The company I work for is hiring several developers which marks my first significant hiring effort since being promoted to management. This had led to a few interesting observations* I would like to share that may benefit both those looking for a new job and those looking for the next star to add to their team.

Immigration Law: I had no idea how complex this area of law gets; it’s a maddening maze of rules and policies that are more effective at confusing those involved than providing a reasonable solution to a problem. If you run into this (and you will), you need somebody that has dealt with this and knows what to do. Getting both parties into legal hot water is far too easy.

Resumes: I’ve seen great resumes that made it clear that I needed to hire this person and resumes so cluttered and complex it took an hour just to get through it. Here’s a few things that stuck out to me:

• DRY is good for code, and for a resume. Clean and concise is always better; if you find yourself hitting Ctrl+C even once while working on a resume, you’re probably doing something wrong.
• Length is important, but shorter isn’t always better. Unlike many other fields where a single page resume is considered optimal, technical resumes need at least a second page. Going too short on a resume is a great way to blend into the crowd; a resume should stand out, and that takes space.
• How long is too long? Unless you’ve been doing this for a very long time, more than three pages is probably excessive. This isn’t always true, but think it through before using more than two pages.
• Use whitespace carefully. Don’t leave a page half empty or pack everything in so that it looks cluttered. As with any type of design, whitespace is a powerful tool that should be used wisely and never be left to chance.
• Use color sparingly. Many corporate printers are black and white only, so if you use color make sure it looks right when printed without it.
• Use bold even more sparingly. It’s sometimes useful to point out items of interest, but it quickly degrades the readability of a resume.

Many people seem to have a hard time with this, but a resume is a textual representation of yourself. It represents you as a person and your accomplishments as a professional. Any errors or signs of haste or carelessness say much about you as a person; if you are careless with such a significant representation of yourself what does it say about your attention to detail or work ethic?

Experience: For a person that has recently graduated, experience in the field is the single largest hindrance both when it comes to securing a position and to receiving a salary they are happy with. The best advice I can find for people in this position is to look to the open source community for help. There are many projects that are desperate for developers and it’s a great way to get familiar with working in a team, coordinating with people over a distributed area, and releasing code for public consumption. In lieu of paid work experience, open source is a great way to fill in a resume (and it can be quite profitable for some, if you play your cards right).

Salary: In some companies pay is a minor issue thanks to clearly structured systems such as that proposed by Joel Spolsky; for others is can be a source of pain, envy, and jealousy. This is a topic that I truly hate; it’s uncomfortable at best and quite painful at worst. While I can’t offer much advice, here are a few things to think about:

• Money is not an effective motivator. In an ideal environment it should just stay out-of-the-way and allow developers to live a comfortable life; in reality the role it plays is a bit different. More often than not, it’s a distraction that gets in the way and outweighs the factors that do motivate people.
• Companies follow a few different pay systems, and once set moving to different system is nearly impossible. Here are a few I’ve seen:
  • Clearly Structured: This system places developers on a scale, and developers at a given level receive the same salary (see Fog Creek).
  • Structured + Negotiated: This is the most common system I’ve seen; it mixes a structured level system with negotiated modifications that can apply a certain percentage increase from the normal base salary for that level or other benefits (extended vacation, etc).
  • Negotiated: Pay is based on negotiation skills and need; this can lead to odd situations such as where a junior developer can make more than a senior developer due to the need to fill a position quickly. This system requires strict secrecy when it comes to salary information to avoid nasty surprises, unlike the clearly structured system where salary information can be openly shared.
• Are large salary increases possible? Some companies have no issue with large increases in salary for a promotion (20%+) while in others exceeding 5% for any reason is a major challenge. If a developer is coming in on the low-end of the scale (i.e. due to lack of experience, such as a recent graduate), is there a real possibility of moving up? In my experience, people stay near the end they start at – those that start at the bottom will stay there until they move to a different company.

Interview Questions: If you are conducing an interview, make a list of questions and write them down. It’s quite embarrassing to suddenly realize that you are out of questions just a few minutes in (Need inspiration? Try this or this). Many people have said much about this, but the most important thing I can point out is just don’t wing it. Plan carefully, make sure you know what you’re going to do and when before the candidate shows up.

Interview Dress Code: I’ve been amazed at what I’ve seen people wear, everything from high-end suits to jeans. What’s appropriate? It really depends on the environment; a large corporation will expect an Armani suit where a startup is happier seeing jeans and an American Apparel t-shirt. When in doubt, I would go with a suit personally – but depending on the company that could cost you the job just as quickly as showing up in jeans.

Interviews Go Both Ways: An interview shouldn’t be a one-way affair; the candidate should be interviewing the company as much as you are interviewing them. They should be asking questions about the environment, expectations, tools and resources provided as much as you are asking them about prior experience and knowledge. If a candidate doesn’t seem to care about the company or what the working conditions are like – think carefully before hiring them.

Other Thoughts: I’ll not go into what I look for when it comes to personality or other personal traits as that would require far more than a blog post to cover. I’m also going to avoid things such as hobbies and the like; while they can tell you much about a person they can also lead to other complications. Any question in an interview can quickly lead to a land-mine and in the legal quagmire that is HR law and policies, trouble is easy to find. When in doubt, just don’t ask.

* This is based on my experience over the years; not necessarily the experiences in this round of hiring or the opinions or policies of my employer. In general, nothing in this refers to policies, preferences, or procedures of my employer. <Standard Disclaimer />

While working on the list of tools and services to write about as part of my Start-up Tools series, Get Satisfaction has been the hardest to decide on. After a lot of reading, I decided against recommending it, though I had to write about it because so many companies have opted to use it.

Get Satisfaction is a great concept for the most part – what it boils down to is a specialized forum service for your customers to discuss issues and ideas about your products. But it’s not quite that simple, as your customer can create a site with them in your company’s name, without your knowledge as 37signals found out – (and they weren’t happy about it). The article by 37signals goes into length about the issues surrounding the service, so I won’t repeat them all here – it’s well worth the time to read if you are thinking about using the service.

While they do offer a rather anemic free version, if you want anything useful you’ll have to shell out for one of the paid versions which start at $99/month. That’s $1,188 per year, which for most start-ups would be among their top expenses.

While they have made some changes to reduce the mafioso feel that many complained about, however the feeling that you have to participate if you care about customers still lingers. With prices ranging from $99 to $899 a month for what amounts to little more than a forum service – it’s simply too expensive for many start-ups.

While I understand that they are in business to make money just as I am, my budget is still very tight and there are many other needs fighting over that same money. Supporting customers has to be the top priority, but is this really the best way to achieve that?

To me it seems that money may be better spent on hardware upgrades to make our servers faster or some real analytics to make sure our web sites are as easy to use as possible. While the service has some nice benefits, spending over $1,100 a year for access to a locked-down forum just doesn’t make business sense.

Oh, and do you want it to match the look and feel of your web site? We’ll for that you have to upgrade to their top plan at a whopping $899 a month. Yet themes are a basic feature of virtually all forum systems.

For me, I think I’ll give bbPress a shot – it’s free, open source, and easy to use – then I’ll take that $99/month and find better ways for it to serve my customers.

When it comes to small business project management, Basecamp by 37signals has been the king of the hill for some time. Now though, there is an exciting new player in the field: Open Atrium. It’s a Drupal based open source project management system somewhat like Basecamp, though with many more features.

Open Atrium is new on the scene, with beta 1 being released just 4 days ago – though it’s already rather polished and seems to work well. While there are some hiccups with the installer and a disappointing lack of documentation, it’s still very easy to install and takes only a few minutes to get running.

It has all the major features that you would expect, plus a few extras such as a twitter-like shoutbox system. Here are the highlights:

• Blogging
• Calendar
• Dashboard
• Document Storage
• Task Management

Being open source and self-hosted adds some nice benefits; unlimited customization, full control of your data, and my favorite: can be installed on a non-public web server. Having you project management system sit behind a VPN is a great way to avoid data leaks and embarrassments.

I’m still debating which is best, Basecamp or Open Atrium – but if you want to save some money, Open Atrium is worth looking into.

Over the next few weeks (and months) I’ll be posting a series of articles on the tools and services that start-ups can use to make their business both more efficient and more profitable. This is aimed at ISVs (both micro and close to micro) though most of this should apply to any technology startup.

When you are starting a business, there are many important considerations with anything you use, here are the keys points I’ll be looking at:

• Expense – This is probably the top requirement. Budgets tend to be quite limited, and there are always too many demands on what budget is available.
• Effectiveness – It has to work; when running an ISV you simply don’t have time to waste. There is software to build and a business to run – there’s no time to waste on things that don’t work.
• Power – Just because you’re running a small business, doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the power and features available to significantly larger business.
• Flexibility – ISVs have a great benefit over larger businesses; agility. The very nature of smaller businesses give them a great ability to adapt to change – and the tools and services they use should be just as flexible.

There are many great resources out there – the challenge is digging through the clutter.

Posts so far:

• Start-up Tools: Microsoft BizSpark
• Start-up Tools: Open Atrium

I normally don’t write posts just to point out an article by another author, but the latest by Jeff Atwood is a must read:

Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive

I point this out because this is something I’ve been fighting recently. It’s easier for management to tell the development team to fix a performance issue than to request money for the new hardware that’s needed.

In the long run it would be much cheaper to just throw more hardware at it – though that requires higher level approval. Whereas assigning a couple developers doesn’t require going nearly as high.

Later this week I’ll start the process of closing my start-up, aDeVIX Software. After months of planning and development, the decision has finally been made to call it a day. It was a great idea, but time and money conspired against us, with great effect.

We had a great product in mind, just not the resources to make it happen. I do believe that it would have been quite a success, but it takes a fair bit of time, and even more money to launch a commercial product aimed at mid-size businesses. It’s not a simple thing to sell software costing more than $10,000 per install; and being a company with no reputation, it’s almost impossible.

We planned the design, the marketing, the budget (even allowing for snacks & drinks), covered every detail, but when you don’t have the time to write code, or the money to pay people to write it for you; no amount of planning will help. We then delayed, then came up with smaller, simpler products, then scrapped all that and went back to the original idea.

Months of work, thousands of dollars in various expenses, and not a single dime as income; much effort, no reward. Many thousand lines of code, a few websites, countless meetings, and enough notes to account for the clearing of a small forest; but no money, no assets of value, nothing. It’s a bit painful to think about all the effort, and see that it was all for not.

It’s certainly possible to make an ISV work, it’s just a matter of being honest with yourself. Can you afford the expenses? Do you have the time? Will you be able to support the product yourself until it brings in enough money to hire people?

In some ways though, I’m happy that this is done, as it now leaves me free of any potential conflict of interest when it comes to pursuing future opportunities.