What does it really take to get a commited PHP developer in a growing company?

21

I belive it is money first. All the other considerations can be monetized.
Most people commenting about Pay being irrelevant and turning down jobs will burn their laptops If they get a great offer.
But thats on a lighter note

I think you have to look for money. Below is a baseline pay evaluation we use.
Logistics (Getting to office everyday) NGN5k/day (NGN1.3million/yr for 260working days) , Rent: NGN500,000.00/yr , Unlimited Internet: 30k/month (360,000.00/yr) , Food/Survival/Medical: NGN3,000/day (NGN1.095million/yr) , Gross baseline = NGN3.255million (NGN270/Month)

If you haven’t got the money; Put the job on upwork and hire a great guy from india, bangladesh or belarus.

NOTE; It is better to spend NGN600k/month for 3months and get your project done, than pay NGN150k/month for 12months for the same result.

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22

When I was younger, everything you wrote here would have been true, but after walking out of 3 jobs and been fired from 1, I realised money is just one consideration for taking a offer. Money is good no doubt, but the successful employers sell dreams. You have 600k/month to spend on a dev and that’s all you’re offering? You’ll meet jobbers, they’ll come, build your product and go on to the next big offer. Software is not like building houses, it’s never complete. So you need people who will want to dedicate a significant portion of their professional life to your cause. In my own opinion, the most important considerations for taking a new offer now are if it gives me a leader I can follow, a vision I can get behind and be proud of, money comes at a distant third, but I’m weird anyway so…

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23

Developers are hard to find, GOOD developers are even harder, if you cant buy one, make one.

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24

You took the word from me. You’ve just said it all

25

It takes time to make a great developer… that is just one part of the problem, you toil to make this great developer and all of a sudden he believes he’s now good enough to build the next Facebook on his own or worse, a bigger company offers him a higher pay, but it’s still worth the risk though.

26

I will reiterate some things already mentioned, using the career pages of Facebook, Stripe and Twitter for reference.

  1. For good creatives, money is not the motivation. A good pay is nice but it doesn’t top the list. What are you building? What makes it interesting and challenging to the developer? You need to be able to sell that to the developer.
    “Help us build the universal payments infrastructure of the internet.”
    “We’re making the world more open and connected. Want to help?”
    “Help us to build real-time products that have global impact”

  2. Notice the word help across. You need to make them feel they are the one doing you the favour. They should feel treated as a very important part of the company.

  3. Let them see what the work culture and environment will look like. Is it one that can help them be better? Or strict, no-risk rules?
    “We want to build a work environment where people are happy, productive, and interact well…”
    “What’s it really like to work at Facebook?” (followed by couple of videos)
    “Have the time of your life…People who work at Twitter say the biggest draw is their colleagues. You’ll find a generous, friendly team that is passionate…”

That said, the simple truth is good developers are hard to get. (Finding is one thing, getting them to work for you is another). You may need to directly talk to the ones you already know. If possible, not just email/phone conversation. Meet them. If you can’t convince them, then ask them to refer other devs to you.

All the best.

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27

I am quite happy and glad that I got some clarity on this issue. Apparently money is not the only determining factor. I would be doing a follow up post that would clearly pitch Prepclass and our plans to take on the world. Hopefully, with that I can get the ball rolling

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28

I’m posting this response from Dustin Moskovitz (Co-founder of Asana). Hopefully, it will emphasis the importance of recruitment pitch from CEOs

Q: Asana: Should I work for Zenefits or Asana?
I have been working at a Big 4 software company for an year since I got my BS in CS. But I am looking to move to San Francisco so I interviewed at these two and got the jobs.

I have not gotten numbers from either company yet, but I just want to get a feel of how people compare the two.

Which do you think would be a better place to work at in terms of learning/career growth/name recognition for future companies etc.

One of my main money-related issues with Asana is that I do not know how their growth looks like. So if anyone can give me a little insight into that, it would be great.

They got their last round of funding 3 years ago at a valuation of 280 mil. I do not know how far they have come from there and how far they can go (as in they are probably not going to be an Uber and reach ~$40B, but I would hope they would have enough potential to get to multi-billion dollar range).

Other than that I feel it would be great to work at (though if someone could back that up/contradict that would be great).

If you get an offer from Asana, you can ask your hiring manager to walk you through the growth numbers (or I’m happy to do it). I feel quite confident that you will not be disappointed.

Actually, since you asked, here’s some more detail:

  1. Revenue in the low 10s of millions of dollars per year, just 3 years after launching the product.
  2. Millions of people have signed up for the free version of the product.
  3. The number of paying users, and therefore revenue, are growing exponentially. Annual recurring revenue has grown to 2.7x the level we had at this time last year, which is super fast in business software.
  4. This makes us one of the fastest growing SaaS companies ever, based on all the data we’ve found, including all the recent IPOs. We aren’t the fastest growing SaaS company yet; but that’s where you might be able to help :wink:
  5. We’ve done this with only the early skeletons of sales and marketing teams – the vast majority of that growth is self-serve. (But we’re now rapidly scaling sales and marketing just to accelerate on top of that.)
  6. We’re on track to be profitable in the next 2 or 3 years. This is rare: many SaaS companies aren’t profitable even years after IPOing. The difference is that we’ve built a marketing and sales model that’s way more leveraged than almost any other SaaS company. We just don’t have to hire tons of sales and marketing people to grow fast.
  7. We have a solid bottoms-up business model, where actual users choose to buy us, not IT departments.
  8. Our customers are from every industry, every continent except Antarctica, from laundromat employees, to leaders in Fortune 500 companies, from tiny startups to large biotech companies. Among startups, we’re quickly becoming the standard: of the top 7 tech unicorns, 6 are Asana customers, and they all began as organic adoptions. These days when we see a great rising tech company, we check our database and, more often than not, they’re a customer.

Do we have the potential to be a multi-billion dollar business? No doubt, and we hope to be there in the next couple of years.

Do we have the potential to be an Uber-size business? We believe we can be much bigger, and point at Google for Work and the Microsoft Exchange business lines as examples of what it is possible to achieve in our space. Though their valuation is not separable from the larger companies, we do know their revenue and it clearly justifies potential valuations at that level of magnitude. Microsoft’s team productivity apps alone makes $25B/year.

You also asked about learning/growth opportunities. A few thoughts there:

  1. We prioritize mentorship very highly, and have a mindfully constructed mentorship program. We see mentorship as the primary function of managers. You’d also get a peer mentor.
  2. We’ve assembled an extremely high-calibre team of people to learn from. I know every company says that, but I think we’ve taken it to an extreme. In my experience (and the experience of recruiters who’ve worked at multiple of these companies), the 50%th percentile at Asana is around the 90%ile at Facebook and Google. We’ve gathered some of the best folks from Facebook, Google, Yelp, Microsoft, Palantir, Yahoo, Apple, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, Amazon and other great places. We’ve got people like the ones who wrote the Facebook News Feed backend, Android’s sync protocol, Yelp’s ranking algorithm, Amazon’s DynamoDB – these are people you’d be learning from.
  3. We have lots of systems in place for getting you high-quality, timely feedback about how you’re doing and how you can take your craft to the next level, including both manager->report and peer->peer feedback cycles.
  4. We provide access to “executive coaches” (coaches that, at most every other company, are available only to executives).
  5. We also have a strong emphasis on personal growth, both in the culture and in training programs we provide. People frequently say that working at Asana changed them as people in ways they like.

Hope that’s helpful in making your decision! Let me know if you have other questions.
[Source]

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29

My perspective remains that a growing company does not need liabilities.
A full time employed developer is a long term liability. You have to source for money to pay him every month and every year you have to give him a raise that matches the country inflation rate.
Hence, you should build as much as possible on your own and contract out a few things. Even apple and google contract out some of the development they do.
Build the main frame inhouse and contract out to freelancers. that is how to stay afloat with little or no money.
Avoid liabilities as much as possible.

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30

@uduak, I don’t agree with you completely. Consider the size and ambition of the company. Most successful tech companies have a company ‘tech’ guy, who’s thinking forward…you can’t achieve much with a part-time freelancer, who’s always overwhelmed with many projects sourcing, fixing other bugs, etc except the project need minimal maintenance and control.

31

well said stan

32

That’s an interesting perspective. Not one that I’d intuitively agree with, but its worth it to look at different solutions to the problem.

Why do you think a full-time dedicated employee is a liability and the contractor isn’t?

I think that an employee understands your code base better, can be more productive and has more commitment to your company’s success. It takes time for these factors to mature though.

A contractor needs to understand what’s going on in your code base before they can make a change, and they’ll be billing you for every second it takes for them to get up to speed. They do exactly what needs to be done and ignores any problems you’re not paying them to solve. They’re committed to giving you exactly what you want so they can collect their pay. Even if they don’t firmly believe its a good idea. Not to mention that most contractors will cost you more than an employee of the same caliber.

In that sense I think employees are less likely to be liabilities than contractors over time.

Why do you feel a contractor is likely to be less of a liability?

33

@akamaozu @ibukunakins The context is that the founder is a Technical guy and he can do some of the work himself. If you can’t afford the pay rate, outsource and make some progress.

1 Like