound to grow tenfold. A unique experience for everyone to work through. An excellent summary of such an experience, I feel, has been written by Gergely Orosz in his blog [3].
Humanity Spotify
Experiencing groundhog day with recruiters can be incredibly tiresome. You feel interview fatigue setting in and generally want it to be over [4]. However, there are positive exceptions. Spotify had a very forthcoming recruiter that made me feel very comfortable throughout the process. Even the usually nerve-racking negotiation step felt more pleasant than ever. Not only that, but in the interviews, I felt that the people on the other end took their time for the interview and were very polite. Put that in stark contrast with another company that asked me during an interview how I would feel about rolling out tech-debt features nonstop without any chance of pushback. It must be noted that this example company also has a famous developer culture of delivering things, which makes it seem that both work-life balance and productivity are high.
No Corporate speak Shapr3d
Big organizations like Uber inevitably have more extended communication channels than small organizations (think n² complexity of having all employees talk to each other). Even more so when the workforce is distributed across continents and time-zones, this engineer stated that they had enough of managing escalations and corporate politics and instead wanted to get back to feeling the joy of just building things. This company was in a stage where it was small and lean but already established, which balanced a still lean organization with your possibility to experience doing things at scale empowering a community of creators.
Money and familiarity going back to Uber
Unexpectedly, some of the engineers got offered the opportunity to go back to Uber. While everyone was still in shatters about the decision of being fired and one of the returnees even publicly apologized in an internal chat group, I think this was a very grown-up decision. You return to a familiar organization and infrastructure where you don’t have to go through the hassle of onboarding. You get to have an immediate impact. Also, Uber pays well. Now, before this sounds like shitting on Uber, it is not that. I do not regret a single day working there and even actively rejected interview offers at other companies right before getting fired.
Tech Stack Datadog
This is probably the most controversial one as people have different preferences. One of the engineers stressed that they want to work with a modern tech stack, and Datadog fit that well since they used Go and Python, which the engineer liked. Another company that still used a lot of PHP was disfavorable to them. Their reasoning was:
A. there are thousands of PHP engs already out there very familiar with the language so the rather stagnating market felt saturated
B. Learning it from scratch felt like something they did not want to invest in as there were so many other technologies and better things out there.
But beyond just the choice of a programming language over the other, in the interviews, this company was very open to showing what they got working well and where they see challenges on a technical level. The engineer got hooked.
Stability ING
This engineer had enough of the roller-coaster ride that was 2020 and accepted an attractive offer from ING, the Netherlands' biggest bank. Even though ING is probably the most innovative place among the old guard of Dutch banks, it can hardly compare with a high-growth startup or scaleup pace. However, which employer is more stable in the case of a crisis than a bank [5]? Update: Just as I was writing this article, ING announced layoffs. This only reinforces one of my core beliefs: job security is an illusion and there is only skill-security.
Conclusions
If you want to hire talent, think about these factors:
- if you are a growth company, communicate that
- be humane to your employees and candidates
- while you are small, try to stay out of corporate-speak land
- be a pleasant memory to former employees so they would want to return
- Show off your tech stack and get the interviewee interested in your technical challenges
- In times of crisis, be able to communicate that you are a stable option
Footnotes
[1] Of course, all of them looked at money as a primary motivator as well. However, some of them had either multiple comparable offers or had already progressed far into the interview process with other companies that could match only to sign and drop out.
[2] Mainly for the sake of simplicity. There are more qualities to each of the companies.
[3] What I have to mention is that a lot of companies brand themselves as being high growth. However, few can show numbers comparable to Databricks. Yet, there are many more concrete factors to organizational growth and individual contributor impact growth than skyrocketing revenue that a company could present to attract talent.
[4] Right in the middle of my recruiting process, I felt so much fatigue that I had to go off on a one-week vacation to recharge. No interviews, no leetcode.
[5] except for 2008 😅 📉 🧨
